The best thing to shoot at SHOT Show 2023 Range Day wasn’t even a firearm…
Umarex, who is well known for its precision and hunting air rifles had the best thing on the firing line: an airsoft anti-tank replica that fired a 2 ½ inch plastic ball filled with airsoft pellets.
When fired, the projectile opened up, raining hundreds of airsoft pellets downrange on the target. It would literally pelt a group of advancing attackers in an airsoft game.
The rear-loaded airsoft AT replica was named the “Carl Gustaf.”
Capsule separating and releasing airsoft pellets.
The onboard air cylinder is housed in the removable cartridge and has to be charged with green gas to ~110.
The cylinder is loaded in the shell housing and put on “safe.” The two-piece plastic projectile is filled with airsoft pellets and inserted in the top of the round.
Cylinder installed in shell housing
The round is loaded into the rear and locked in place. The shooter shoulders the unit and utilizes the side-mounted sights and pistol grip to aim the weapon. Then, the shooter takes it off “safe” and presses the trigger to launch the ball of pellets downrange.
Pellet filled capsule installed in top of shell.
About 15-20 yards down range the two halves separate and all the pellets shower the target. Awesome!
Rear loading port, but there is no back blast on this one.
Unfortunately, Umarex was not able to give an actual release date or price for the Carl Gustaf. But check back for updates.
Grip and trigger for making the magic happen.
For more information on Umarex products and the Carl Gustaf keep click HERE.
High School can be a fairly horrible place. I enjoyed my time there, but kids are often just mean. Cliques and popularity contests are as old as humanity.
I know this is hard to believe, but I wasn’t necessarily the most popular kid in High School. I ran track briefly just to check the block for military pursuits that were to come later, but a jock I was definitely not. I was kind of a cerebral kid who got along with everybody. However, there was never any real threat that I might win Most Handsome or be nominated to escort the Homecoming Queen.
Ours is a violent species. To deny that fact is to deny our very natures.
Throughout it all, I was pretty comfortable in my own skin. School violence back in my day was restricted to two rednecks fighting with their fists over something stupid and soon forgotten. Kids brought guns to school all the time, but we left them locked in the trunks of our cars for hunting and shooting excursions afterward. In the days before the Internet, nobody really thought to take things any further.
This guy collects fossilized poop. As weird hobbies go, his seems fairly harmless.
At some point between then and now something fundamentally changed. The World Wide Web connected folks with weird proclivities in ways we never might have imagined. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, a Florida man named George Frandsen has the largest collection of privately-owned fossilized turds in the world. As of 2016, this 36-year-old owned some 1,277 samples of coprolite or fossilized excrement. He even operates an online Poozeum to show off his crap. You can find it here.
This is dinosaur poo. Apparently, people want this now.
Before the Internet, George Frandsen just would have been some harmless guy with a curiously strange hobby. Now this deep into the Information Age, however, Mr. Frandsen can connect with like-minded poo collectors from all over the world. While collecting fossilized turds is, in reality, indeed fairly harmless, the Net takes some other people to much darker places.
Scott Beierle’s soul was a dark and twisted place.
Nothing brings out your inner victim like connecting with like-minded lost souls. The dark subject of our discussion today is Scott Beierle. Scott self-identified as an Incel, or part of the Involuntary Celibate community. Distilled to its essence these are most typically hetero males who define themselves as being unable to obtain or maintain a romantic partner despite wishing they could. Theirs is a curious online subculture frequently characterized by self-pity, self-loathing, and a sense of entitlement to sex. Such stuff can also cross a little invisible line to become quite terribly dangerous.
The Guy
From the uniform, Scott Beierle obviously spent time in the Army assigned to the 1st Armored Division.
Scott Paul Beierle was born in October of 1978. According to his Facebook profile, he was a military veteran, but I couldn’t find many details about his service. After leaving the military he taught Social Studies and English in the Anne Arundel County Public School System. He also served as a substitute teacher at surrounding schools but was oft disciplined for performance problems.
Scott Beierle didn’t thrive in an academic environment among young women.
In one case, Beierle was fired from a substitute position for touching a female student on her abdomen and asking if she was ticklish. In 2012 and 2016 he was officially charged with battery for groping women’s buttocks. Over time this disturbed young man came to view all women as the impetus behind his many manifest problems. His online activity reinforced this twisted vision.
This freaking loser is Elliot Rodger. He used a gun and a car to kill seven people.
Beierle was active on social media. He posted several YouTube videos that allowed him to vent over his sordid state. In one 2014 video, he described himself as an Incel and voiced support and empathy for Elliot Rodger, a mass shooter who also projected his personal shortcomings onto women in general. Rodger ultimately killed seven people and injured another fourteen. This twisted guy posted an online screed just before his attack titled, “Elliot Rodger’s Retribution” wherein he verbalized his hatred towards women for rejecting him and sexually active men because he envied them.
Scott Beierle was an exceptionally opinionated person.
Beierle also hated African-Americans and got seriously tooled up over interracial relationships. Illegal immigration set him off as well. He wrote song lyrics that glorified the torture and murder of women. He titled one of his videos, “Dangerous Diversity.”
It Has a Name
I have found that applying Biblical precepts to my personal interactions addresses almost everything of importance. Don’t be selfish and treat others as you would like to be treated. The rest takes care of itself.
The textbook definition of a misogynist is, “A person who dislikes, despises, or is strongly prejudiced against women.” Not unlike woke or gaslighting, this is one of those obscure terms that no one really paid much attention to until lately. Scott Beierle took it yet further and earned the title “Misogynistic Terrorist” from the ICCT.
I read about it a bit and still can’t really tell what the ICCT actually does. Mostly sit around and think about stuff apparently.
ICCT stands for International Centre for Counter-Terrorism. It was founded in 2010 and is based in The Hague. Per Wikipedia, “The ICCT is an independent think tank devoted to providing multidisciplinary policy advice and practical support focused on prevention and the rule of law as it relates to combatting terrorism. ICCT’s work focuses on themes at the intersection of countering violent extremism and criminal justice sector responses, as well as human rights-related aspects of counter-terrorism. The major project areas concern countering violent extremism, rule of law, foreign fighters, country and regional analysis, rehabilitation, civil society engagement, and victims’ voices.” I have no idea what all that really means, but the ICCT really doesn’t like people like Scott Beierle.
The Event
As is so often the case, when tragedy struck folks were just out living their lives.
November 2, 2018, was a Friday. At 5:37 PM, Scott Beierle walked into Tallahassee Hot Yoga carrying a 9mm Glock 17 handgun. For those of you who, like me, might not get out much, hot yoga is apparently the act of performing yoga in an artificially torrid environment.
I freely admit that I just don’t get it.
Hot yoga began with someone named Bikram Choudhury. The mission is to replicate the heat and humidity of India, where yoga first was born. The goal is to sweat a lot and, in so doing, “prepare the body for movement and remove impurities.” Whatever. That all sounds pretty miserable to me. However, it does reliably attract women.
Scott Beierle knew his way around a gun. He schemed out the details of his attack well in advance.
After dissecting his digital footprint in retrospect, investigators found that Beierle had been planning his attack for months. He briefly masqueraded as a yoga student before opening fire on the folks in the studio. A lot of stuff happened fairly quickly at that point.
The result was unfettered chaos.
Patrons in a bar across the street reported people streaming from the yoga studio. A man in a badly-bloodied white t-shirt then ran into the bar and claimed that he had attacked the shooter in an effort to buy time for the other patrons to escape. Other survivors backed up his claim.
This sweet young lady fell victim to a deranged homicidal maniac.Nancy Van Vessum was a physician who was at the wrong place at the wrong time.
Beierle ultimately shot six people, killing two. The dead victims were a 21-year-old student at nearby Florida State University named Maura Binkley and a 61-year-old physician named Nancy Van Vessem. Binkley was due to graduate the following year. Dr. Van Vessum worked as the Medical Director for a health insurance company.
Beierle wielded a Glock 17 pistol like this one during his attack.
The man who resisted Beierle’s attack fought back with whatever he had handy. At first, this was a vacuum cleaner and later a broomstick. Though he wasn’t shot, Beierle did beat him severely with his handgun. Tallahassee Police Chief Michael DeLeo later applauded the students who, “fought back and tried not only to save themselves but other people.”
The Aftermath
The police response to the shooting was exemplary.
The cops arrived onsite three and one-half minutes after the first shot was fired, which is frankly pretty amazing. However, by then it was all over. Binkley and Van Vessum were already dead, and the loser Beierle had taken his own life.
The resulting scars from a horrific event such as this invariably run deep.
There were subsequently tributes aplenty to the innocent victims of this egregious rampage. The following day an instructor at Tallahassee Hot Yoga led a yoga class specifically intended to heal the community in the middle of a nearby street. The following year, Maura Binkley’s parents sued Tallahassee Hot Yoga and the property owners for failure to provide adequate security measures.
Ruminations
This mass shooting didn’t follow the accepted narrative. There were no black rifles involved at all.
There is always ample blame to go around in horrible situations like this. There are those who will immediately attack the gun, but this example is even more tenuous than is typically the case. This wasn’t an “assault weapon”–whatever that actually is–or some uber-deadly implement of war. It was just a pistol. Even hypothetical magazine capacity restrictions wouldn’t have touched this one. Scott Beierle was just a really horrible person.
These guys just can’t be everywhere.
The owners of the yoga studio got sued for what exactly? I could post some scary-looking guy with a black rifle at the front door of my business, but I doubt that would do much to enhance my patient flow. Scott Beierle is the reason I carry a gun every time I’m not asleep or in the shower. When seconds count the cops are often only minutes away. Their response was, per usual, absolutely incredible. It is simply that bad stuff like this typically unfolds very quickly.
Scott Beierle was a product of his era. If you really want a date how about trying a little harder not to be a creepy weirdo?
I would assert that Scott Beierle is not the problem. Scott Beierle is a symptom of the problem. When I was a kid, stuff like this never happened. Now it seems to happen all the time. What exactly changed?
There are solutions to life’s problems that actually work, but you have to go looking for them.
A point of personal privilege–the absence of light is dark. Similarly, the absence of God is godlessness. Our culture has ejected God from our public spaces and embraced a pervasive depressing nihilistic humanism.
If we persist in raising our kids to believe that life doesn’t matter and that sex is the ultimate end-all then we should not be surprised when the Incels of the world become convinced they have nothing to live for and take it out on the rest of us. Jesus is the only thing I have found that reliably displaces the darkness, even such darkness as Scott Beierle.
In an effort to outdo Smith & Wesson’s fast-loading, top-break revolvers, Colt brought a solid-frame, swing-out-cylinder revolver to the market in 1889. Its initial models were large-frame handguns in .38 and .41 calibers designed for military use. The success of those models led to Colt’s introduction of smaller-scaled double-actions for the law-enforcement and civilian markets.
The Colt New Pocket, a six-shot revolver offered in various .32-cal. cartridges, was introduced in 1893. Three years later, the New Police was introduced, which married the New Pocket frame with a larger grip for law-enforcement duty. It was promptly adopted by the New York City Police Dept. at the urging of then-police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt.
The New Pocket was replaced by the Pocket Positive in 1905. This model got its name from the “Positive Lock” mechanism patented by Colt in 1905 that prevented the revolver from firing unless the trigger was pulled. Likewise, the New Police adopted the same mechanism and added the option of .38 New Police or .38 S&W chamberings to become the Police Positive. Along with Colt’s large-frame Official Police, the Police Positive would go on to be a popular law-enforcement sidearm, and just more than 1,000 were supplied to the British during World War II.
As with the New Police, a target version of the Police Positive was made. It featured a 6″ barrel and an adjustable rear sight with the topstrap of the frame matted to reduce glare. The trigger and backstrap were checkered. In addition to the .32 cartridges offered in the Police Positive, the Target model was also available chambered in .22 Long Rifle and .22 WRF. In 1923, hard rubber stocks were replaced by checkered walnut, and the cylinder’s chambers were recessed after 1934. A nickel finish was offered on both the standard and target models.
Like the Police Positive, the Target model was made in two versions. The First Issue was made from 1905 through 1925. The Second Issue began in 1926 and had a slightly heavier frame that increased the overall weight of the revolver by about 4 ozs.
The Police Positive Target would serve as a small-frame companion to Colt’s large-frame Officers Model Target. According to Colt’s marketing literature, it was “a fine arm and made to meet the demand for a light, small caliber Target Revolver—medium in price—for both indoor and outdoor shooting; light, smooth pull, well balanced, with the full Colt Grip.” The combination of an affordable price and manageable size meant that the Police Positive Target was more likely to be found on the belt of an outdoorsman than on the competition range. Consequently, many will be found, like the example pictured, with holster wear.
While production of the standard Police Positive would continue until 1947, the last Police Positive Target models were made in 1941. About 28,000 were produced over its production run. The legacy of Colt’s solid-frame, swing-out cylinder, double-action revolvers, like the Police Positive, lives on in the company’s current Anaconda, Python and Cobra models.
The Police Positive Target pictured is a Second Issue model manufactured in late 1930. It is in NRA Good Condition and is valued at $650.
Like the Police Positive, Target models will be encountered with British proofs. Target models in one of the .32-cal. chamberings will bring about a 40 percent premium compared to the rimfire versions.
And yes my family did NOT ride for Mr. Lincoln! Grumpy
*The Pottawatomie massacre occurred on the night of May 24–25, 1856, in the Kansas Territory. In reaction to the sacking of Lawrence by pro-slavery forces on May 21, and the telegraphed news of the severe attack on May 22 on Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, for speaking out against slavery in Kansas (“The Crime Against Kansas”), John Brown and a band of abolitionist settlers—some of them members of the Pottawatomie Rifles—made a violent reply. Just north of Pottawatomie Creek, in Franklin County, they killed five pro-slavery settlers, in front of their families. This soon became the most famous of the many violent episodes of the “Bleeding Kansas” period, during which a state-level civil war in the Kansas Territory was described as a “tragic prelude” to the American Civil War which soon followed. “Bleeding Kansas” involved conflicts between pro- and anti-slavery settlers over whether the Kansas Territory would enter the Union as a slave state or a free state. It is also John Brown’s most questionable act, both to his friends and his enemies. In the words of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, it was “a terrible remedy for a terrible malady.”[1]: 371
John Brown was particularly affected by the sacking of Lawrence, in which the Douglas County Sheriff Samuel Jones on May 21st led a posse that destroyed the presses and type of the Kansas Free State and the Herald of Freedom, Kansas’s two abolitionist newspapers, the fortified Free State Hotel, and the house of Charles Robinson. He was the free-state militia commander-in-chief and leader of the “free state” government, established in opposition to the “bogus” pro-slavery territorial government, based in Lecompton.
A Douglas County grand jury had ordered the attack because the hotel “had been used as a fortress” and an “arsenal” the previous winter, and the “seditious” newspapers were indicted because “they had urged the people to resist the enactments passed” by the territorial governor.[2] The violence against abolitionists was accompanied by celebrations in the pro-slavery press, with writers such as Dr. John H Stringfellow of the Squatter Sovereign proclaiming that pro-slavery forces “are determined to repel this Northern invasion and make Kansas a Slave State; though our rivers should be covered with the blood of their victims and the carcasses of the Abolitionists should be so numerous in the territory as to breed disease and sickness, we will not be deterred from our purpose.”[3]: 162
Brown was outraged by both the violence of pro-slavery forces and by what he saw as a weak and cowardly response by the anti-slavery partisans and the Free State settlers, whom he described as “cowards, or worse”.[3]: 163–166 In addition, two days before this massacre, Brown learned about the caning of abolitionist Charles Sumner by the pro-slavery Preston Brooks on the floor of Congress.[4][5][full citation needed]
A Free State company under the command of John Brown Jr. set out, and the Osawatomie company joined them. On the morning of May 22, 1856, they heard of the sack of Lawrence and the arrest of Deitzler, Brown, and Jenkins. However, they continued their march toward Lawrence, not knowing whether their assistance might still be needed, and encamped that night near the Ottawa Creek. They remained in the vicinity until the afternoon of May 23, at which time they decided to return home.
On May 23, John Sr. selected a party to go with him on a private expedition. John Jr. objected to their leaving his company, but seeing that his father was obdurate, acquiesced, telling him to “do nothing rash.” The company consisted of John Brown, four of his sons—Frederick, Owen, Salmon, and Oliver—Thomas Wiener, and James Townsley (who claimed later that he had been forced by Brown to participate in the incident), whom John had induced to carry the party in his wagon to their proposed field of operations.
Letter of Mahala Doyle to John Brown, when he was in jail awaiting execution, November 20, 1859: “Altho vengence is not mine, I confess, that I do feel gratified to hear that you ware stopt in your fiendish career at Harper’s Ferry, with the loss of your two sons, you can now appreciate my distress, in Kansas, when you then and there entered my house at midnight and arrested my husband and two boys and took them out of the yard and in cold blood shot them dead in my hearing, you cant say you done it to free our slaves, we had none and never expected to own one, but has only made me a poor disconsolate widow with helpless children while I feel for your folly. I do hope & trust that you will meet your just reward. O how it pained my Heart to hear the dying groans of my Husband and children if this scrawl give you any consolation you are welcome to it.
NB [postscript] my son John Doyle whose life I begged of (you) is now grown up and is very desirous to be at Charleston [Charles Town] on the day of your execution would certainly be there if his means would permit it, that he might adjust the rope around your neck if Gov. Wise would permit it.”[6]
They encamped that night between two deep ravines on the edge of the timber, some distance to the right of the main traveled road. There they remained unobserved until the following evening of May 24. Some time after dark, the party left their place of hiding and proceeded on their “secret expedition”. Late in the evening, they called at the house of James P. Doyle and ordered him and his two adult sons, William and Drury, to go with them as prisoners. (Doyle’s 16-year-old son, John, who was not a member of the pro-slavery Law and Order Party, was spared after his mother pleaded for his life.) The three men were escorted by their captors out into the darkness, where Owen Brown and his brother Frederick killed them with broadswords. John Brown Sr. did not participate in the stabbing but fired a shot into the head of the fallen James Doyle to ensure he was dead.
Brown and his band then went to the house of Allen Wilkinson and ordered him out. He was slashed and stabbed to death by Henry Thompson and Theodore Wiener, possibly with help from Brown’s sons.[3]: 172–173 From there, they crossed the Pottawatomie, and some time after midnight, forced their way into the cabin of James Harris at swordpoint. Harris had three house guests: John S. Wightman, Jerome Glanville, and William Sherman, the brother of Henry Sherman (“Dutch Henry”), a militant pro-slavery activist. Glanville and Harris were taken outside for interrogation and asked whether they had threatened Free State settlers, aided Border Ruffians from Missouri, or participated in the sack of Lawrence. Satisfied with their answers, Brown’s men let Glanville and Harris return to the cabin. William Sherman, however, was led to the edge of the creek and hacked to death with swords by Wiener, Thompson, and Brown’s sons.[3]: 177
Having learned at Harris’s cabin that “Dutch Henry”, their main target in the expedition, was away from home on the prairie, they ended the expedition and returned to the ravine where they had previously encamped. They rejoined the Osawatomie company on the night of May 25.[3][page needed]
In the two years prior to the massacre, there had been eight killings in Kansas Territory attributable to slavery politics, and none in the vicinity of the massacre. Brown killed five in a single night, and the massacre was the match to the powder keg that precipitated the bloodiest period in “Bleeding Kansas” history, a three-month period of retaliatory raids and battles in which 29 people died.[7]
The Potawattomie massacre was called by William G. Cutler, author of the History of the State of Kansas (1883), the “crowning horror” of the whole Bleeding Kansas period. “The news of the horrid affair spread rapidly over the Territory, carrying with it a thrill of horror, such as the people, used as they had become to deeds of murder, had not felt before. …The news of the event had a deeper significance than appeared in the abstract atrocity of the act itself. …It meant that the policy of extermination or abject submission, so blatantly promulgated by the Pro-slavery press, and proclaimed by Pro-slavery speakers, had been adopted by their enemies, and was about to be enforced with appalling earnestness. It meant that there was a power opposed to the Pro-slavery aggressors, as cruel and unrelenting as themselves. It meant henceforth, swift retaliation—robbery for robbery—murder for murder— that “he who taketh the sword shall perish by the sword.”[8]
Kansas Senator John James Ingalls in 1884 quoted with approval the judgment of a Free State settler: “He was the only man who comprehended the situation, and saw the absolute necessity for some such blow, and had the nerve to strike it.” This a result of the men killed being leaders in a conspiracy to “drive out, bum and kill; and that Potawatomie Creek was to be cleared of every man, woman and child who was for Kansas being a free State.”[9]
According to Brown’s son Salmon, who participated, it was “the grandest thing that was ever done in Kansas”
Capsule separating and releasing airsoft pellets.
Cylinder installed in shell housing
Pellet filled capsule installed in top of shell.
Rear loading port, but there is no back blast on this one.
And yes my family did NOT ride for Mr. Lincoln! Grumpy