And in rebuttal –
Category: All About Guns
Brit standbys: The Boys Rifle dwarfs a No. 4 Enfield.
Nobody really needs an anti-tank rifle. When I informed my long-suffering bride of the newest acquisition she just rolled her pretty eyes, shook her head, and wandered off to do something productive. You don’t buy an anti-tank rifle because you need it. You buy an anti-tank rifle because it’s just so freaking cool.
The rear sight is easily adjustable between 300 and 500 yards.
Descent Into Madness
It all began with an email from a dear friend. You know the type. The only thing better than spending your own money on something old, black and oily is spending your buddy’s money on something old, black and oily. He already had a Boys Rifle, so when he tripped over another he naturally thought of me. He dangled the thing in front of me like some kind of worm, and I gobbled it straight up without a fuss.
An anti-tank rifle is a Destructive Device. Never mind that it weighs as much as a Buick and shoots a ridiculously expensive antique round that has been out of production for more than half a century. In the eyes of the government it is Extra Special Dangerous (not a real federal classification so far), so it requires the same $200 transfer tax and interminable wait as might a machinegun or grenade launcher. At the terminus of all this hassle, however, this monster gun makes quite the fashion statement.
The forward-swept pistol grip on the Boys is perhaps its most distinctive feature.
Settle behind the gun and you’ll see the wisdom of this geometry.
Back Story
The .55 caliber rifle was born in 1937 of one Capt. Henry C. Boys. Boys was the Assistant Superintendent of Design at the Royal Small Arms Factory in Enfield, England. The gun was originally supposed to be called the “Stanchion,” but Boys died a few days before the weapon was approved for service, so they named it after him.
The Boys Rifle was actually obsolete when it was introduced. Against early light tanks and tankettes (a real thing used fairly extensively by the Italians, French and Japanese) the weapon was relatively effective. In fairly short order, however, armored vehicle technology had rendered the rifle’s 47.6-gram bullet little more than an inconvenience.
Optimized rounds sported a tungsten core and travelled at around 2,800 fps. These hardened projectiles would penetrate just under 1″ of steel armor plate at 100 yards.
The Boys Rifle was liberally supplied to the Finns during their Winter War with the Soviets in 1939. The weapon was popular with Finnish troops as it could reliably deal with the T26 light tanks the Russians fielded at the time. It was also used extensively in North Africa. After the Battle of France, however, the Boys had developed a reputation for ineffectiveness that was getting tough to shake.
Desperate to restore confidence in the gun, the Canadian government contracted with Walt Disney in 1942 to create a short animated film titled Stop That Tank! It can be seen on YouTube and is pure unfiltered awesome. Hitler ultimately has his personal tank destroyed by a Boys Rifle and ends up in Hades alongside his pal, Satan.
The USMC purchased Boys Rifles from Canada prior to the Pearl Harbor attack and used them to destroy a pair of Japanese seaplanes off Makin Island. The widespread employment of the Browning M2 .50 HMG — which had comparable penetration — rendered the Boys superfluous. The Boys Rifle was ultimately replaced by the PIAT (Projector, Infantry, Anti-Tank) in British service. The PIAT was a man-portable spigot mortar firing a shaped charge warhead that was hugely more effective against tanks.
The Boys Rifle was used sporadically throughout the war and saw limited use in a variety of brushfire conflicts around the Pacific afterwards. The last known combat use of the Boys occurred in September 1965 when members of the Irish Republican Army used a Boys Rifle to fire on the British fast-attack patrol boat HMS Brave Borderer, damaging one of its turbine engines. Nowadays Boys Rifles are only of interest to gun geeks like me.
The massive belted .55-caliber rounds could put paid to early light tanks. However,
armored vehicle technology soon eclipsed the Boys Rifle’s capabilities.
The Boys Rifle came in three major variations. The first sported this interesting circular muzzle brake.
Details, Details
The Boys Rifle weighs 35 lbs. (empty) and is just over 5 ft. long. It sports a conventional bolt action set into a spring-retarded sliding chassis that helps absorb the gun’s prodigious recoil. There were three variations built around the same basic action and my gun is the earliest sort.
The gun feeds from a top-mounted single-stack 5-round box magazine and sports iron sights that are flip-adjustable between 200 and 300 yards.
The odd forward cant of the two pistol grips accommodates the human form nicely, though there is no conceivable way to carry the Boys comfortably. Production culminated at 62,000 copies in 1940, and many available today have been rechambered to .50 BMG.
Heavy, inefficient, obsolete and cool, my Boys Rifle is now the epicenter of my gunroom.
At GunsAmerica, our general policy is to avoid glorifying mass shooters by naming them. But the 2012 Aurora Theater shooting demands we break this rule, not to focus on the shooter, but on a potentially overlooked catalyst – Big Pharma.
Here’s the shocker. The world has been fixated on the “orange-haired psycho” responsible for the carnage at the Aurora movie theater, where 12 lives were lost and 70 were injured. But it’s time to challenge the one-dimensional villain narrative.
What if the real story has been hiding in plain sight?
Enter the compelling insights of Dr. David Healy, a leading psychiatrist and a beacon of clarity in a sea of pharmaceutical ambiguity. In a sobering interview with Dr. Josef on YouTube (see above), Healy tears down the mainstream facade. His point? We’re missing a critical piece of the puzzle.
Healy paints a picture of the shooter before the tragedy: a typical college student battling shyness, not a natural born killer.
“I was struck by the fact that it was a very normal human being; this was not a monster in the sense of someone who kills 12 other people and injures 72 others,” he tells Dr. Josef.
Healy interviewed the suspect at the behest of his legal defense team prior to the trial. Dr. Healy also had the opportunity to examine all the suspect’s medical reports.
What Healy found was the twist in his tale began with the Pfizer-produced Zoloft, an SSRI prescribed for his introversion.
As the patient’s mental state deteriorated (likely suffering from “disinhibited delirium,” per Dr. Healy), his dosage was ramped up – a move Healy slams as disastrously misguided. The result?
A once-timid student morphing into an unrecognizable version of himself, engaging in uncharacteristic behaviors.
“He’s beginning to do things, like he finds it easy to go and ask girls out. He picks the prettiest girl in the class and asks her out. You know this kind of behavior just wasn’t happening before,” explains Dr. Healy.
“He’s beginning to buy things that, you know, he wouldn’t have ever bought before including guns, and he goes along to a shooting range to teach himself how to shoot and things like this. This is all very unusual behavior for him; there’s never been anything like this before.”
Then, according to Dr. Healy, he goes to his psychiatrist and says, “Look I’m not much better, and if I was to tell you what I was thinking you’d lock me up.”
Eventually, he drops out of school, stops taking the Zoloft and goes into an abrupt withdrawal. Post-medication, the suspect’s actions escalated to the point of no return. Everyone knows what happens next.
And, Healy’s conclusion is stark: “You know you can’t be absolutely certain that the drugs caused it but I think it’s highly likely that the Zoloft he was on and the withdrawal from it caused the problems.”
Healy doesn’t stop there. He links a potential genetic factor to the shooter’s adverse reaction to SSRIs, a factor ignored or overlooked by his doctors.
“Both of his parents at one point or another had had an SSRI and that they’d had reactions not unlike the ones that he’d had, and things became terribly vivid and abnormal,” he says.
The Aurora Theater shooting saga, spotlighted by Dr. Healy, isn’t just an isolated incident of potential medication-induced violence. It’s a tip of an iceberg in a sea of pharmaceutical implications, extending far beyond SSRIs like Zoloft.
Consider the eye-opening case of Singulair (made by Merck), an asthma medication. A forceful letter this week from the NY State Attorney General’s Office to the FDA blasts the lid off concerning reports of Singulair causing aggressive behavior ( e.g. “rage”) and suicidal thoughts.
This isn’t just a footnote; it’s a glaring alarm signal!
The Attorney General’s direct call to the FDA paints a grim picture, revealing a critical oversight in medication monitoring.
The Singulair debacle corroborates Healy’s argument – the problem of drugs triggering violent reactions is more widespread and insidious than we’ve been led to believe. This isn’t about one type of drug or one tragic event; it’s a systemic flaw.
As Dr. Healy told Dr. Josef, “There’s a range of drugs that can cause these things so my key take-home message is if you go on any drug and feel weird you’re probably right.”
But, “Now the world we live in is one where you’ll be told don’t go off your drugs, whether it’s even an asthma drug or whatever, ‘don’t come off your drugs without consulting your doctor.’ That’s not safe anymore.”
“If you’ve got a good doctor it may work. But all too often doctors will increase the dose of the drug you’re on when you say you feel weird,” warns Healy.
The Aurora Theater case, when seen in this expanded context, becomes even more alarming. As mentioned, it’s no longer just a story of a single shooter and an SSRI. It’s a wakeup call echoing across the entire medical and regulatory landscape, urging a serious, unflinching reexamination of how all medications are monitored, reported, and discussed.
It’s high time for a bold, unvarnished conversation about the full spectrum of potential medication side effects. This is about public health, public safety, and the urgent need for transparency and accountability from Big Pharma and the FDA.
As Healy noted explicitly in the interview, “the Pfizer articles on Zoloft are ghost written; you realize that not even FDA has seen the data from the clinical trials.”
What?!!! How is that even possible???
It’s evident that we’re standing at a crossroads demanding answers. These answers aren’t just crucial pieces of a complex puzzle; they could very well hold the key to averting future mass killings.
