I came across this story about a girl who family was from Latvia who was arrested for smuggling Raptor 4X Night Vision Weapons Sights to Russian. She said they were going to some friends who wanted to use them for hunting.
I am not sure why you would smuggle this scope into Russia as Russia already has some of the best night vision scopes you can buy, but she did. I'm betting it was really for some rich Russian gangsters who wanted American technology just for the grins of it. Or perhaps they want to rip off the design. The most incriminating thing that I read was that the serial numbers were removed.
What got me worked up enough to digress from farming and write a post about it were the quotes in the article from former NYPD idiot and "gun expert" Richard "Bo" Dietl. Who seems to bit of self proclaimed celebrity and his is certainly a self promoting blow-hard and a dumbass. I hate it when people just make crap up and the idiot newspaper writer and MSN just repeats it.
Oh, yeah I looked him up. He has his own website and he is a self-promoting dumbass. Here is the Orwellian quote of the year from his own website,
"YOU MUST TRUST THE PEOPLE WHO ARE GOING TO TELL YOU WHO TO TRUST". - BO DIETL"
"What a tool," that is a quote from me...
So, Bo says these scopes are for snipers with automatic weapons and here is the best quote of all.
"You could take someone out with one of these scopes in the dead of night from up to a mile-and-a-half-away," he said. (see full article in the New York Daily News)
Ok, I'm not a gun expert but...
You probably can't see a mile and a half away in total darkness with a night vision scope and I know you could not hit anything smaller than a very large barn at a mile and a half with a 4 power scope. In fact i would expect this scope to be used under 200 yards. The fact that you can attach it to a machine gun just means that it is shock mounted. It is all pretty stupid.
And finally, I found one on ebay. You can buy it off of ebay with no restrictions at all. What a BS story. The girl is cute and I guess it sells papers and fuels gun/spy/terrorist fetishes of newspaper writers and cops.
Of course real terrorists on get caught by accident, if the bomb doesn't go off, if they are trying to light the fuse sticking out of their shoes, if their underpants catch on fire.
Idiots, the country is run by idiots...
Now that I wrote my amateur rant, I did a search for Bo Dietl is an idiot and I found this blog post from Confederate Yankee that is much better than mine.
Posts
I've worked with alot of night vision and thermal imagining equipment and two things come to mind from this post.
ReplyDeleteThe First is the Russian stuff I've seen isn't that good, and little of it is the best there is, regardless of the price.
Second, Just about all the stuff sourced from inside the USA is prohibited from export to anywhere by the US State Dept. You have to have a high level export permit to take even the simplest of these devices out of the country. It is this second fact that the girl violated and means she is in serious doo-doo.
All The Best,
Frank W. James
Frank, thanks for your comment. I don't really know that much about quality night vision.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure the girl is in deep doo-doo as it was restricted. I'm thinking that rich Russians doing some night hunting is more likely than any major terrorist activity. Perhaps some gangster stuff but much less sensational than the news would make it.
Yeah, Budd, but as you know, truth and common sense don't sell papers.
ReplyDelete