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.
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Today’s heartwarming story of Democrats getting what they voted for takes us to Austin, Texas, where a police staffing crisis exploded the murder rate, and according to a report there were no cops at all in a section of the city on one Saturday in February.
“Austin, Texas residents are expressing outrage over police staffing shortages and longer 911-call response times in the aftermath of the city council’s vote to defund the department in 2020,” the New York Post reported.
It gets better…
“In February, a section of the city was notably left without a single police officer for a few hours on a Saturday due to the ongoing shortages,” the Post noted.
“Each year since 2017, we’ve lost more officers than we’ve hired,” Austin Police Association President Michael Bullock warned. “We had to gut our specialized units and force detectives to work backfill on patrol just to try and respond to 911 calls.”
Bullock added, “Our staffing has been set back at least 15 years, and at the same time, we’ve dealt with a population growth of over 250,000 new residents.”
Here’s the rub:
In 2020 following the Black Lives Matter riots, Austin’s city council voted unanimously to cut up to $150 million from its police department budget — about 34% of its current total — and reinvest the funds in other services. The following year, the Texas Legislature passed a law essentially forcing Austin to restore the funding, but the officer shortage persists.
…
“What the Austin city council did was horrific to the community,” [Fraternal Order of Police Vice President Joe Gamaldi] told Fox News Digital.” There is no one left to fill these shortages because the city council treats officers like scum. Now, responses are over 10 minutes for emergency calls. Some districts are left without staff. City council should learn their lesson over violent crime. 2021 was the highest ever for recorded murders and, since then, the murder rate continues to stay close to that high and looks like 2024 will not be any better. People are dying over bad decisions.”
…
Last year, the department was on the verge of a staffing collapse after 40 officers filed retirement papers following a 9-2 city council vote to scrap a four-year contract that the city had previously agreed to in principle and instead pursue a one-year contract that the police union’s board had rejected.
You see, these Austin idiots have cornered themselves. They can either 1) allow their city to implode or 2) admit they were wrong. The problem for Austin is that leftists never admit they are wrong. In their twisted minds, they are not wrong. Rising crime is the goal. Violence is the goal. Urban blight is the goal. Chronic homelessness, poverty, and drug abuse are the goals. It’s all laid out right here.
The dummy voters are in a similar spot. They hate us MAGAtards and would rather see their city go full shithole before handing us a “toldjaso.”
Pride is such an awful and insidious thing. The inability to admit you are wrong is a devastating handicap. But that’s what the voters will have to do: admit they were wrong and that we MAGAtards are right about supporting your police force and locking up violent criminals and three-time losers.
While I wish no physical harm on anyone, watching the smug and prideful lose their city brings me nothing but joy. It’s no different than watching CNNLOL implode, or the Disney Grooming Syndicate lose billions. These voters, politicians, media outlets, and entertainment conglomerates are only victims of one thing: laughably stupid choices based on deranged and fascist thinking.
These people are so smug and self-involved that they honestly believe their Greatness can alter human nature: criminals will see the light, news consumers will enjoy being lied to, and parents will subject their small children to gay sex, transvestites, and other queering and grooming propaganda.
Burn, baby, burn.