UDATED 3:02 pm UPDATED 3:57 pm The blog at the American Spectator has some great stuff on “Shock Troops.” John Tabin finds more suspect information in a previous story by “Scott Thomas”. In his second piece for the New Republic titled “Dead of Night,” “Thomas” had written,
Someone reached down and picked a shell casing up off the ground. It was 9mm with a square back. Everything suddenly became clear. The only shell casings that look like that belong to Glocks. And the only people who use Glocks are the Iraqi police.
Tabin writes, “I’ve Googled in vain for evidence of 9mm cartridge that features a “square back.” As far as I can tell, 9mm Glocks fire the same type of ammo as the Beretta M9 — the standard-issue Army sidearm. Am I missing something?” Apparently not. A reader at that site responds:
I know for sure that the round fired by the Glock 17 (their standard 9mm service pistol) fires the same round as the 9mm Beretta, the M9 (known in the civilian world as the 92… I know quite a bit about guns, and I have NEVER heard of a 9mm round with a “square back”. In fact, I’ve never heard of ANY centerfire cartridge with a squared-off rim. A square rim would screw up how the round would sit in the magazine, and how it would feed into the chamber. The only “square” “cartridges” I’ve ever heard of came with caseless rounds, and weapons using caseless ammunition is so complex that it has yet to be fielded in any form.
And another interesting post comes from the lefty blog Lawyers, Guns, and Money, which as far as I can tell is the first lefty blog to seriously take up the issue…and, we were pleasantly surprised to see that Scott Lemieux also finds something fishy about the whole thing:
The story in the new anonymous New Republic article is similar [to Stephen Glass]; not facially inconceivable (most people who aren’t conventionally attractive, especially women, will be no strangers to some kind of casual cruelty), and yet there’s something about the details that has a faint whiff of bullshit about it. It’s all just a little too After School Special-y.
Other blogs that are all over this today: Powerline Michelle Malkin More from Hot Air Instapundit Little Green Footballs, which did so much to debunk the “Fake but Accurate” 60 Minutes story. Confederate Yankee The Bullwinkle Blog The Tank, which smelled something fishy with this even before the WWS. The Jawa Report Villainous Company So how long can the New Republic hold out without bowing to the legitimate questions raised by the best and brightest of the blogospehre, and how long can the mainstream media avoid taking this issue up for themselves? UPDATE: A reader writes in to shed further light on this–it sounds like “Thomas” may have been describing the “somewhat rectangular firing pin mark” that a Glock leaves on the casing:
Just my 2 cents, it appears the author incorrectly described what was seen. 9mm rounds are not square backed for Glock pistols, they use NATO standard 9mm ammunition, which has a round base. What I believe he was referring to is that ALL Glock pistols impart a somewhat rectangular firing pin mark to the primer on the back of the spent round. Generally speaking, and there may be some exceptions, all other firearms impart a round firing pin mark to the primer. This unusual characteristic allows one to preliminarily identify spent brass as having been fired from a Glock pistol.
UPDATE 2: More readers chime in on the Glock issue:
“Square-backed” absolutely does not equal “with a square marking.” It looks very much like “Scott Thomas” garbled some technical advice he got from someone who actually is familiar with bullets and casings. Given the other implausibilities and impossibilities in the “Shock Troops” stories, however, at least this one suggests that the author at least put some effort into verisimilitude.
And from Bob Owens at Confederate Yankee:
I just wanted to concur with your previous reader who commented on the shape of the primer mark on the spent 9mm cartridges. The striker of a Glock can leave these squared-off dimples, as opposed to the more rounded firing pins if many weapons systems. But far more damning is the unsupported assumption Thomas made that “the only people who use Glocks are the Iraqi police.” Glock pistols have been on the commercial market for decades, and there are literally dozens of stories of Glock pistols being recovered from the insurgents, in weapons caches or other raids, and on the black market for the past four years. This claim simply isn’t supported by reality, and shows the author is only interested in libeling the Iraqi police.
