The tactical needs of Americans continue to boggle my mind. Given the way many of us buy tactical gear, you’d get the impression that we are in a constant state of being attacked.
This picture has been making the rounds after the annual NRA meeting in Texas.
My suspicion is that some garbage human thought this was a funny way to give cops more excuses to shoot black people. “Look, he had a gun-phone!” Bam BamBamBam BAM BAM BAM BOOM BAM RATATATATATATAT BAM BAM BAM (pause to reload) BAM. “Oh, it was a phone.”
It makes me wish I owned an ammunition company; I’d make and brand some “Cop Killa” bullets with a thin blue line down the side of the copper. Troll me, troll you.
America is a really messed up place.
Is it just me or is that smartphone gun boring and ugly? Vintage hidden guns were a lot more interesting, not to mention also prettier. I have seen vintage guns disguised as all sorts of everyday items. For example, here https://www.fleamarketinsiders.com/spy-guns/ are a few interesting ones. My favorites are the pen gun and the crucifix gun.
Which part of this phone do you hold to your head while making a call?
Ieva that is a fascinating link, thank you. The cross gun seemed very appropriate for some of today’s fundamentalists.
Ieva Skrebele@#1:
Is it just me or is that smartphone gun boring and ugly?
It’s stupid, pointless, has terrible ergonomics, is probably shit to shoot, boring and ugly.
chigau@#2:
Which part of this phone do you hold to your head while making a call?
“press against forehead”
At least they didn’t think to make the triggering mechanism a phone call. Ring-BAM.
The logical conclusion to this trend would be the adoption of suicide clothing. Not your typical home-made explosive vest but regular clothing with some explosives and a dead-man’s switch discreetly sown in. A casual suit, for instance, that detonates should the wearer expire, as might happen in a mugging gone awry or in a car crash. (That’ll teach someone not to tailgate) It’s also the next step to take against school shootings in a country which regards bullet-proof inserts for bags or transparent school bags as a reasonable response. “At least they’ll only get one, give or take some collateral damage!”
Police might have to switch to scoped rifles, however, handcuff the suspect to something solid and shoot them from afar. The “I felt threatened” defence would probably still work, so no worries there. It just means a little more work for the Good Cop.
P.S.: I wonder how many proud owners of concealed weaponry from Ieva’s posted collection shot themselves. Probably most worrying was the “walking stick”, which fortunately didn’t turn out to be one.
I like the distracted alchemist’s gun from Ieva’s link.
komarov@#6:
The logical conclusion to this trend would be the adoption of suicide clothing.
Deterrent! Wasn’t there a character in a Neal Stephenson story who had an H-bomb rigged to go off if his heart stopped? “You wouldn’t want to upset me.”
Brings a whole new meaning to your phone accidentally going off during a meeting…
Dunno, but John Crichton pulled that trick with remarkable aplomb in Farscape.
Also, I know two people called Max, and this item would not conceal either of them. False advertising!
komarov @#6
Yeah, so do I. Looking at some of the vintage miniature guns makes me wonder about their safety, accuracy, ergonomics, etc. problems. But, hey, at least they were creative and pretty, which is certainly not the case with that smartphone gun.
I don’t know about the physics of miniature guns. It seems to me that springs, recoil, propellants do not scale down.
Anatomy is not my strong point, but it looks that if you make a phone call on this phone-gun, the barrel of the gun is pointing straight through the artery between your shoulder and neck (it has a name, I just don’t know it), and pointing towards your heart. Also, the trigger is suspiciously close to where the ‘accept call’ button would be on most smartphones.
“It makes me wish I owned an ammunition company…”
I like Chris Rock’s solution of making bullets cost $500 each…
Carotid
Marcus@#8 Yup, Snowcrash. He had the bomb build into the sidecar of his bike IIRC.
In Prague Castle’s Golden Lane there’s a museum with a variety of weapons with tactical guns embedded into them for some reason.
A few of my photos:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/EoJiggs79tD4BHhH8
Not entirely sure how practical any of these actually were.
Indeed, there were multiple attempts at making shields with embedded guns, Henry VIII had a bunch made as well:
http://art.thewalters.org/detail/29199/gun-shield/
Spoiler: no, they weren’t particular practical. Sure were tactical though!
Great. Now the cops have an excuse to shoot anybody with a cellphone.
In a novel by Cixin Liu, a character rigs a deadman’s switch to a series of orbital megabombs. Without going into too much detail, the end goal was to deter an alien civilisation from invading.
The scaling was an interesting question, especially since scaling can sometimes be a bit counterintuitive. From a quick look:
Spring energy depends on the square of the distance. If you halve the length the energy stored in the spring is reduced to a quarter. Beside the issue of building reliable springs on small scales you might run into problems if your spring can’t produce enough force to actually operate the mechanism inside the gun.
The rounds are a bit trickier. The bullet itself scales linearly: Half the size, half the mass and hence half the energy on impact. That’s not great but often the best you can hope for when rescaling things. I’m not sure about the propellant, though. I think it’s the same again: Half the volume yields the same kinetic energy but since the bullet mass has been halved that should result in the same projectile speed. I’m probably wrong about this. I always struggled with energy calculations for some reason and really should be doing other things right now (I just don’t want to).
—
The supposed “walking stick” made me cringe the most. With a big trigger just begging to be pressed while leaning on it you could easily have shot yourself in the foot or blown it off when the thing inevitably blows up due to a muzzle blocked by a pavement stone. But since it’s actually a hunting crop, I guess the worst thing that could happen is that you shoot your hunting partners, your dog or the horse you’re sitting on. No issue there at all…
Ieva #1: Wow. I covet that miniature Luger.
komarov:
In the Ecotopia novel (in which the Pacific Northwest and Northern California secede from the United States to form a “ecological “utopia””) that is how they guarantee their independence. A few bombs placed in key locations in the remaining United States.
So is this why Star Trek phasers look like TV remotes?
No Picatinny rails? Feh. 0/10 Tacticalness; would not operate with! :P
“Wasn’t there a character in a Neal Stephenson story who had an H-bomb rigged to go off if his heart stopped?”
Raven, from Snow Crash. He also knew how to flake plate glass into a weapon that was invisible to metal detectors and x-ray machines yet sharp enough to cut through kevlar vests.
“The bullet itself scales linearly: Half the size, half the mass and hence half the energy on impact. That’s not great but often the best you can hope for when rescaling things. I’m not sure about the propellant, though. I think it’s the same again: Half the volume yields the same kinetic energy but since the bullet mass has been halved that should result in the same projectile speed.”
Not quite; the bullet is halved in all three dimensions, and thus only has 1/8 the original volume and mass. Likewise with the propellant: if you simply scale down the cartridge, you get 1/8 the propellant and therefore 1/8 the energy. This will get you the same muzzle velocity as the original, assuming the same efficiency as the original. I know just enough about internal ballistics to avoid making any predictions here.
The bullet will also fall afoul of the square/cube law: while its mass is reduced to 1/8 the original, the frontal area is only reduced to 1/4. This will result in greater velocity loss in flight and reduced penetration
Cell phone guns have been floating around for a while now. The ones I’ve seen photos of look like a normal cell phone, unlike this thing, but have one or more hidden barrels that fire a small caliber round like .22 LR.
The gun in the photo reminds me of the ARES FMG. It was a folding submachine gun developed in the ’80s by an employee of the US arms ccompany ARES. It folded into a rectangle that could be stuffed in a large pants or jacket pocket. Supposedly the idea was that it would be a “businessman’s personal defense weapon,” although the restrictions on automatic weapons already in place in the US at the time make that a questionable concept. A guy named Dave Boatman copied the idea, but designed his so at first glance it would look like a portable radio. A Russian firm actually put their own take on the design into production as the PP90, but apparently it proved not particularly useful.
In Marvel Comics the Avengers fought an industrialist named Jason Beere in one issue. It turned out Beere had a neutron bomb that could supposedly kill all life on Earth attached to his heart. When his heart stopped the bomb would go off. So after he was defeated Tony Stark put him in cryogenic suspension in his factory on Long Island, one of his old Iron Man chest plates ensuring Beere’s heart would keep beating.
That looks like CG. That could well mean no one is buying it because there’s no product.
I have my own ironic tactical gear idea. Feel free to steal it if you like. I don’t mind, I’ll never use it. You take some bullets and put some plastic chess bits around it to disguise it. The board you sell with it has a concealed compartment with a small but otherwise normal gun. Using this now you can get tactical with your tactical while you’re waiting for an excuse to get really tactlessly tactical. You might even call the gun motif tacky.
The only caveat is if you ever did this you need to do two things. First, make sure the bullets have no gunpowder and cannot go off. You don’t want to be partially responsible when some fruitloop turns it into an heirloom and lets their innocent grandkids play with the stuff until something goes boom. Second, I recommend using a bit too much glue to hold the bullets in. Because trolling.
So there’s lotsa folks who know intricate ways of destroying humans. Good to know.
Rescaling volumes as if they were lengths. A classic mistake, so of course I made it even though I should have known better. Thanks for the correction, Eric.
I did a quick search for cell phones made from meteorites, but came up empty.
“Rescaling volumes as if they were lengths. A classic mistake, so of course I made it even though I should have known better. Thanks for the correction, Eric.”
You’re quite welcome. I’ve made mistakes equally dumb in my engineering homework; it happens to literally everyone at times.
the area of a pizza with a radius of z
pi*z*z=a
….
ancient trope
no credit to me
@ 1 leva Skrebele
Is it just me or is that smartphone gun boring and ugly?
It is but people crazy enough to buy such a thing may not be artistically inclined.
@ enkidu
Great. Now the cops have an excuse to shoot anybody with a cellphone.
They needed one before?