Praxis: Army Bans P-Mags. Never underestimate the propensity for rear echelon bureacracy to screw things up for the troops.

In Reversal, Army Bans High-Performance Rifle Mags

The Army has ordered that soldiers may use only government-issued magazines with their M4 carbines, a move that effectively bans one of the most dependable and widely used commercial-made magazines on today’s battlefield.

The past decade of war has spawned a wave of innovation in the commercial soldier weapons and equipment market. As a result, trigger-pullers in the Army, Marines and various service special operations communities now go to war armed with commercially designed kit that’s been tested under the most extreme combat conditions.

Near the top of such advancements is the PMAG polymer M4 magazine, introduced by Magpul Industries Corp. in 2007. Its rugged design has made it as one of the top performers in the small-arms accessory arena, according to combat veterans who credit the PMAG with drastically improving the reliability of the M4.

Despite the success of the PMAG, Army officials from the TACOM Life Cycle Management Command issued a “safety of use message” in April that placed it, and all other polymer magazines, on an unauthorized list.

The message did not single out PMAGs, but instead authorizes only the use of Army-issued aluminum magazines. The message offers little explanation for the new policy except to state that “Units are only authorized to use the Army-authorized magazines listed in the technical manuals.” Nor does it say what Army units should now do with the millions of dollars’ worth of PMAGs they’ve purchased over the years.

Magpul officials have been reluctant to comment on the issue. Robert Vidrine, vice president of marketing and sales, said the company found out about TACOM’s message only after it was released to the field.

The decision has left combat troops puzzled, since the PMAG has an Army-approved national stock number, which allows units to order them through the Army supply system.

“This just follows a long line of the Army, and military in general, not listening to the troops about equipment and weaponry,” said one Army infantryman serving in Southwest Afghanistan, who asked not to be identified.

“The PMAG is a great product … lightweight and durable. I have seen numerous special ops teams from all services pass through here, and they all use PMAGs. Also, a large amount of Marine infantry here use PMAGS, including their Force Recon elements.”

TACOM officials said the message was issued because of “numerous reports that Army units are using unauthorized magazines,” TACOM spokesman Eric Emerton said in a written response to questions from Military.com. Emerton added that only “authorized NSNs have ever been included in the technical manuals. Just because an item has an NSN, does not mean the Army is an authorized user.”

This seems to be a complete policy reversal, since PMAGs are standard issue with the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment and they have been routinely issued to infantry units before war-zone deployments.

Of course when all these P-Mags are dutifully turned in, they will be promptly crushed. Insanity.

Couldn't resist posting this one. David Codrea opens a store front.

Memorial Day Weekend

US Military Cemetery in Taguig City, South East of Manila, Philippines.

I will be spending some time with my family this weekend (both daughters home) so I cannot promise much in the way of posting. Unless, of course, we have breaks in the Gunwalker Scandal. I am hearing more positive stuff out of DC from people I trust, so maybe . . . just keep checking. In any case, what time I commit will be largely to the Absolved project. Remember the reason for the holiday. With Matt in Afghanistan now, I feel it keenly and I hope you do too.

Facebook Follies Strike Again. Anybody know William David Butler?

Man's Facebook posts draw scrutiny from law enforcement.

A man's posts on U.S. Rep. Jeff Duncan's Facebook page are drawing scrutiny from Anderson County and federal law enforcement officials.

In a Wednesday morning post on Duncan's Facebook page, a man identifying himself as David Butler wrote that President Barack Obama has committed treason.

"The punishment for treason, how delicious is hanging," Butler posted, a response to the Republican congressman's comments about how he is sick and tired of "hearing President Obama demonize success in this country."

Butler posted additional comments in the same thread, including the following: "Militia action is warranted, but not needed yet ... Peaceful marches to escort the traitors out of office should suffice for now."

Duncan's staff removed the comments referring to treason and hanging from his Facebook page on Thursday. His staff also contacted the Capitol Police in Washington, D.C., and the Anderson County Sheriff's Office.

Anderson County Sheriff John Skipper said Thursday that he has assigned an investigator to look into the congressman's concerns about Butler's Facebook posts.

Skipper also said his office recently learned about some additional comments that Butler left on another Facebook page. He said his staff has shared this information with the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division.

A spokesman for U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham confirmed Thursday that his office also has been notified about a post that Butler left on Duncan's Facebook page that could be construed as a threat against the Republican senator from South Carolina.

"We are aware of the situation, but that is all we will say," Graham spokesman Kevin Bishop wrote in an email.

Michael Kiger, chairman of the Pickens County Democratic Party, said he spoke to a U.S. Secret Service agent based in Greenville on Wednesday night about Butler's post that mentions treason by Obama.

Efforts to contact Butler, whom a law enforcement official said also is known as William David Butler, through his link on Duncan's Facebook page were unsuccessful Thursday.

According to his Facebook page, Butler lives in Anderson. Skipper could not confirm where Butler lives.

Butler's Facebook page and some of the posts he left on Duncan's Facebook page mention his support for two groups: Oath Keepers and Three Percenter.

The Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center each have listed Oath Keepers as an extremist anti-government group.

According to its website, Oath Keepers describes itself as a nonpartisan association of active military members, veterans, law enforcement officials and firefighters who are committed to defending the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

The group's motto is "Not on our watch!"

The Oath Keepers website includes articles on topics such as how Wall Street banks are secretly building the world's largest private army. The site also has a section devoted to Operation Sleeping Giant, which urges veterans to prepare to defeat the "domestic enemies of our Constitution."

As part of Operation Sleeping Giant, veterans are advised to stockpile food, fuel and medical supplies and to create barter networks based on the use of gold and silver as money.

Three Percenter is a pro-Second Amendment group. The name refers to the 3 percent of the population in colonial America that took up arms in the Revolutionary War.

Look, I do not do Facebook, viewing it as a positive social and cultural evil. However, posting comments about hanging Obama on a Congressman's page seems to me to be self-evidently stupid. There is undoubtedly more to this story but so far it seems to me to be within the limits of the First Amendment, still I would like to know if anybody knows this fellow. I need the whole story.

David Codrea: Shipley appeal presents former FBI agent’s side of gun charges.

"On reading the details, it’s clear there is more to this case than just a slam dunk conviction."

Anybody know any more on this?

Anonymous: We hacked DOJ emails, database.

Anybody know where these are posted?

LATER: Here's the download site but I cannot access it from my existing equipment.

O'Reilly's boss Restrepo heads for the door.

Dan Restrepo (left): the Oliver North of the Gunwalker Conspiracy?

Can this be a harbinger of O-Reilly's deposition by the Issa committee?

BREAKING: “Dan Restrepo, Senior Director for the Western Hemisphere at the National Security Council, will leave the White House next month. Restrepo has been President Obama’s point man on policy in the Americas since early 2007, and made history in April 2009 as the first person to speak Spanish from the White House podium. He plans to reacquaint himself with his family before heading to the private sector.

Southern Preposterous Lie Center sez I'm a "divisive propagandist" who's "doing real damage to our country."

3 Alabama men among 30 profiled by Southern Poverty Law Center as key leaders in radical groups

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama -- Three Alabama men are among 30 people from around the nation profiled in a report released Wednesday by the Southern Poverty Law Center on what the group characterizes as key leaders of radical right groups.

"Their divisive propaganda, which is being embraced by opportunistic politicians and pundits and exploited for partisan gain, is doing real damage to our country," Mark Potok, senior fellow at the Montgomery-based center and editor of the new report, said in a prepared statement. . .

The Alabama men highlighted in the report are Michael Vanderboegh of Pinson, described by the report as a "Patriot leader;" Michael Hill of Killen, with League of the South, described as a neo-Confederate group; and Timothy Turner of Ozark, described as being with the Sovereign Citizens Movement. . .

Vanderboegh disputed the center's characterization of him. "The so-called 'Patriot Movement' is a false construction of the SPLC to be able to conflate large numbers of dissimilar and even opposing philosophies for the purposes of creating fundraising bogeymen to scare their donors," he wrote in an email. He described himself as a long-time leader of the constitutional militia movement.

Conducting a training class in communications and sensors, getting ready to work the border, 2005.

The center's profile on Vanderboegh states he dislikes immigrants. "I worked the border in October 2005 in support of the Minutemen," Vanderboegh wrote. "I do not 'dislike' immigrants nor have I ever written such ... I did oppose the Bush administration's failure to enforce the immigration laws of this country as a direct threat to the rule of law."

The profile on him states that in 2010, after Congress passed President Obama's health care reform bill, Vanderboegh used his Sipsey Street Irregulars blog to urge opponents to throw bricks through the windows of Democratic offices nationwide. Bricks were thrown through several offices around the nation.

"Specifically I called for the breaking of local Democrat Party headquarters windows," Vanderboegh wrote. "Political vandalism to make a point is a fine old American tradition, going back to original Sons of Liberty."

The report also notes the arrests in November of four men, ranging in age from their 50s to 70s, with a Georgia militia charged with allegedly planning attacks against government officials and buildings. The planned attacks were inspired, in part, by an online novel published by Vanderboegh, according to news reports and the center's report.

"Blaming me for the 'Georgia Geriatric Militia' is like blaming Tom Clancy for September 11," Vanderboegh said.

One professor who studied and wrote a book on the growth of militia groups in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing questioned the tone of the center's report.

"Dispassionate unbiased analysis it is not," said Robert Churchill, associate professor of history at the University of Hartford, Conn., who wrote "To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant's Face: Libertarian Political Violence and the Origins of the Militia Movement."

Churchill wrote in an email that he believes the center takes a few cheap shots at Vanderboegh, including the attempted link to the Georgia militia case and questioning Vanderboegh's claims that he was a moderate who denounced neo-Nazis. "Vanderboegh was in fact a very important anti-racist voice within the militia movement in the 1990s," Churchill wrote.

Here's some quotes responding to the SPLC screed that didn't make it into the paper:

As to the "posturing as a civic improver by leading attacks on a botched gun investigation," they are referring to the fact that I broke the "Fast and Furious" scandal story in December, 2010, verifying whistleblower accounts through my own sources within the ATF. I, along with my fellow gun rights blogger David Codrea, was subsequently responsible for linking up whistleblowers like ATF agent John Dodson first with Senator Sessions' office and then with Senator Grassleys'. The SPLC, which has long had a symbiotic relationship with ATF (they defended ATF during the racist Good O' Boys Roundup scandal) is likely taking this opportunity to express their dislike of my criticism of their gravy train. (Ask SPLC how much they make from Federal law enforcement contracts providing "extremist training" to federal and state LE agencies. They will not tell you.)

SPLC: "In that role, he has been regularly consulted as an expert by Fox News, which hasn’t bothered to mention his background as a militia leader or instigator of criminal brick-throwing attacks."

My reply: In my year and a half of working the Fast and Furious scandal, I have been interviewed by William LaJuennesse of FOX exactly twice. If that constitutes "regular" it is a definition contrary to the one in Webster's. . .

SPLC: "That would be officials of the very same government, as it turns out, that sends Mike Vanderboegh, each and every month, a disability check for $1,300."

My reply: Accurate as far as it goes. The collectivists such as SPLC, MSNBC and others have made much of the fact that I am on SS disability for this princely sum. My doctor suggested I apply after I was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. It was immediately granted without reference to any lawyer. What really galls these professional liars for money is either (a) that I am getting some of the forty plus years that I paid into Social Security back while they understand that they'll never draw theirs, (b) more likely, they understand the ancient guerrilla warrior logistics tactic of living off the substance of the enemy.

My conclusion to the email: SPLC gets by with their years of lies, conflations and half-truths simply because you in the media never look under their skirts. They have been denounced by ex-employees (see Montgomery Advertiser series in the 1990s, "Marketing the Militias"); by activists on the left who despise them more than I do; by old civil rights foot soldiers who sneer that Dees is a "civil rights pimp" who started out defending Klansmen and then saw where the money was; by Dees ex-partner, the founder of Habitat for Humanity and by non-partisan, non-profit watchdog groups.

Yet they get by with ad hominem attacks such as the sneer just dissected because you in the press view them as "extremist experts." One might as well write a history of the Jews in Spain by relying solely upon the memoirs of Cardinal Francisco Jimenez, the Grand Inquisitor.

David Codrea: Grassley holds key to bypass balking on Holder contempt charges

"There is one other option, perhaps the best one, and it’s a course recommended consistently in this column: Reenact the law that expired in 1999 to allow for a truly independent counsel."

MAIG Coordinators Paid as City Employees, Saves Gun-Hater’s Money

Just in case you were wondering if you're paranoid. You're not.

Ho, hum. Another Inspector General report.

Big deal.

Did You Hear the One about U.S. Internment Camps?

Latest from J.M. Berger.

THE CRISIS OF LEGITIMACY: Boehner said to be blocking Issa committee vote on contempt. His defenders claim Democrat disinformation. If not, it will be time to take the fight to Boehner, the GOP leadership & even Romney.

Lapdog AP reporter Jordy Yager writes: Rep. Issa might not have the votes to push forward Holder contempt charge>

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) might not have the votes in his own committee to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress.

A number of Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee are wary of moving forward with Issa’s proposed measure, putting the powerful chairman in an awkward position as he attempts to build support for the move. . .

Two of the committee’s 23 Republicans have declined to support the measure at this point, while five other GOP panel members did not respond to repeated requests for comment over the last two weeks.

When compared with the 16 Republicans on the committee who have actively been speaking in favor of the measure, the silence, lack of outspoken support and desire by these eight GOP caucus members to avoid the issue could be a problem for Issa.

Republican leadership has been hesitant and reluctant to voice its support for Issa’s move, possibly owing to the chairman’s inability to guarantee the measure’s passage in his own committee. . .

Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) plans to hold off making a decision on whether he will support the measure until Issa puts forward a final version of the resolution and formally introduces it, his office told The Hill. Rep. Frank Guinta’s (R-N.H.) office said the lawmaker declined to comment on whether he supports Issa’s measure.

Reps. Todd Platts (R-Pa.), Mike Turner (R-Ohio), Connie Mack (R-Fla.), Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) and Patrick Meehan (R-Pa.) have not responded to repeated requests for comment over the past two weeks.

Main Justice's version.

I received this little bit of news this morning while I was in the ER yet again. I made some calls from there. What I learned made me livid. One source I trust implicitly says that the story is correct.

"They (the GOP leadership) don't think that they will suffer for failure to follow through. They're scared of Holder's race card. . . they're scared of Trayvon. They think if they let Issa fail, that it will only be a story in the blogosphere for a day . . . that they can weather it. . . . They exert pressure behind the scenes on those weak-kneed bastards (GOP congressmen), promise them shit and when the vote happens it will only look like Issa's case was weak. . . It will be his fault, not theirs."

Another source close to the committee claims that the entire story is disinformation planted by the White House "to get the GOP fighting each other and blame Boehner for it." I explained to several people I talked to just how this story would play on the street among people who are already upset at the glacially slow pace.

"Don't they understand that this is the final crisis of their own legitimacy?" I fairly screamed into the phone at one. "Don't they understand how poorly some are going to react?" I added, "You know there's a whole lot of folks who have lost all faith in the system, people who don't listen to me about restraint and letting the system work. Doesn't Boehner understand that this is his last f--king chance to prove his oath means anything to him before people start acting on that? Does he really think this will have no consequences for him?"

I sent word that I wanted to hear from someone at the Committee directly, to give them the opportunity to convince me that despite the evidence this really was disinformation. It is evening. I haven't heard a word.

I promised this to one source and told him to spread it around: "If I have to put my sorry, cancer ridden, half-dead ass on the line and break the sedition laws of the United States by calling for targeted civil disobedience, vandalism and monkey wrenching on these GOP traitors to their oaths, then I will do it. . . What have I got to lose? If Boehner wishes us to believe that he is NOT dragging his feet then let him issue a press release tomorrow denying the AP story." I pointed out that I have a certain history of pushing the sedition laws and that the press -- who they seem entirely eager to avoid -- could not fail to cover the first broken window, or the second or third. Rachel Madcow would be all over the story. Let them contemplate that and its effect on the Romney campaign.

The sources defending Boehner who claim disinformation begged for me to wait until the Tuesday after Memorial Day when Holder's deadline is up. In the meantime, anybody who lives in the congressional districts of these weak sisters that Boehner seems to pressuring needs to get hold of them by email, fax, phone or shouting in his face and tell them what you think of their being Obama's patsies.

I am sending this out on my own email list. I urge all of you to do the same. This is the final crisis of the search for justice in the Gunwalker scandal. If they get away with this, we have lost. I will have more as events unfold.

Talk, talk, talk. Boner and Company send Holder a letter (snooze).

Letter here:

So what? Spot on comment here: ‘Too Little, Too Late’ From GOP Leaders on ‘Fast and Furious’

Texas lawmakers play hardball over Fast & Furious

Boehner asks Obama, pretty please, to get Holder off the dime. As if that's going to work.

LATER: Another, more detailed, account.

Meanwhile, the GOP does nothing except fund raise using the issue and makes the Dems points for them.

LATER: Boehner continues to hide.

Obama "Memorializing" Brian Terry in the dark.

David Codrea writes Obama memorials bury Fast and Furious law enforcement deaths

John Richardson: A Lack Of Class

David Codrea: Issa invites questions while staffers ignore them.

Not for the first time.

Praxis Questions: Length of pull on a bolt action rifle & how truly important is it to be able to manipulate the bolt while the rifle is seated in your shoulder?

A reader asks, and although I have my opinions, I'm wondering what you readers have to say. Remember to look at it from two points of view, from the big shooter forced to deal with a weapon with too short length of pull and a small statured shooter using a weapon with too long a length of pull.

Still stalling.

DOJ: Issa’s Move To Hold AG In Contempt ‘Unprecedented’

"The first guy who uses a Second Amendment weapon to bring a drone down that's been hovering over his house is going to be a folk hero in this country."

Krauthammer On Drones Flying In US: "Stop It Here, Stop It Now"