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NRA Controversy Continues Organization Sues Its Own Fundraising Arm By Brent Wheat

The National Rifle Association has gone through a period of tremendous upheaval after the courts
found former NRA officials guilty of financial mismanagement. Now, the legal troubles continue as
the NRA is taking on it’s own fundraising arm in court.

For years, NRA members were told everything was hunky-dory, and most of us believed it.

Then came the fight between Oliver North and Wayne LaPierre, the “AckMack” troubles and finally the lawsuit brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James. The allegations were explosive, but they are no longer just allegations after a jury weighed the evidence — Wayne LaPierre and other senior NRA officials were found liable for misconduct involving the organization’s finances.

Wayne LaPierre, former NRA CEO was ordered to pay back four million dollars to the NRA
and cannot serve as an NRA officer or director for 10 Years.

LaPierre was ordered to repay more than $4 million to the NRA and was later barred from serving as an NRA officer or director for 10 years. Recent appeals have upheld those penalties. Of course, the damage went far beyond the courtroom.

Troubles Ending?

The NRA spent years and tens of millions of dollars fighting legal battles while membership, revenue and most importantly, political influence, declined. Thankfully, reform-minded members eventually won key board elections and sought to move the organization beyond the LaPierre era. Many members assumed that was the end of the story.

It wasn’t.

Today, a new controversy is unfolding between the NRA and what was formerly known as the NRA Foundation.

The NRA filed suit against the foundation to prevent it from using the name or likeness of the NRA. On June 2, 2026, the NRA Foundation announced it would rebrand as the 1791 Foundation. Foundation President Tom King stated that the organization’s mission remains unchanged and the rebranding is intended to strengthen its ability to support firearms education, youth programs, law enforcement training, and other charitable initiatives. Critics, however, note that the ongoing dispute centers not only on the foundation’s charitable mission but also on its historic role as a supporting organization for the NRA. Whether the rebranding represents a change in identity, a change in mission, or simply a change in name is likely to remain a central point of disagreement.

Specifically, the NRA’s complaint asserts that foundation officials “sought to sever the relationship between the NRA and the Foundation by attempting to strip the NRA of its right to appoint the Foundation’s directors and seizing that power for themselves.” The foundation rejects those allegations and argues it is acting independently and in accordance with its charitable responsibilities. The dispute is now being fought in court. As many of the parties involved are famously litigious, I’ll refrain from asking more pointed questions until more facts are known.

Friends of NRA

Part of the confusion stems from the fact that many gun owners have long viewed the NRA and NRA Foundation as essentially the same organization. They are not. The NRA is the membership and advocacy organization (technically a 501(c)(4) organization) that conducts lobbying, political activity, training programs, competitions and member services. The NRA Foundation (a 501(c)(3) organization under tax code) was created as a separate charitable organization to raise tax-deductible donations for firearms education, youth programs, grants and related charitable purposes.

Most NRA members never paid much attention to the distinction because the two organizations worked closely together and shared a common mission. Historically, the NRA Foundation worked closely with the NRA and funded many NRA-related programs, while also making grants to youth shooting sports, clubs, law-enforcement training, conservation efforts, and other charitable initiatives.

According to recent reports, the 1791 Foundation controls roughly $160 million in net assets, while the NRA itself reported approximately $15.7 million in net assets. In other words, the charitable organization at the center of the current dispute controls the overwhelming majority of the financial resources involved. At its core, the legal battle centers on control of substantial charitable assets and how those resources will be used going forward.

The Question

Most members have neither the time nor the desire to read court filings, tax returns, and legal briefs. They simply want to know whether their money is advancing the Second Amendment or funding another round of gamesmanship, so we’ll attempt to answer the question at the center of this debate: If NRA members voted for reform, did reform follow the money?

The LaPierre era taught NRA members that problems can remain hidden for years behind familiar names and repeated assurances that everything is under control. The lesson wasn’t that some NRA leaders were corrupt; the lesson was that the members should pay attention and never stop asking questions.

In other words, the old advice to “Trust but verify” is still good advice, so those same important questions need to be asked today:

• Who controls the assets?

• Who controls the fundraising?

• Who controls the grants?

• Who decides where donor dollars ultimately go?

Most importantly, how much overlap exists between today’s 1791 Foundation leadership and the NRA leadership structure in the years leading up to the New York verdict?

Meet the New Boss

Several names associated with the current 1791 Foundation are familiar to longtime NRA observers. Among them are Tom King and former NRA President Charles Cotton, both prominent figures within NRA leadership during the LaPierre years.

Neither man’s involvement proves wrongdoing, and they have not been accused of misconduct in connection with the current dispute. However, these associations invite increased scrutiny from members who spent the last several years fighting for accountability and transparency.

Foundation leaders tell a very different story. In a recent editorial, 1791 Foundation Vice President Ronnie Barrett argued the dispute began after the foundation gained greater independence and increased scrutiny of NRA reimbursement requests.

According to Barrett, trustees concluded that too much donor money was being spent on overhead and administrative expenses and chose to direct more funds toward charitable programs instead. Barrett contends the lawsuit is not about abandoning the NRA’s mission but about a charitable foundation exercising independent judgment over donor funds.

Barrett’s editorial focuses extensively on donor stewardship, overhead costs and the foundation’s independence from the NRA. However, it did not touch on the number of prominent LaPierre-era NRA leaders who now hold key positions within the 1791 Foundation.

 

 

Readers will have to decide for themselves whether the dispute is primarily about stewardship, as Barrett argues, or whether it also reflects a struggle between competing factions within the broader firearms community. Either way, the continued prominence of several longtime NRA leaders ensures that questions about continuity and accountability are unlikely to disappear anytime soon.

Reasonable people can disagree about the merits of the NRA’s lawsuit, and the courts will ultimately sort out the competing claims. In the meantime, donors — especially those who previously donated to the NRA Foundation — should be asking legitimate questions about spending, governance, transparency and financial stewardship.

Takeaway

Trust is earned, and the NRA learned that lesson at great cost. The 1791 Foundation should expect to have to earn that same trust.

For donors, the issue is not whether the organization calls itself the NRA Foundation, the 1791 Foundation or the Committee to Keep and Arm Bears. The issue is whether contributions are advancing the mission donors intended to support.

The firearms community has already paid a steep price for years of misplaced trust. Before writing the next check or attending a “Friends” banquet, members should make sure they know not only where the money is going but also who is controlling it once it gets there.

The courts will eventually decide who wins the lawsuit. Donors should decide who earns their trust.

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The Pussification Of The Western Male by the Great Kim Du toit!!

We have become a nation of women.

It wasn’t always this way, of course. There was a time when men put their signatures to a document, knowing full well that this single act would result in their execution if captured, and in the forfeiture of their property to the State. Their wives and children would be turned out by the soldiers, and their farms and businesses most probably given to someone who didn’t sign the document.

There was a time when men went to their certain death, with expressions like “You all can go to hell. I’m going to Texas.” (Davy Crockett, to the House of Representatives, before going to the Alamo.)

There was a time when men went to war, sometimes against their own families, so that other men could be free. And there was a time when men went to war because we recognized evil when we saw it, and knew that it had to be stamped out.

There was even a time when a President of the United States threatened to punch a man in the face and kick him in the balls, because the man had the temerity to say bad things about the President’s daughter’s singing.**

We’re not like that anymore.

Now, little boys in grade school are suspended for playing cowboys and Indians, cops and crooks, and all the other familiar variations of “good guy vs. bad guy” that helped them learn, at an early age, what it was like to have decent men hunt you down, because you were a lawbreaker.

Now, men are taught that violence is bad — that when a thief breaks into your house, or threatens you in the street, that the proper way to deal with this is to “give him what he wants”, instead of taking a horsewhip to the rascal or shooting him dead where he stands.

Now, men’s fashion includes not a man dressed in a double-breasted suit, but a tight sweater worn by a man with breasts.

Now, warning labels are indelibly etched into gun barrels, as though men have somehow forgotten that guns are dangerous things.

Now, men are given Ritalin as little boys, so that their natural aggressiveness, curiosity and restlessness can be controlled, instead of nurtured and directed.

And finally, our President, who happens to have been a qualified fighter pilot, lands on an aircraft carrier wearing a flight suit, and is immediately dismissed with words like “swaggering”, “macho” and the favorite epithet of Euro girly-men, “cowboy”. Of course he was bound to get that reaction — and most especially from the Press in Europe, because the process of male pussification Over There is almost complete.

How did we get to this?

In the first instance, what we have to understand is that America is first and foremost, a culture dominated by one figure: Mother. It wasn’t always so: there was a time when it was Father who ruled the home, worked at his job, and voted.

But in the twentieth century, women became more and more involved in the body politic, and in industry, and in the media — and mostly, this has not been a good thing.

When women got the vote, it was inevitable that government was going to become more powerful, more intrusive, and more “protective” (i.e. more coddling), because women are hard-wired to treasure security more than uncertainty and danger. It was therefore inevitable that their feminine influence on politics was going to emphasize (lowercase “s”) social security.

I am aware of the fury that this statement is going to arouse, and I don’t care a fig.

What I care about is the fact that since the beginning of the twentieth century, there has been a concerted campaign to denigrate men, to reduce them to figures of fun, and to render them impotent, figuratively speaking.

I’m going to illustrate this by talking about TV, because TV is a reliable barometer of our culture.

In the 1950s, the TV Dad was seen as the lovable goofball — perhaps the beginning of the trend — BUT he was still the one who brought home the bacon, and was the main source of discipline (think of the line: “Wait until your father gets home!”).

From that, we went to this: the Cheerios TV ad.

Now, for those who haven’t seen this piece of shit, I’m going to go over it, from memory, because it epitomizes everything I hate about the campaign to pussify men. The scene opens at the morning breakfast table, where the two kids are sitting with Dad at the table, while Mom prepares stuff on the kitchen counter. The dialogue goes something like this:

Little girl (note, not little boy): Daddy, why do we eat Cheerios?
Dad: Because they contain fiber, and all sorts of stuff that’s good for the heart. I eat it now, because of that.
LG: Did you always eat stuff that was bad for your heart, Daddy?
Dad (humorously): I did, until I met your mother.
Mother (not humorously): Daddy did a lot of stupid things before he met your mother.

Now, every time I see that TV ad, I have to be restrained from shooting the TV with a .45 Colt. If you want a microcosm of how men have become less than men, this is the perfect example.

What Dad should have replied to Mommy’s little dig: “Yes, Sally, that’s true: I did do a lot of stupid things before I met your mother. I even slept with your Aunt Ruth a few times, before I met your mother.”

That’s what I would have said, anyway, if my wife had ever attempted to castrate me in front of the kids like that.

But that’s not what men do, of course. What this guy is going to do is smile ruefully, finish his cereal, and then go and fuck his secretary, who doesn’t try to cut his balls off on a daily basis. Then, when the affair is discovered, people are going to rally around the castrating bitch called his wife, and call him all sorts of names. He’ll lose custody of his kids, and they will be brought up by our ultimate modern-day figure of sympathy: The Single Mom.

You know what? Some women deserve to be single moms.

When I first started this website, I think my primary aim was to blow off steam at the stupidity of our society.

Because I have fairly set views on what constitutes right and wrong, I have no difficulty in calling Bill Clinton, for example, a fucking liar and hypocrite.

But most of all, I do this website because I love being a man. Amongst other things, I talk about guns, self-defense, politics, beautiful women, sports, warfare, hunting, and power tools — all the things that being a man entails. All this stuff gives me pleasure.

And it doesn’t take much to see when all the things I love are being threatened: for instance, when Tim Allen’s excellent comedy routine on being a man is reduced to a fucking sitcom called Home Improvement.

The show should have been called Man Improvement, because that’s what every single plotline entailed: turning a man into a “better” person, instead of just leaving him alone to work on restoring the vintage sports car in his garage. I stopped watching the show after about four episodes.

(The Man Show was better, at least for the first season — men leering at chicks, men fucking around with ridiculous games like “pin the bra on the boobies”, men having beer-drinking competitions, and women bouncing on trampolines. Excellent stuff, only not strong enough. I don’t watch it anymore, either, because it’s plain that the idea has been subverted by girly-men, and turned into a parody of itself.)

Finally, we come to the TV show which to my mind epitomizes everything bad about what we have become: Queer Eye For The Straight Guy. Playing on the homo Bravo Channel, this piece of excrement has taken over the popular culture by storm (and so far, the only counter has been the wonderful South Park episode which took it apart for the bullshit it is).

I’m sorry, but the premise of the show nauseates me. A bunch of homosexuals trying to “improve” ordinary men into something “better” (i.e. more acceptable to women): changing the guy’s clothes, his home decor, his music — for fuck’s sake, what kind of girly-man would allow these simpering butt-bandits to change his life around?

Yes, the men are, by and large, slobs. Big fucking deal. Last time I looked, that’s normal. Men are slobs, and that only changes when women try to civilize them by marriage. That’s the natural order of things.

You know the definition of homosexual men we used in Chicago? “Men with small dogs who own very tidy apartments.”

Real men, on the other hand, have big fucking mean-ass dogs: Rhodesian ridgebacks, bull terriers and Rottweilers, or else working dogs like pointers or retrievers which go hunting with them and slobber all over the furniture.

Women own lapdogs.

Which is why women are trying to get dog-fighting and cock-fighting banned — they’d ban boxing too, if they could — because it’s “mean and cruel”. No shit, Shirley. Hell, I hate the idea of fighting dogs too, but I don’t have a problem with men who do. Dogs and cocks fight. So do men. No wonder we have an affinity for it.

My website has become fairly popular with men, and in the beginning, this really surprised me, because I didn’t think I was doing anything special.

That’s not what I think now. I must have had well over five thousand men write to me to say stuff like “Yes! I agree! I was so angry when I read about [insert atrocity of choice], but I thought I was the only one.”

No, you’re not alone, my friends, and nor am I.

Out there, there is a huge number of men who are sick of it. We’re sick of being made figures of fun and ridicule; we’re sick of having girly-men like journalists, advertising agency execs and movie stars decide on “what is a man”; we’re sick of women treating us like children, and we’re really fucking sick of girly-men politicians who pander to women by passing an ever-increasing raft of Nanny laws and regulations (the legal equivalent of public-school Ritalin), which prevent us from hunting, racing our cars and motorcycles, smoking, flirting with women at the office, getting into fistfights over women, shooting criminals and doing all the fine things which being a man entails.

When Annika Sorenstam was allowed to play in that tournament on the men’s PGA tour, all the men should have refused to play — Vijay Singh was the only one with balls to stand up for a principle, and he was absolutely excoriated for being a “chauvinist”.

Bullshit. He wasn’t a chauvinist, he was being a man. All the rest of the players — Woods, Mickelson, the lot — are girls by comparison. And, needless to say, Vijay isn’t an American, nor a European, which is probably why he still has a pair hanging between his legs, and they’re not hanging on the wall as his wife’s trophy.

Fuck this, I’m sick of it.

I don’t see why I should put up with this bullshit any longer — hell, I don’t see why any man should put up with this bullshit any longer.

I don’t see why men should have become feminized, except that we allowed it to happen — and you know why we let it happen? Because it’s damned easier to do so. Unfortunately, we’ve allowed it to go too far, and our maleness has become too pussified for words.

At this point, I could have gone two ways: the first would be to say, “…and I don’t know if we’ll get it back. The process has become too entrenched, the cultural zeitgeist of men as girls has become part of the social fabric, and there’s not much we can do about it.”

But I’m not going to do that. To quote John Belushi (who was, incidentally, a real man and not a fucking woman): “Did we quit when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?”

Well, I’m not going to quit. Fuck that. One of the characteristics of the non-pussified man (and this should strike fear into the hearts of women and girly-men everywhere) is that he never quits just because the odds seem overwhelming. Omaha Beach, guys.

I want a real man as President — not Al Gore, who had to hire a consultant to show him how to be an Alpha male, and french-kiss his wife on live TV to “prove” to the world that he was a man, when we all knew that real men don’t have to do that pathetic crap.

And I want the Real Man President to surround himself with other Real Men, like Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft, and yes, Condi Rice (who is more of a Real Man than those asswipes Colin Powell and Norman Mineta).

I want our government to be more like Dad — kind, helpful, but not afraid to punish us when we fuck up, instead of helping us excuse our actions.

I want our government of real men to start rolling back the Nanny State, in all its horrible manifestations of over-protectiveness, intrusiveness and “Mommy Knows Best What’s Good For You” regulations.

I want our culture to become more male — and not the satirical kind of male, like The Man Show, or the cartoonish figures of Stallone, Van Damme or Schwarzenegger.

 

(Note to the Hollywood execs: We absolutely fucking loathe chick movies about feelings and relationships and all that feminine jive. We want more John Waynes, Robert Mitchums, Bruce Willises, and Clint Eastwoods. Never mind that it’s simplistic — we like simple, we are simple, we are men — our lives are uncomplicated, and we like it that way. We Were Soldiers was a great movie, and you know why? Because you could have cut out all the female parts and it still would have been a great movie, because it was about Real Men. Try cutting out all the female parts in a Woody Allen movie; you’d end up with the opening and closing credits.)

I want our literature to become more male, less female. Men shouldn’t buy “self-help” books unless the subject matter is car maintenance, golf swing improvement or how to disassemble a fucking Browning BAR. We don’t improve ourselves, we improve our stuff.

And finally, I want men everywhere to going back to being Real Men. To open doors for women, to drive fast cars, to smoke cigars after a meal, to get drunk occasionally and, in the words of the late Col. Jeff Cooper, one of the last of the Real Men: “To ride, shoot straight, and speak the truth.”

In every sense of the word. We know what the word “is” means.

Because that’s all that being a Real Man involves. You don’t have to become a fucking cartoon male, either: I’m not going back to stoning women for adultery like those Muslim assholes do, nor am I suggesting we support that perversion of being a Real Man, gangsta rap artists (those fucking pussies — they wouldn’t last thirty seconds against a couple of genuine tough guys that I know).

Speaking of rap music, do you want to know why more White boys buy that crap than Black boys do? You know why date rape is supposedly such a problem on college campuses*? Why binge drinking is a problem among college freshmen?

It’s a reaction: a reaction against being pussified. And I understand it, completely. Young males are aggressive, they do fight amongst themselves, they are destructive, and all this does happen for a purpose.

Because only the strong men propagate.

And women know it. You want to know why I know this to be true? Because powerful men still attract women. Women, even liberal women, swooned over George Bush in a naval aviator’s uniform. Donald Trump still gets access to some of the most beautiful pussy available, despite looking like a medieval gargoyle. Donald Rumsfeld, if he wanted to, could fuck 90% of all women over 50 if he wanted to, and a goodly portion of younger ones too.

And he won’t. Because Rummy’s been married to the same woman for fifty years, and he wouldn’t toss that away for a quickie. He’s a Real Man. No wonder the Euros hate and fear him.

We?d better get more like him, we’d better become more like him, because if we don’t, men will become a footnote to history.

– 0 –

*since debunked as bullshit, based on crap statistics

**“I’ve just read your lousy review of Margaret’s concert. I’ve come to the conclusion that you are an ‘eight ulcer man on four ulcer pay.’ It seems to me that you are a frustrated old man who wishes he could have been successful. When you write such poppy-cock as was in the back section of the paper you work for it shows conclusively that you’re off the beam and at least four of your ulcers are at work. Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you’ll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below! Pegler, a gutter snipe, is a gentleman alongside you. I hope you’ll accept that statement as a worse insult than a reflection on your ancestry.”

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From Bad ass's Blog

Image result for john m browning

John Moses Browning is the greatest gun designer in human history, the father of modern firearms, and an insane super-genius who designed everything from the lever-action cowboy rifles you see in old Westerns to heavy belt-fed machine gun that is literally still mounted on vehicles used in every branch of the United States military to this very day.  Among his 150 patents and the 80 guns he designed, an unbelievable number are still in use today among military, police, and civilians around the world.  The dude invented the pump-action shotgun, the gas-operated ammunition cycling system that is utilized by literally every semi-auto and full-auto weapon in use today, and, of the 10 standard small arms utilized by American soldiers who were storming the Beaches of Normandy in World War II, six of those weapons had been personally designed by John Moses Browning.  This is made even more incredible when you realize that John Moses Browning personally helped contribute to the defeat of Nazi Germany and the destruction of Adolf Hitler’s regime even though he died eleven years before World War II even freaking began.
Browning was born January 21st, 1855, in Ogden, Utah.  His dad, Jonathan Browning, had been a Mormon gunsmith in Tennessee, helping fix and build weapons for badass American frontiersmen working on the fringes of the American countryside.  After he got pretty hardcore into Mormonism, Browning relocated to Nauvoo, Indiana, to join the congregation of Reverend Joseph Smith, but when Smith was assassinated and the Temple was burned down, Browning was brought in by Brigham Young to serve as the gunsmith during the Mormon Exodus west to Utah.  There, in the desert frontier, he helped settlers build, maintain, and repair the weapons they needed to fight off threats from everything ranging from killer bears to Native American warriors.

John Moses Browning got started working on guns at an early age, when at just ten years old he found an old broken flintlock musket and repaired t using wood and metal he just found laying around in his dad’s shop.  He turned a smashed-up piece-of-garbage gun into something that would actually fire, but his dad, like any good badass cowboy frontier dad, was just like “yeah, this is good, but you can do better.”  When Browning was 14 he built a gun from scratch for his brother.  A few years after that, he’d already made a name for himself working as an apprentice in his dad’s gunsmithing shop, doing neighborhood D&D blacksmith kind of stuff for the local settlers – everything from building rifles to repairing broken sewing machines and helping farmers repair damaged equipment.  He learned the trade, and was excellent at fixing anything that had any moving parts on it, but his true passion lie not with running the shop, or making money, but in building cool stuff.
Jonathan Browning died in 1879, leaving 24 year-old John Browning in charge of the shop.  Browning updated the shop’s tools from hand-powered stuff to steam-powered equipment, got married, got his first patent, and started building a pretty cool single-shot breech-loaders rifle.  He didn’t really love running his business and doing the day-to-day paperwork crap associated with being a small business owner, though, and in 1883 he caught a pretty awesome break when the big-time Winchester Company caught wind of the fact that there was some mid-20s gunsmithing genius out in Utah who was selling guns faster than he could build them.  Winchester’s head guy, T.G. Bennett, headed to Ogden and offered John Browning $8,000 to buy the rights to produce Browning’s rifle, and of course we all know that $8,000 in 1883 is the equivalent of roughly seventy-five kajillion dollars in 2018, so there should be no surprise that Browning accepted.
At Winchester, Browning developed and designed the 1886 and 1895 lever-action Winchester repeating rifle.  Bascially, this is the freaking lever-action gun that every cowboy carries in every cowboy movie ever made, and it was designed by a kid in his late-20s who just so happened to be a genius at making awesome stuff using machine tools and the power of his incredible mind.  He was later asked by Winchester to build a lever-action shotgun, which he did, but Browning didn’t love the way it worked.  Instead of a lever-action, he decided, a pump-action would be much better.  So he designed the Winchester 1897 Pump Shotgun, a weapon that was carried by American infantry soldiers from the year 1897 all the way through Vietnam and even the first Gulf War 100 years later.  It was the world’s first pump-action shotgun, and Browning is basically the man capable of designing what would eventually become the best weapon in virtually every single first-person shooter since Doom.

Browning wanted his weapons to possess two things – speed and reliability.  Unfortunately, those two things had, until Browning, primarily been limited by a human being’s own inability to do anything fast or reliable, and guns only fired as fast as a man could pump, lever-action, or draw back a bolt of a bolt-action rifle.  Even the famous Gatling Guns and the French mitrailleuses, while technically “fully automatic” still had to be operated by a man cranking a lever around in a circle.  John Browning thought there had to be a better way.
He was right.
One day, Browning was at a big shooting competition, and he noticed that every time the shooters would fire their weapons it would blast around the grass and reeds around the barrel.  Browning decided that if there were some way to harness the power of the gas that was generated by the ignition of gunpowder in a cartridge, perhaps that could cycle rounds through the weapon in a way that would be consistent, and also way faster than a dude could cycle rounds.
He drew up some plans, designed a mechanism, and it turns out he was right.  To this very day, virtually every semi-auto and full-auto weapon on Earth utilizes this method.  And, honestly, until we invent laser rifles or man-portable rail guns, it’s going to be the basis of cycling rounds through a firearm for the foreseeable future as well.
Browning invented the 1895 Machine Gun, which was the first fully-automatic weapon ever purchased by the United States military.  It was used in the Boxer Rebellion and the Spanish-American War, primarily as a ship-based weapons system, but this design was a breakthrough in weapons development forever.

From here, Browning went on to invent some of the most iconic guns ever built.  Working for Winchester, Remington, Colt, and FN, he created semi-auto shotguns when he built the Auto-5, then he invented virtually every man-portable firearm used by the U.S. to stomp Hitler’s nuts in World War II.  His pistol design, created in 1911 as a response to a call by the U.S. military to upgrade their sidearm from a .38-cal to a .45-cal is still revered today as the Colt M1911.  In military testing for the weapon, the second-best gun malfunctioned nearly 40 times for every 6,000 rounds put through it.
Browning’s Colt 1911 did not fail once.  In the entire trial.  Not a single jammed round.
Do you know what helped?  The fact that Browning had not only designed the gun, but the bullet that went through it.  We know the round today as the .45 ACP.

Browning went on to build the BAR assault rifle, the M1917 machine gun, the M1919 .30-cal machine gun that was mounted on nearly every U.S. airplane and tank of World War II, and the Browning M2, “Ma Deuce”, a full-auto, belt-fed .50-caliber machine gun that you can still see today on Abrams tanks and Bradley IFVs.  When the Allies stormed D-Day 13 years after Browning’s death, five of the ten small arms in the U.S. Military were guns he had designed… and one of the ones he didn’t design, the Thompson Submachine Gun, was chambered in .45 ACP, which is a bullet that Browning invented.
Oh, right, and he’d also designed the pistol the Brits and Canadians were carrying, the Browning Hi-Power.  Just, you know, for good measure.
That’s right.  The same guy designed the Colt 1911, the lever-action Winchester, the M2 Browning machine gun, and the freaking .45 ACP cartridge.  Basically every badass weapon from cowboy days to Nazi-killers was created by the same soft-spoken, quiet, humble, eccentric genius.  A man who was referred to across FN in hushed tones as simply, “le maître,” meaning, “the Master”.
John Browning died the day after Thanksgiving 1926.  His weapons are still in use in militaries across the world to this very day.

 
Links:
History.com
AmericanRifleman.org
SchoolofTrades.edu
M1911.org
Wikipedia
 
Carter, Greg Lee.  Guns in American Society.  Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2012.
Conroy, Bob and Paul Ruffin.  Browning Automatic Rifle.  Huntsville, TX: Texas Review Press, 2015.
Sweeney, Patrick.  The Gun Digest Book of the 1911.  Gun Digest Books, 2006.
Tillman, Barrett.  D-Day Encyclopedia.  New York: Regnery Publishing, 2014.
Yenne, Bill.  Tommy Gun.  New York: Thomas Dunn Books, 2009.
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