thcragg
3.3K posts

thcragg
@thcragg
Writer and veteran fencer in Orlando. Books on Kindle - Mr. Grumble (spy parody of 60’s movies) - Sir Edwin Dunfrees (WWI historic action adventure)
Orlando, FL Katılım Haziran 2023
400 Takip Edilen212 Takipçiler

@histories_arch @Dr_TheHistories Except for those Italian six shooters which fired forever without reloading. Great article.
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Everyone knows what a six-shooter is.... The name is part of the mythology of the American West, woven into dime novels and wanted posters and a thousand Saturday morning westerns.
The cowboy draws his six-shooter. The outlaw empties his six-shooter. Six shots, six chambers, the whole cylinder loaded and ready.
Except that almost nobody actually carried it that way.
The Colt Single Action Army, the revolver that defined the era, had a design problem that every experienced user understood within about five minutes of owning one.
The hammer, when the gun was at rest, sat directly on top of whichever cartridge was positioned beneath it. There was no safety mechanism of any kind.
No firing pin block, no transfer bar, nothing between the hammer and the primer of the cartridge but gravity and good fortune.
If the gun was dropped, or knocked against a saddle horn, or bumped hard enough against anything at all, there was a real possibility it would fire. Not a theoretical possibility. A practical, documented, this-has-happened-to-people-you-know possibility.
The solution was simple and universally adopted. You loaded five rounds, positioned the empty chamber under the hammer, and went about your day. The gun held six.
You carried five. Everyone knew this. It was taught, passed on, drilled into anyone who spent serious time with the weapon. Load one, skip one, load four more. Hammer on the empty. The phrase for it was "five beans in the wheel."
This arrangement persisted not for months but for decades. The Colt Single Action Army was introduced in 1873 and the practice of carrying five rounds continued as standard until the gun was redesigned with a proper drop safety in the 1970s, nearly a hundred years later.
The revolvers that replaced it across that entire period had the same problem and the same solution. Five rounds in a six-shot gun was not a quirk of the frontier era. It was the correct and accepted method of carrying a single action revolver for the better part of a century.
Hollywood, naturally, never got this memo. The six-shooter of the movies is always fully loaded, always fires exactly as many times as the plot requires, and is reloaded from impossible angles at implausible speeds.
The real weapon required more care, more patience, and a slightly different relationship with arithmetic. The men who carried it daily understood that the sixth chamber was not for bullets. It was for the hammer to rest on without killing you.
The name stuck anyway. Six-shooter. It had a better ring to it than five-shooter, and the West was always better at legend than at accuracy.
#archaeohistories

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🚨 BREAKING: Sen. Bernie Moreno just went OFF on the Senate floor, demanding lawmakers be BANNED from leaving D.C. until DHS is fully reopened and funded
GOOD. This is exactly the kind of hardball the GOP should be playing. 🔥
“Take OUR paychecks. Stop us from flying home. Keep us HERE until this gets done.”
“If that means staying through Easter, then so be it. We should lose pay every single day until DHS is fully funded.”
“Forget leaving D.C. We shouldn’t even leave this chamber until we finish the job.” 🇺🇸 @berniemoreno
Should the Senate stay in D.C. until DHS is fully funded?
A. Yes, no one leaves
B. Yes, no pay too
C. No, negotiate normally
D. Unsure
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🇺🇸🎯Warthogs Unleashed: Top General Confirms A-10s Destroying Iranian Speed Boats:
Today, General Dan "Razin" Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, confirmed during a Pentagon press briefing that A-10 Warthog attack aircraft have been deployed to conduct strikes against Iranian targets along the nation's southern coast.
These rugged close air support platforms famous for their exceptional survivability, heavy armor plating, and devastating 30mm GAU-8 Avenger rotary cannonare actively engaging and neutralizing Iranian fast-attack boats in the Strait of Hormuz.
The A-10s have been integrated into joint operations from the outset of the campaign, with a recent focus on low-altitude, persistent loitering missions to hunt down naval assets and ground-based threats in support of broader efforts under Operation Epic Fury.
BRRRRT - what’s the one thing you love most about the A-10?
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How much longer will we pretend old designs can’t outlast the new ones? Case in point: A-10 Warthog
Satellite images just showed 24 A-10 Warthogs parked at a Jordanian airbase, right on Iran’s doorstep.
This jet was supposed to be retired years ago—too old, too slow for modern air wars.
But Iran doesn’t fight with fighter jets.
It fights with swarms of cheap Shahid drones, fast attack boats in the Strait of Hormuz, and proxy militias that hide in civilian areas.
Against those threats, the A-10 is a perfect predator.
They’ve fitted it with laser-guided rockets to swat drones out of the sky without wasting million-dollar missiles—some Warthogs already sport drone kill markings on the fuselage.
Its 30mm GAU-8 cannon turns small boats into scrap metal, and its ability to loiter for hours makes it a nightmare for anything moving on the surface.
In February 2026, A-10s were photographed circling U.S. mine-hunting ships, training for exactly this fight: low, slow, and devastating.
The bird isn’t dying.
It’s being reborn for the asymmetric wars of tomorrow.
What does it say about modern warfare when a 50-year-old plane is suddenly the best answer to today’s threats?
Follow for more daily mind-blowing American wins.
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