50 Caliber Quotes

I'll sit on him,' Otis says and laughs like it's the funniest thing in the world. He twirls a small ball of fire in one hand and a Desert Eagle .50 Caliber in the other. If Seven didn't know him, he'd probably be running away as fast as he could. It's a big gun.

The B-29 itself was an awesome weapon, capable of nearly twice the performance of the time-tested B-17 being used in Europe. Built by Boeing, the silver-painted four-engine aircraft was 99 feet long, 27 feet 9 inches high, with a wing span of slightly over 141 feet. Its armament included twelve 50-caliber machine guns and a 20-millimeter cannon in the tail. The B-29 could operate at 38,000 feet and cruise at over 350 miles per hour. It could fly 3,500 miles with four tons of bombs.

They came to a destroyed cabin and he pulled up and then went inside. Broken cups and pieces of dress material torn on a nail. A doll’s body without a head. He dug a .50-caliber bullet out of the wall with his knife and then carefully placed it on the windowsill as if for a memento. Here were memories, loves, deep heartstring notes like the place where he had been raised in Georgia. Here had been people whose dearest memories were the sound of a dipper dropped in the water bucket after taking a drink and the click of it as it hit bottom. The quiet of evening. The shade of the Devil’s trumpet vine over a window, scattered shadows gently hypnotic. The smell of a new calf, a long bar of sun falling into the back door over worn planks and every knot outlined. The familiar path to the barn walked for years by one’s father, grandfather, uncles, the way they called out, Horses, horses. How they swung the bucket by the handle as they went at an easy walk down the path between the trees, between here and there, between babyhood and adulthood, between innocence and death, that worn path and the lifting of the heart as the horses called out to you, how you knew each by the sound of its voice in the long cool evening after a day of hard work. Your heart melted sweetly, it slowed, lost its edges. Horses, horses. All gone in the burning.

The pyre was a ditch 50 yards long, six yards wide and three yards deep, a welter of burning bodies. SS soldiers, stationed at five-yard intervals along the pathway side of the ditch, awaited their victims. They were holding small caliber arms—six millimeters—used in the KZ for administering a bullet in the back of the neck. At the end of the pathway two Sonderkommando men seized the victims by the arms and dragged them for 15 or 20 yards into position before the SS. Their cries of terror covered the sound of the shots. A shot, then, immediately afterwards, even before he was dead, the victim was hurled into the flames.

Clutching a map and a field phone, Second Lieutenant Murphy leaped onto a burning tank destroyer and for an hour repulsed the enemy with a .50-caliber machine gun while calling in artillery salvos. He “killed them in the draws, in the meadows, in the woods,” a sergeant reported; the dead included a dozen Germans “huddled like partridges” in a nearby ditch. “Things seemed to slow down for me,” Murphy later said. “Things became very clarified.” De Lattre described the action as “the bravest thing man had ever done in battle,” but Murphy reflected that “there is no exhilaration at being alive.” He would receive the Medal of Honor. At last an Allied preponderance began to crush the pocket.

The world recoiled in horror in 2012 when 20 Connecticut schoolchildren and six adults were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School. . . . The weapon was a Bushmaster AR-15 semiautomatic rifle adapted from its original role as a battlefield weapon. The AR-15, which is designed to inflict maximum casualties with rapid bursts, should never have been available for purchase by civilians (emphasis added).1 —New York Times editorial, March 4, 2016 Assault weapons were banned for 10 years until Congress, in bipartisan obeisance to the gun lobby, let the law lapse in 2004. As a result, gun manufacturers have been allowed to sell all manner of war weaponry to civilians, including the super destructive .50-caliber sniper rifle. . . .(emphasis added)2 —New York Times editorial, December 11, 2015 [James Holmes the Aurora, Colorado Batman Movie Theater Shooter] also bought bulletproof vests and other tactical gear” (emphasis added).3 —New York Times, July 22, 2012 It is hard to debate guns if you don’t know much about the subject. But it is probably not too surprising that gun control advocates who live in New York City know very little about guns. Semi-automatic guns don’t fire “rapid bursts” of bullets. The New York Times might be fearful of .50-caliber sniper rifles, but these bolt-action .50-caliber rifles were never covered by the federal assault weapons ban. “Urban assault vests” may sound like they are bulletproof, but they are made of nylon. These are just a few of the many errors that the New York Times made.4 If it really believes that it has a strong case, it wouldn’t feel the need to constantly hype its claims. What distinguishes the New York Times is that it doesn’t bother running corrections for these errors.

Conservative estimates place the Persian casualties at some two thousand in less than twenty minutes, victims of the unforgiving geometry of the battlefield. Because of the limitations of anatomy, humans are evolved to act effectively only in the direction that evolution has pointed eyes and hands. The consequences of this simple fact for military tactics, from Caesar to Napoleon to Patton, are always the same: Troops are more vulnerable on either side than they are in their front, and terribly so in their rear. Virtually the entire library of tactics, as set down in classics from Sun Tzu to Liddell Hart, consists of ornate descriptions of the best way to apply force—clubs, arrows, or .50 caliber machine-gun bullets—from your front to your enemies’ flank. And, obedient to the Golden Rule of Soldiering, to do so to him before he does so to you.

KaBoom…. The roar of the cannon could be heard reverberating for miles around. The volatile sound boomed off the side of the hill that the school was on, and echoed across the Bagaduce River. I don’t know if the 3”/50 caliber gun, mounted as a decorative piece in front of Richardson Hall, was ever fired in anger, but now for the first time, as far as anyone could remember, it had been fired as a lark. The parking lot was a mess. Strewn across the melting snow were brightly colored panties, brassieres and other ladies’ garments. There were bras hanging from the electric wires and trees. It was obvious that the cannon had been fired as a prank since we could later hear the seniors talk about what they had had to do to get these items to start with. Although the chatter continued for some time, no one was ever identified as the culprit. In fact, the administration took the position that it never even happened since that way nobody had to lie or be held accountable. No logbook entries were ever made since it did not happen on either of the watches. Nothing was broken and the all-too-visible attire could have fallen from an airplane, for all anyone knew.

But it is probably not too surprising that gun control advocates who live in New York City know very little about guns. Semi-automatic guns don’t fire “rapid bursts” of bullets. The New York Times might be fearful of .50-caliber sniper rifles, but these bolt-action .50-caliber rifles were never covered by the federal assault weapons ban. “Urban assault vests” may sound like they are bulletproof, but they are made of nylon. These are just a few of the many errors that the New York Times made.

So Avalos—who had unzipped his pants and was now attending to some important personal business by squatting on top of an empty box of .50-caliber machine-gun ammo while continuing to work his radio—turned to a weapons system that was quite a bit more complicated than a single 120-mm mortar tube, but potentially far more devastating.

while the captain wrote that only that the .50 caliber machine guns got into action.

The Israel Defense Forces were routinely experiencing ambushes along Sidon Road, their main supply route, that resulted in high casualties. The Marines’ assigned position at BIA was adjacent to the MSR, which led to several ugly confrontations between the IDF and the Marines. Prior to our mission in Lebanon, the Marine-IDF relationship reflected a mutual respect between two warrior cultures. Many Israelis were U.S. citizens, had attended our service schools, and enjoyed a hard-earned reputation for winning decisive victories on the field of battle. The Marines were not alone in embracing the Israelis’ demonstrated courage and sacrifice in defense of their homeland. However, this relationship changed in Lebanon. The Israelis had a long-established policy of mercilessly responding to any attack against them, even minor ones. A sniper round from a village would cause the IDF to open up with .50-caliber machine gun fire from a convoy in many directions. This indiscriminate fire caused numerous civilian casualties, which

Pfc. Leonard J. Savitskie and his driver jumped into the car and swung its .50-caliber machine gun on the Krauts. An enemy mortar opened up behind the building and Savitskie, with a hand grenade, raced from his car behind the building under small-arms fire, lobbed the grenade and destroyed mortar and crew. The one-man task force then got into his armored

It’s a Barrett .50-caliber sniper rifle. It can hit a target at 2600 meters.” Max picked it up by a handle connected to the middle top of the rifle. “Holy Christ! That’s like a mile away.” Bill had already forgotten the secret passage and room, which was obviously where Max kept a lot of supplies. Now, he was completely focused on the monster gun. “A little jackrabbit hunting?” he joked. “Ha. Not unless you like your jackrabbits in little tiny clumps. This is for killing someone a long way away, before he or she becomes a threat to you. Before the Barrett, only death and taxes were sure things.” Max grinned at his quip but then continued with purpose.

As to the “super destructive .50-caliber sniper rifle,” not only does the New York Times editorial get the law wrong, but it somehow neglects to mention that these guns have never been used to murder anyone, let alone used in the mass shootings that the editorial was discussing.7 Part of the reason for them not being used in crimes is that these guns are extremely expensive (at least $4,000), big, and very heavy (nearly four feet long and weighing twenty-seven pounds).

I don’t remember how much time passed between my saying, “It’s nothing,” and someone in that other group of soldiers opening fire, but it was likely less than ten seconds. And I don’t know why they did it. But I know that .50 caliber machine-gun rounds tore into the small white car and tore into the old man and the old woman until the small white car stopped moving and the old man and the old woman were both dead. So it goes. They have been dying in my mind every day for the last fourteen years. I suspect they will do so until I’ve exhausted my own days on this earth. This is my moment trapped in amber. I am now thirty-eight years old. I live in a rented house in Pittsboro, North Carolina, with my wife, my two daughters, and my dog. I try to be kind. I try not to hurt people. And though I have just told you all the things I know with certainty about that day in September in Tal Afar, Iraq, when I was twenty-four, I’m still not sure what it means. I don’t know if my being there in that place and at that time makes me a bad person, but on most days I think it means I do not get to claim to be a good one.

Daniel Inouye, a nisei senior at McKinley High School long before he became a U.S. senator, furiously pedaled his bike to help at an aid station. He looked up into the sky and said to himself: “You dirty Japs!” On cruiser San Francisco an engineer came topside to join Ensign John Parrott. “I thought I’d come up and die with you.” Rear Admiral William Furlong stood on the bridge wing on Helena. A gunner called: “Excuse me, admiral, would you mind moving so we can shoot through here?” An officer playing golf went into a sand trap after his ball to find a soldier there shooting a rifle into the air. A bomb blew off a comer of a guardhouse. The inmates rushed out to help set up a .50 caliber machine gun. The phone rang in a Hickam hangar and someone reflexively picked it up. The caller wanted to know what all the noise was about. Kimmel stood in a window at his headquarters as a spent bullet tumbled in the window and hit him on the chest, smudging his whites. “It would have been better if it killed me,” he said. Down the hall Layton, Kimmel’s intelligence officer, caught sight of Admiral Bye who the day before had said the Japanese would never attack the United States. He was wearing a life jacket, his whites smeared with oil, staring wordlessly into the middle distance. “Soc” McMorris appeared: “Well, Layton, if it’s any satisfaction to you, we were wrong and you were right.” •

To try to make sure gunmen do hit their targets, cartels have developed training camps. The first such camps were discovered in northeast Mexico and linked to the Zetas, but they have since been found all across the country and even over the border in Guatemala. Most are built on ranches and farmlands, such as one discovered in the community of Camargo just south of the Texas border. They are equipped with shooting ranges and makeshift assault courses and have been found storing arsenals of heavy weaponry, including boxes of grenades. Arrested gangsters have described courses as lasting two months and involving the use of grenade launchers and .50-caliber machine guns. A training video captured by police in 2011 shows recruits running across a field, taking cover on the grass, and firing assault rifles. Sometimes training can be deadly. One recruit drowned during an exercise that required him to swim carrying his backpack and rifle. The discovery of these camps has sparked the obvious comparison to Al Qaeda training grounds in Afghanistan. But however much schooling they give, cartels still love gunslingers with real military experience. In the first decade of democracy, up until 2010, one hundred thousand soldiers had deserted from the Mexican military. There is a startling implication: country and ghetto boys sign up for the army, get the government to pay for their training, then make real money with the mob.

I saw a strange and odd-looking little guy walk in to a gun show in Fort Worth, pay cash for a 50-caliber sniper rifle with nobody asking him any questions before he walked right out the front door with that thing strapped over his shoulder; I thought it was extra odd that he was such a little puny fellow and the sniper rifle was actually bigger than he was, making that very memorable for me. I’m not saying this little fellow can’t legally have a sniper rifle; I am saying we would all have much better security in knowing that he was legally cleared to have it and in knowing that if he gets weird on us, then someone will show up to legally take the sniper rifle out of his hands.