Free Republic

“The ammunition problem isn’t new. It’s been a market factor for well over a year and is rooted in the extraordinarily high number of firearms that were sold over the past 18 months,” the trade lobby group for the firearms industry added. “Firearm sales skyrocketed starting in March 2020 and set an all-time high record that year, topping out at 21 million background checks for the sale of a gun. NSSF surveys revealed that 40 percent of those sales were for first-time gun buyers, an injection of over 8.4 million new owners. That pace hasn’t slowed, and through August of...

A “U.S. official” speaking without attribution told the news organization that the purpose of the communication was “to focus on managing risk between the two countries.” It was the first mil-to-mil conversation with China in the Biden administration. There is only one way for the U.S. to “manage risk” with a militant regime, and it does not involve hotline conversations.

In December 2019, Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post published an extraordinary compilation of documents that revealed American officials discussed the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan in private but gave often glowing reports in public. Some of the reports exposed the duplicity between what Obama said publicly but knew privately. Obama claimed he was on track in 2014 to bring the war to a “responsible end.” In fact, Whitlock wrote, “the war was nowhere near a conclusion, ‘responsible’ or otherwise.”

Now Biden is seeking to punish gun owners and at the same time chastise Russia by further banning the importation of firearms ammunition even as the country faces the greatest shortage of cartridges it has ever seen. “New and pending permit applications for the permanent importation of firearms and ammunition manufactured or located in Russia will be subject to a policy of denial,” the U.S. State Department announced last week. The start date for the “ban” would begin on September 7, 2021, while the sanctions are expected to be in place for a minimum of twelve months. The sanctions were...

To avenge some 3000 Americans killed on 9/11, Washington caused a hundred or two hundred times as many deaths. To respond to an assault on two American cities, the U.S. plunged two nations into years, even decades of war. In the end, there were more jihadists fighting allied regimes and terrorists at work targeting civilians than at the start. What kept America safe was not endless war, which struck one hornet’s nest after another, but targeted counter-terrorism efforts at home and abroad.

The holstered firearm was inside the purse Det. Brittney Hilton of the Bridge City Police Department was carrying when the accidental discharge occurred. “I picked up my bag, my keys were on top,” she said. “As I walked around my desk, my purse swings out and it shoots out the bottom of my bag.” She heard the sound, but it took a moment for Det. Hilton to realize what happened.

Now a 1945 Contributing Editor, Dr. Robert Farley is a Senior Lecturer at the Patterson School at the University of Kentucky. Dr. Farley is the author of Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force (University Press of Kentucky, 2014), the Battleship Book (Wildside, 2016), and Patents for Power: Intellectual Property Law and the Diffusion of Military Technology (University of Chicago, 2020). What if the United States had never invaded Afghanistan? The question is not as absurd as it sounds. Popular support for military retribution against Al Qaeda following the 9/11 attacks was high, but this retribution did...

Last week, the White House announced that it would stop approving new permits to import Russian-made firearms as well as ammunition. The ban, which is part of a new round of sanctions against the Russian government over its alleged poisoning and imprisoning of dissident Aleksey Navalny, is set to go into effect on Sept. 7, 2021. “Pursuant to the Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act of 1991 (the CBW Act), the United States will impose a second round of sanctions on the Russian Federation over its use of a ‘Novichok’ nerve agent in the August 2020 poisoning...

To that end, the AK-47 has been ideal for those who don’t adhere to “spit and polish” type drilling. Instead, the weapon was developed based on experiences gained when Russian soldiers – many of whom were conscripted to defend the motherland – fought for their very survival. It wasn’t uncommon for those conscripts to be deployed to the front line almost immediately, with little training and almost no instruction on weapons maintenance.

On Friday, the White House announced that it would stop approving new permits to import Russian-made firearms as well as ammunition. The ban, which is part of a new round of sanctions against the Russian government over its alleged poisoning and imprisoning of dissident Aleksey Navalny, is set to go into effect on Sept. 7, 2021.

Indeed, the Taliban captured essentially all the necessary ingredients to fully equip both an army and an air force, spanning the gamut from 600,000 rifles and machine guns; 76,000 vehicles, such as high-mobility multipurpose wheeled vehicles, armored trucks, and pickups; radios, night vision googles, and drones; and 208 helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft.

Even as the sales of firearms have begun to slow in recent months, according to the latest data U.S. gun sales in the first seven months of 2021 were 13 percent higher than over the same period last year – which also blew away all previous records. With some 25.1 million firearms sold between January 1 and July 31, it was the largest seven months of the year figure since sales were first recorded in 1998.

Last year Vista Outdoors paid $81.4 million for Remington’s ammo business, after the Remington Outdoor Company – the nation’s oldest firearms manufacturer – filed for bankruptcy. Part of the acquisition of the Remington brand included the 750,000 square foot of manufacturing space on 1,200 acres in Lonoke. The facility in Lonoke now employs a little more than 1,000 people, and has been looking to even hire hundreds more. To keep the lines running, the plant has implemented a social-distancing protocol, which includes staggered break times to reduce crowd size. Additionally, a full-time nurse is at the site to ensure that...

The rapid Taliban advance stranded several thousand Americans in Kabul and across Afghanistan. The US Embassy in Kabul has urged Americans first to shelter in place and then to make their way to the airport for evacuation. It warned, however, that it could not guarantee the safety of the routes to the airport. That may be sage advice: The Taliban have shut off access to the airport. Bold Afghans now share videos via social media of Taliban thugs using whips and pipes to beat men, women, and children who try to go to the airport. Administration officials like National Security...

While US support for the ANA has declined over the past year, the primary issues involved distribution rather than a lack of abundance. The problem of corruption among the Afghan elite turned out to be a bigger problem than a simple siphoning away of vast stores of wealth; it cut at the very sinew of the national government, preventing Kabul from mobilizing military force at a time of critical need. Nor was this purely an Afghan problem; US contractors played a crucial role in facilitating the corruption across the Kabul government. Armies fight for any number of reasons, from the...

Over the past five years, the Pentagon had reduced the American presence to under 10,000 troops. The presence was a deterrent and led to few American casualties. Indeed, over that period, far fewer Americans have died in Afghanistan than residents of Baltimore have died in automobile accidents. Past efforts to nation-building were an expensive and misguided mistake, but not the American military presence which had evolved into a mission set not dissimilar from what the Pentagon maintains in Korea.

Remember when certain politicians found out that just blaming President George W. Bush for 9/11 and believing Michael Moore’s documentary didn’t work so well after the September 11 commission started calling witnesses and showing there was plenty of blame to go around for both Republicans and Democrats? Likewise, the Biden team will discover that truth finds a way, and a cover-up won’t cut it. Biden’s speech was a categorical disaster. His remarks were the equivalent of President Reagan claiming that Iran-Contra never happened. Of course, Reagan didn’t do that. He took responsibility. He fired people. He tried to be as...

The Taliban have captured Kabul and the twentieth anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks will coincide with their triumphant return to power in Afghanistan. Blame for a defeat in a conflict waged over two decades can be assigned to a multitude of decision-makers; whether they will be held accountable is a separate story. When this war ends, the real fighting will come to the United States — one side will assert America should have withdrawn years ago and one side will argue America’s withdrawal snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China and The Great U.S.-China Tech War. Follow him on Twitter @GordonGChang. Chang is also a Contributing Editor to 1945. The costs in blood of such a move would be high. Richard Fisher of the Northern Virginia-based International Assessment and Strategy Center told 1945 that China could lose about 50,000 troops, sailors, and pilots even if it were able to both achieve complete surprise in mobilizing thousands of barges, ships, and planes and prevent others from coming to Taiwan’s rescue. “Should China fail to gain complete surprise and the...

For the United States, however, it represents not only a military failure but also an intelligence one. Not only did the Central Intelligence Agency and other US intelligence agencies wildly underestimate the speed of the Taliban advance, but they also appear to have been blind to the extent of political dealings the Taliban had made as the withdrawal loomed and the military prepositioning the Taliban achieved to begin a near-simultaneous assault on provincial capitals. They appear to have missed the fact that Taliban shadow governors were already in place, alongside their staff, to take over provincial functions.