On-site report: It’s cold outside.

Editorial comment: I don’t like it.

Watch for updates as the situation develops.



Our commenter Aitchmark sent me a link to this YouTube video on the Engadget site.

The 24-barrel, tripod-mountable monster you see above, lovingly known as the Disintegrator, was rather amazingly hand-carved and assembled by Anthony Smith of the UK, who spent four months on the ambitious build. Unlike your dinky little six-shooter, this model boasts a 288-band capacity and 40-round-per-second firing capability…

You’ll note that this device was created in the United Kingdom, where gun ownership is illegal.

This, my friends is what happens when you deny men real weapons.

Actually, it puts me in mind of the days when I was an avid shooter of cap-and-ball revolvers. It took what seemed like twenty minutes to load the things (actually about five, but I was eager). Then you got to shoot for about thirty seconds. Then you had to spend an hour cleaning the things (and you’d better do a good job, because that powder residue is mostly salt).

But it’s what a man’s gotta do.

In my own part of the world (known in the reference books as the Walker Sphere of Influence) we have this story, in which a man took the utterly reasonable and sober-minded action of blowing up his old pickup truck by loading it with explosives and shooting at it from a distance with a high-powered rifle. Note that he exercised role-model-level prudence in not trying to light a fuse with a match and run away, like Wile E. Coyote. He did the job at a prudent remove. And yet people are criticizing him.

(I don’t know the guy, but the story takes place in the county where I grew up. Makes me proud, it does.)

Listen, it’s a man’s testosteronic birthright to blow things into the stratosphere and send objects hurtling at high rates of speed toward distant targets. What shopping is to women, explosions are to guys.

And if you don’t understand that, you’re a woman.