by David E. Petzal

As 2011 lurches into history like a smelly old wino, I take MAC in hand to review some of the lows of the year.

You Can’t Get it Right All the Time: In the 1960s the Department of Defense decided that all future combat was going to take place at 300 meters or less and, now that the distance has increased again to 500 meters and over, is scrambling to come up with guns and ammunition that can hack it at long range. We, of course, are paying for all this.

What’s next? Tac Nukes? Some weeks ago, Mayor for Life Bloomberg referred to the New York City Police as “my private army.” People assumed he was joking. I don’t. NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly has coyly announced that the NYPD has the technology to shoot down airplanes, presumably to avoid a repeat of 9/11. Commissioner Kelly did not say what kind of armament was involved. It could be missiles, or it could be 30mm cannon on Mayor Bloomberg’s private jet. The NYPD averages one hit per 72 rounds expended with its handguns, so the mind reels at the havoc it can wreak with this kind of firepower.

by Phil Bourjaily

A while back we talked about relative recoil of the .44 magnum and the S&W .500. Here’s a video on the topic from none other than “FPS Russia,” who has become a viral hit due to his ability to procure all kinds of weaponry (dragon’s breath, mortars, the AA12 shotgun, an APC with a M2 on it) and shoot things while keeping up a foulmouthed running commentary in a fake Russian accent.

At any rate, in this video FPS Russia doesn’t swear much, and the comparison here between the .44 and the .500 is instructive, even though you can’t actually feel the recoil. You can tell that the .500 is louder, and that a bigger fireball comes out of its muzzle.

by David E. Petzal

It is my duty to inform you that my post of September 1, “Party Poppers for Libya,” contained not a single word of truth. It was political satire, nothing more. A number of you astutely pointed out that it was only a single click off reality, despite its preposterous premise, and you spoke better than you knew.

I was provoked to write it by a White House press conference at which Jay Carney, President Obama’s Press Secretary (a nice young man, but badly out of his depth, sort of like his boss) opined that bombing--the NATO airstrikes on Quadaffi’s hired goons--did not constitute war. This was something straight out of Catch-22. And rather than giving him a chorus of “BUUUUUUULS**T!”, the gutless toads of the Washington press corps simply went on to the next round of inanity. If rocketing and bombing is not war, it’ll do till the war comes along. I invite Mr. Carney to place himself in the middle of an air strike and see if his opinion is not changed.

by David E. Petzal

One of the reasons I enjoy going through old copies of Field & Stream is that they bring back to life little bits of history that would otherwise be forgotten. One of these is the fact that in 1939-1940, Great Britain begged American shooters and hunters for rifles—any kind of rifles. Until England won the Battle of Britain in the fall of 1940, it looked very likely that Adolf was going to send his merry men in feldgrau across the Channel, and His Majesty’s Home Guard—a sad joke in and of itself—was practically gunless, the British having already gone a long way down the road to self-disarmament.

That trend has continued over the past 70 years, and in the past week we have been treated to nightly tapes of widespread rioting, looting and, even in gunless England, killing.