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The British firm of John Rigby & Co. is older than the United States. Founded in 1775 by John Rigby, the Dublin, Ireland, gunmaker manufactured elegant flintlock rifles and pistols. Some 23 years later, Rigby’s facility was raided by Town-Major Henry Sirr and police force. Virtually every firearm in his place was seized and kept for a lengthy time. By the time they were returned, the firearms were virtually worthless, most having been disassembled and cannibalized for parts.
In 1816, Rigby, now 58 years old, brought his son, William, in as a partner. Two years later, John Rigby died, and William brought in his brother, John Jason Rigby, into the business. The brothers ran it—now called W&J Rigby—until 1887 when John Jason was appointed superintendent of the Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield Lock. The Rigby name was always identified with the finest quality in firearms, and as the 19th century came to a close, firearm technology was skyrocketing.
Cordite—a double-based smokeless propellant that looks similar to spaghetti—was patented in Britain in 1889. The burn rate of Cordite was modified by the surface area early on. Thin strands burned at a faster rate, while thicker strands had a slower rate of deflagration. Big-game hunting was still popular among the privileged class, but those gorgeous examples of the gunmaker’s art—double rifles—were terribly expensive.
Too, the idea caught on among some that a magazine rifle could hold more cartridges and therefore be rather valuable when things went sideways with an animal that can bite, claw or stomp a hunter, as well as his entourage, in the event of a poorly placed shot. However, magazine rifles can be problematic in feeding the rimmed cartridges used in double rifles. W.J. Jeffery & Co. and Westley Richards each came out with proprietary heavy-game cartridges in 1905 and 1909, respectively.
The .404 Jeffery was initially loaded with either a 300-grain bullet at 2,600 f.p.s. with 4,500 ft.-lbs. of energy or a 400-grain bullet at 2,150 f.p.s. and 4,100 ft.-lbs. of energy. Westley Richards developed a .425 Westley Richards launching a 410-grain bullet at 2,350 f.p.s. with 5,010 ft.-lbs. of thump. Each of these cartridges easily outshined the .450 Black Powder Express cartridge that they replaced. The .425 Westley Richards features a rebated rim , allowing it to be built on a standard .30-’06 Sprg. length Mauser 98 action.
The .404 Jeffery needed a Magnum Mauser action to accommodate its overall length. John Rigby wasn’t sitting on the sidelines. In 1897, he negotiated an agreement with Mauser-Oberndorf to be the exclusive source for all Mauser-made rifles, barreled actions and parts in Great Britain; an arrangement that extended into the first 40 years of the 20th century. Rigby then set about designing a cartridge that worked well in a bolt-action magazine rifle and perform as well or better than the Jeffery and Westley Richards cartridges.
He started from scratch—no parent case and no existing bullet—a rather expensive way to develop a new cartridge. Rigby’s cartridge turned out to be slightly rebated-rim case, 2.900″ long, .589″ in diameter at its base tapering to .540″ at the shoulder with a bullet diameter of .416″. Such a huge case could only be contained in a Magnum Mauser No. 5 receiver. Rigby’s magnum magazine rifle was an instant success, though the raw numbers made it seem paltry. This was a custom rifle for those who traveled the world in search of big game, so rifle and cartridge were proprietary.
Too, while the magazine rifle was popular because of its cost—about half that of a double rifle at that time—and lighter weight, Rigby still continued to crank out double rifles for those who wanted the best and could afford it. From 1912 until World War II, Rigby turned out just 169 rifles on the Magnum Mauser receiver. Over the following 59 years, just 364 copies were built. A resurgence of interest in the .416 Rigby rifle and cartridge came from Jack O’Connor in the 1960s.
The .416 Rigby, left, is shown next to a .375 Holland & Holland cartridge.
O’Connor had a .416 made up on a Brevex Mauser receiver and took it to Africa. He found it a very effective cartridge for heavier game, with less recoil than the .450 Watts O’Connor used on previous hunts on the Dark Continent. In his The Rifle Book—a must-have tome for any serious student of the hunting rifle—O’Connor said, “[The .416] is an outstanding cartridge…drives a 410-grain bullet, according to claims, at a velocity of 2,371 and turns up 5,100 ft.-lbs. of energy.” O’Connor was a gifted wordsmith and shared compelling stories of adventure with his rifles around the world.
It was these tales that fueled new interest in both the rifle and .416 Rigby cartridge. While the interest was strong because of more people heading into big game country, ammo was still a sticking point. Kynoch had been the sole supplier of .416 Rigby ammunition until the 1970s, and the company was twisting in the wind by that time. It would later rise again as a British company with a separate U.S. base. Ruger introduced the .416 Rigby in 1991 in its Model 77 RSM Magnum Mk II rifle. Now nearly anybody could have a solid .416 Rigby rifle, and ammunition manufacturers took note.
Federal, Hornady and Norma tooled up and began producing .416 Rigby ammunition. Later, Nosler and Winchester began loading the .416 Rigby. The British firm of Eley licensed rights for the Kynoch name to Kynamco, a British firm, in Suffolk, England, and rekindled .416 Rigby ammo under its original name. Today’s loads in .416 Rigby feature 400- to 410-grain soft-nose or FMJ bullets at 2,300 to 2,400 f.p.s. and churning up some 4,700 to 5,100 ft.-lbs. of energy and have a maximum-point-blank range of 198 yards.
Compare that to the .458 Winchester Magnum with a 500-grain bullet at 2,050 f.p.s. and 4,665 ft.-lbs. of energy. The .416 Rigby may have started from scratch, but it has spawned several notable progenies. Such uber-mags like the .300 and .338 Lapua cartridges are based on the .416 Rigby case, as are the .450 Dakota, .450 Rigby and .500 Whisper. Weatherby’s .30-378, .338-378, .378, .416 and the .460 Weatherby Magnums may have a belt—almost a trademark of Weatherby cartridges—but dimensionally each can be traced back the Rigby’s original case.
As a sporting cartridge, the .416 Rigby may not be as popular as the .30-’06 Sprg. or .375 H&H, but that’s normal. Not every hunt is for huge animals that can and will stomp you back if you mess up a shot. Too, it’s not something any sane person would want to shoot 200 rounds of it in a day of shooting. Besides the recoil, cartridges are more than $5 per round. But for serious work on dangerous game, the .416 Rigby remains in a class by itself.
When the Department of Homeland Security launched a search for new service pistols, Heckler & Koch was selected to provide pistols to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
In addition to the standard-issue Heckler & Koch P2000 Compact LEM pistol in .40 S&W, a small contingent of Border Patrol BORTAC agents assigned to the national team based at SOG headquarters in El Paso, Texas, carry the HK P30L (Long) LEM service pistol in .40 S&W.
NEXT-GEN DESIGN
Even though the HK P30 and the HK P2000 Compact share a number of parts, the P30 is a more modern design that has improved ergonomics, including a special grip frame with interchangeable backstrap inserts and lateral plates, allowing the pistol to be individually adapted to any user.
Israel Ziv, a retired Israeli army general, was taking a bike ride Saturday morning when a flood of alarming calls started coming in.
A huge barrage of rockets had been fired from Gaza. Gunmen from Hamas, the armed Palestinian group that controls the territory, were pouring across the border. Soon he would learn a friend’s son was trapped in a kibbutz.
He raced home, put on his uniform and grabbed his weapon, a nine-millimeter pistol.
Within minutes he was flying down a deserted highway in his new white Audi. As he neared the Gaza border, columns of black smoke rose in front of him, and the Israeli Army, at least at first, was nowhere to be seen. Hamas attackers were running across the landscape, hunched under the weight of heavy machine guns and rocket propelled grenade launchers, shooting at him.
“They were all over,” he said. “Hundreds of them.”
Mr. Ziv, stocky, spiky-haired, a bit irascible, and the former head of the operations directorate of the Israeli Defense Forces, is a well-known figure in Israel, especially now. His actions over the weekend — driving headlong into the battle zone armed only with a pistol, organizing a confused group of soldiers into a fighting unit and overseeing evacuations — have been widely publicized on Israeli news channels. In the process he has become an avatar of Israel’s D.I.Y. spirit — and of the failure of its military and intelligence agencies.
The Israeli government said the toll in the devastating incursion by Hamas had reached 1,200 people killed, most of them unarmed civilians.
Already, amid the anguish over the slaughter, public frustrations are beginning to boil, with many Israelis, Mr. Ziv among them, taking issue with the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“The government is totally paralyzed,” said Mr. Ziv, who, even before this crisis, was extremely critical of Mr. Netanyahu for what he said were policies that bitterly divided Israelis and put the country’s security at risk.
Nevertheless, Mr. Ziv is still welcome in Israel’s corridors of power. On Wednesday, he held several teleconferences with captains of industry about raising tens of millions of dollars to help victims and their families.
“Just for civilians,” he shouted into his phone. “None of it for the army.”
He spoke to the top brass of the military and the police about shoring up a civilian defense force that had clearly been overwhelmed.
He even walked into Israel’s Defense Ministry, where he met with the defense minister, Yoav Gallant, and held secret meetings with national security officials in which they left their mobile phones on the hallway floor before stepping inside a small office for a chat that, the hope was, could not be tracked.
So weakened is public faith in the country’s military that one of the biggest issues Israelis are talking about is arming themselves. Many already own weapons, but the government announced this week that it was purchasing 10,000 assault rifles for civilians, along with bulletproof vests. Mr. Ziv is spearheading an effort to empower retired generals and former soldiers to rebuild community defense squads in the Gaza border area and around the country.
“We need weapons,” one man pleaded with Mr. Ziv as he visited a massacre site on Wednesday. “And we need a system.”
Mr. Ziv put a hand on the man’s back and said, “We are putting together that system right now.”
As they spoke, huge booms thundered and black smoke billowed up from the horizon, obscuring the banana farms and the wire fence along Gaza’s border with Israel that Hamas had breached to launch the assault. Gaza, only a few miles away, has been under relentless attack by Israeli warplanes since Saturday, killing hundreds of Palestinians.
And in just about every village where Israelis have been slaughtered, when a light breeze stirred the slender eucalyptus trees it also carried the smell of death.
Mr. Ziv spent Wednesday moving through this landscape. Sixty-six years old and a decorated paratrooper, he revisited the same terrain where he had tried to rescue as many people as he could. That included the site of the ill-fated desert rave party where Hamas terrorists massacred hundreds of young people — which Mr. Ziv believes might have been a primary target of the attack. Just about everywhere he went, soldiers and civilians thanked him, then shyly asked for a selfie.
His account of what he did on Saturday has been backed up by other retired generals and active duty officers who fought with him over the weekend.
He left his house, a beautiful home overlooking olive groves near Tel Aviv, and arrived in the battle zone around 10 a.m.. He was traveling with a close friend, Noam Tibon, a retired general whose son was trapped in the Nahal Oz kibbutz.
Mr. Tibon’s son, a prominent journalist, had called his father in deep distress, saying gunmen were closing in on him and his family. In recent media interviews, Mr. Tibon said he told his son, “Trust me, I will come. This is my profession. Nobody can stop me.”
Mr. Ziv said that as they drove closer to Gaza, fires burned everywhere and unchallenged Hamas gunmen fired into buildings and passing cars. At first, he said, he didn’t see any Israeli soldiers. But as they traveled deeper toward the besieged villages, they encountered small bands of Israeli soldiers trying to fight back but clearly outnumbered.
“Things were not organized,” Mr. Ziv said.
He and Mr. Tibon linked up with a platoon of young soldiers, piled several of them into the Audi, and began attacking Hamas gunmen on the road, Mr. Ziv said.
It was difficult taking them on with just a pistol, Mr. Ziv said, but after a soldier in his car was wounded, Mr. Ziv snatched his M16 and started firing out the window.
The worst feeling, though, was knowing that although they were some of the first responders, they were already too late.
Bodies were strewn on the highway, along the paths in the kibbutzim, in the patches of shaded forest they passed. What Mr. Ziv shared has been corroborated by extensive video and photo evidence, some of it filmed by the Hamas gunmen themselves. They hunted down Israeli civilians sitting in their cars, huddling in their homes, hiding at a bus stop and running for their lives.
“No one could imagine they would do what they did,” Mr. Ziv said. “It is a brutality that we have not witnessed since the establishment of Israel.”
He added: “So now we need to change the whole doctrine about Gaza,” he said. “No more Hamas.”
How do you do that? he was asked.
“Level the ground,” he said.
Mr. Ziv and Mr. Tibon split up near the kibbutz where Mr. Tibon’s son lives. While Mr. Tibon joined a group of Israeli soldiers fighting Hamas members there, and eventually rescued his son, Mr. Ziv raced to other hot spots. He said he spent nearly 24 hours straight rushing around the kibbutzim and villages under attack, firing his own weapon, organizing evacuations of civilians and coordinating with the military to dispatch backup units as fast as possible.
The worst he found was the rave site. On Friday night, several thousand young people, Israelis and many foreigners, had flocked to an open field a few miles from the Gaza border to hold an overnight open-air dance party. By the time Mr. Ziv reached it Saturday night, he said, there was nothing left to be done.
There were bodies everywhere: in the campsite; in the field where everyone had been dancing; in car after car after car lining the road, filled with young people trying to escape.
He ran to one young man slumped out of a car and felt his neck. No pulse.
“I think the trigger for this whole attack was this event,” Mr. Ziv said. “Hamas planned this for a long time. But they knew a critical mass would be here this weekend.”
From evidence the Israeli military found at the rave site, and what witnesses said, the Hamas attackers surrounded the gathering on three sides. One group of gunmen opened fire on the crowd, methodically driving the panicked partygoers toward the road, where more gunmen were waiting to mow them down.
“I can still hear them screaming,” Mr. Ziv said.
He stood on the site looking out at a field littered with water bottles, rolled up sleeping mats, still-full boxes of Oreos, shirts, pants, tents and empty camp chairs. It was like everything was there but the people. One soldier quietly moved past him, carrying a black plastic bag, looking for documents.
“People don’t understand how fragile the situation is,” Mr. Ziv said. “Hamas has to pay for this.” He paused. “With their existence.”
He then walked away.
______________________________________________ If this is true and not BS Propaganda. Then this guy is a real stud in my book. Grumpy
Ya see what happens is, these entitled young jerkoffs think their opinions matter just because they go to some elite Ivy League school. Well, you may be edjamecated, but ya ain’t that fuckin’ smart. Did you really have to put your name on that letter, Einstein?
A group of US business leaders has demanded that Harvard University release the names of students who were part of organizations that signed a letter blaming Israel for deadly attacks by Hamas that triggered a severe escalation of violence across Israel and Gaza.
Several chief executives called for the names to be made public so that they, and others, could know not to hire the students once they leave Harvard.
Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge fund manager and chief executive of Pershing Square, tweeted that he and other business leaders believe the “names of the signatories should be made public so their views are publicly known”.
Ackman added: “One should not be able to hide behind a corporate shield when issuing statements supporting the actions of terrorists.”
The rest of the article is here:
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/oct/12/harvard-letter
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/oct/12/harvard-letter
————————————————————- How much do you want to bet that they know who they are already? Grumpy
