No word yet on whether or not the TSA will let you get on a plane with these 3D gun nails, but then again, it’s going to be pretty hard to load them assuming you have these on both hands, so maybe you’d be more of a threat to yourself than to other people.

Link Via Geekosystem

Man, Christmas seems to come and go faster each year! These ads harken back to a simpler time, a time when cowboys were all the rage, and gun ads were allowed to appeal to kids during the holidays.

It’s a nice bit of nostalgia, and a few of the pics in this gallery are definitely chuckle worthy. Just don’t shoot your eye out!

Link –via BoingBoing

The Scottsdale (Arizona) Gun Club invites you to have your picture taken with Santa Claus ..and his machine guns. Other firearms are available for your photo shoot, and you can even try out the machine guns! Link to story. Link to website. -via Arbroath

Artist Alan Sailer likes to fire air rifles into different objects in his garage, but unlike most shooting enthusiasts, he is able to make brilliant photos by using a laser that triggers the flash to go off at the perfect second. The resulting images are simply stunning.

Link

How do you make a Nerf gun fight into something special? Special effects, that’s how! -Thanks, Chris M!

Mental Floss has a great post featuring a variety of weird cameras, but my favorite has to be this weird gun camera. The trigger works just like one on a regular gun, which gives a whole new meaning to shooting wildlife.

Link

I’m not a fan of firearms, but apparently some creative paper artists are. According to the post, these are realistic copies of actual guns–one of them looks like the Nintendo light gun, but whatever. There’s obviously some skill and patience involved in recreating all those curves and detachable parts. I wonder how long it takes to design and assemble one of these? Check out the rest on Nuffy. Link

If you are going to build a “good” weapon you need to make sure that it effectively does what you want it to do; a gun that hits the enemy and a tank that protects your troops (also while hitting the enemy). However it seems through history there have been some pretty ill-conceived weapons. This includes something called the Bob Semple Tank which was built by looking at a picture of a tank.

Besides having the least-threatening name ever bestowed upon a tank, the Bob Semple barely qualified as one. It was little more than a farm tractor — and due to several design flaws, it was about as useful as one in a war zone. The designers based it on an American tractor tank, but the problem was that they had no blueprints, no building materials outside those found in a farm and no idea what the hell they were doing. They literally designed the Bob Semple by looking at a postcard of the original tank. By that logic, half of us should be able to reconstruct the Eiffel Tower.

Link

If you are going to kill people and blow things up, at least you can do it so the rest of the living can have a pollution free Earth. It seems the US military has been developing “green” ammunition for some time now.

In 2007, responding to reports from the field that current rounds weren’t deadly enough, the Army jump-started efforts to make a more lethal round that was also environmentally friendly.

Link

From the folks at Vice Magazine comes this mini documentary on the Pakistani Homemade Machine gun market. It gives an in depth look (with photos and video) of how arms are created, bought and sold in that part of the world.

The bulk of Pakistan’s homemade automatic weapons and explosive devices are forged, built and sold at Darra Adamkhel, a village located near Peshawar where main street is an open-air arms market.

Link

Neatoramanaut Senor Mysterioso (featured previously) did something neat that you would never have thought of in a million years. He crocheted an entire gun store! The pistols in the display case, the ammo boxes, the weapons hanging on the walls -all made of yarn! This was his Bachelor of Fine Arts thesis project. See details in his Flickr set for the installation. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user SenorMysterioso)

That’s the bad news. In the limited scope of the review, the primary positive effect assigned to guns is deterrence, and, more specifically, deterrence against violence. Although, “Results suggest that self-defense gun use may be the best method for preventing property loss,” this doesn’t count from a public health perspective. And that’s only the start of the problems; as the National Academies of Science noted in a report quoted by the author, “self-defense is an ambiguous term.” As Hemenway himself puts it, “Unlike deaths or woundings, where the definitions are clear and one needs to only count the bodies, what constitutes a self-defense gun use and whether it was successful may depend on who is telling the story.” If you have read this far, please mention Bananas in your comment below. We’re pretty sure 90% of the respondants to this story won’t even read it first.

Finally, on the third page of comments, someone mentioned bananas. Redditor metageeek took a screenshot of the comments. Things got even sillier after that, with some readers mentioning bananas used as weapons, and other commenters totally confused. How about you? Do you ever comment without reading an entire post? Link -via reddit

Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – via Afrojacks

If a bullet flies at 3000 fps, it will pass through a 24? (two-foot) barrel in 1/1500th of a second. If you have a useful barrel life of 3000 rounds, that would translate to just two seconds of actual bullet-in-barrel operating time.

Ah, but it’s not that simple. Your bullet starts at zero velocity and then accelerates as it passes through the bore, so the projectile’s average velocity is not the same as the 3000 fps muzzle velocity. So how long does a centerfire bullet (with 3000 fps MV) typically stay in the bore? The answer is about .002 seconds. This number was calculated by Varmint Al, who is a really smart engineer dude who worked at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, a government think tank that develops neutron bombs, fusion reactors and other simple stuff.[...]

Six seconds. That’s how long your barrel actually functions (in terms of bullet-in-barrel shot time) before it “goes south.” Yes, we know some barrels last longer than 3000 rounds. On the other hand, plenty of .243 Win and 6.5-284 barrels lose accuracy in 1500 rounds or less. If your barrel loses accuracy at the 1500-round mark, then it only worked for three seconds! Of course, if you are shooting a “long-lived” .308 Win that goes 5000 rounds before losing accuracy, then you get a whopping TEN seconds of barrel life. Anyway you look at it, a rifle barrel has very little longevity, when you consider actual firing time.

Link via Say Uncle | Photo by Flickr user Zach Petersen used under Creative Commons license

Filmmaker and professional gamer Freddie Wong produced this fantasy sequence starring himself and Shenae Grimes. It’s violent, but there’s an even bloodier version available. -via b3ta

A new public service announcement for Amber Watch Alert shows mother-ish types going all John Rambo with automatic weapons -in slow motion, no less.

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by jaimec.

(Image by ngbiblog)

Recycling is a potent concept. Many regard it as simply the repurposing of objects in order to prevent waste, but in the right hands, it can be a process that charts all sorts of powerful aesthetic and cultural shifts. The “Throne of Weapons” and “Tree of Life” are two pieces of “recycling” that do just this. Made from decommissioned AK47s and other instruments of death from the Mozambique civil war, they take the physical remains of war and transform them into the collective hopes of a nation traumatized by violence and cruelty.

(Image via wikimedia, by drow male)

Both objects are the product of the imaginatively entitled “Transforming Arms into Tools” project. But despite its rather functional name, the scheme, set up in 1995 by the Christian Council of Mozambique, is consistently creating some of the most the most poignant “recycled” art in recent memory. These guns began life in the poisonous smelting factories of Russia, Eastern Europe, Korea or Portugal, before being put to bloody use in the dense jungles of Mozambique’s coastal lowlands. Now, under the initiative of Bishop Dinis Sengulane, they are crafted into icons that carry a nation’s hopes for peace.

(Image by hjallig)

Under the guidance of the Christian Council, teams from the project (known as Transformação de Armas em Enxadas, or TAE) cut up the guns and re-mould them into sculptures: an elaborate, if disturbing chair, and a tree dedicated to ‘life’. The chair alone is composed of guns that originated in seven different countries, pointing up the resolutely unresolved issue of international arms trade. The resulting artworks are not only hauntingly beautiful for the casual observer, but also draw together many intersecting currents for the people of Mozambique.

(Image by James M Thorne)

In one sense, we might think of them as cathartic: they perform a cleansing or purging movement, ridding us of painful emotional excess, not unlike the original intentions of Greek Tragedy. They give outer form to Mozambique’ s collective surplus of sorrow, left to stew long after the firing stopped, a form of relief that prevents such pain from eating its people up, or worse still, erupting into further violence. Conversely, they also enable us as viewers to experience their pain in a controlled form, fostering a sense of profound empathy for the victims of such a tragic conflict, perhaps an implicit form of advice that we should never let this happen again.

(Image by hdptcar)

At another level, they are also signs of peace that point the way to happier times. Just as these sculptures recycle guns that brought misery into art that brings pleasure, so they recycle the memories of those who perished, into a new feeling of humanity, brotherhood and charity. They serve as reminders of what came to pass, and of why we should strive to avoid human conflict in the future. In this sense they embody a change, and one for the good, that we hope is sweeping through the villages of Mozambique and other war-torn countries the world over.

(Image by rvacpinta)

The pieces were acquired by the British Museum in 2005 and spent the next few years touring the major cities of Britain, garnering huge applause. Now on display in the museum, they are definitely worth a trip to London we think; these moving sculptures may be recycled monuments to death, but crucially, also to life and a peaceful future.

Thanks to author Chris Ingham Brooke of Environmental Graffiti.

Howdy Neatoramanauts! I’m happy to say that we’ve made some new friends at The Toilet Paper, a daily email magazine filled with neat facts and a lot of humor. TTP, as they like to be called, is a lot like Neatorama – but in an email form. They’re also much more organized and generous (as in sponsoring a free T-shirt contest. More on that later.)

Because you’re reading this blog, you’re already likely to a) be good at this Interweb thing and b) like fun facts and random neat things. The Toilet Paper tackles a different topic every day – like current events and such – and break each topic into interesting stats, quotes, word definition, and lists (didn’t I tell you they’re organized?)

Take, for example, the big topic of last week: Starbucks and Guns

The Toilet Paper emails are quick and fun reads (don’t you like the example above? Not convinced? They have an archive going back all the way to January 2009. Their blog ain’t too shabby either) – we betcha that by the second day you’ll start looking forward to reading your emails for the daily TTPs. We wouldn’t suggest them if we weren’t already hooked.

Because they’re such awesome people, The Toilet Paper is sponsoring what is probably the easiest contest we ever had on Neatorama: 6 lucky winners, selected from new sign ups for the daily emails, will each get 3 free T-shirts of their choice from the Neatorama Shop.

To enter this neat contest, sign up for The Toilet Paper here: Link. Good luck and happy readings!

Perhaps a dozen of these specialized guns were made in Nazi Germany. They fired either a .32 caliber or .22 rimfire cartridge and had a four-round magazine. At the link, you’ll find a copy of a short article from a 1954 issue of American Rifleman about two such guns that had come into the possession of the then-Governor of Alabama.

Link via Hell in a Handbasket | Photo: James R. Rummel

When I die and become Saint Neatorama, I’d like sculptor Al Farrow to make me a reliquary to treasure one of my body parts. Presumably my blogging pinkie. Al has made some 40 unusual reliquaries, mausoleums and monuments out of guns and ammo parts, dedicated to preserving the body parts of fictional saints.

Link – as suggested by Minnesotastan in this Neatorama post by John Farrier (yes, I do read the comments

I’m rethinking the Max Brooks-endorsed M1 carbine as my anti-zombie weapon of choice. .30 carbine ammo is rather unusual, and in the event of a Stage 4 zombie apocalypse, I wouldn’t want to be scrounging around for it in vain.

Neatorama readers, what is your preferred anti-zombie weapon?

Via Confederate Yankee

A few things came to my mind when I saw this clip.
1) Why have a loaded gun in plain site at the office?
2) Who woud be stupid enough to go straight to the trigger and pull it?
3) Whas there anyone in front of the desk?

Link: YouTube