The Chiappa company’s name is pronounced KEE-opp-a and it is attracting a lot of interest in handgun circles these days with the arrival of a startlingly different new production model revolver. The Rhino, chambered in .357 Magnum, is a radically innovative design by Emilio Ghisoni, previously known as manufacturer and designer of the Mateba Autorevolver (1, 2).

Ghisoni’s Mateba was a kind of modern reinvention with improvements of Lieutenant Colonel George Vincent Fosberry’s Webley-Fosberry automatic revolver, an accurate and intriguing sidearm produced in small quantities a century ago.

The Rhino differs from the Mateba in being an ordinary non-automatic revolver, but retains a number of its innovative design features including firing with the barrel aligned with the bottom of the cylinder.

Ammoland:

Chiappa Firearms debuts a new production revolver and concept at the MKS Supply 2010 SHOT Show display (booth 15549).

Called the Rhino (sort of resembles one too) you will first notice that the barrel is actually at the bottom of the cylinder. The gun is designed to fire from the bottom chamber of the cylinder (6:00 position not 12:00 as with other revolvers).

The new design resulted in improvements of the internal mechanisms over conventional revolver designs yielding up incredible reliability, a super-smooth action and improved safety.

The Rhino’s low barrel design ergonomically shifts recoil energy into the center of the palm of the hand and in line with the forearm thus greatly reducing the effects of felt recoil. Traditional revolver design (semi-autos too) place the barrel above the hand.

When the gun is fired the leverage applied by that design forces the recoil into the web area of the hand between the thumb and trigger finger causing significant muzzle snap. Not the Rhino! Due to this new design a shooter can now fire very fast and accurate repeat shots.

The Rhino is designed reduce its carry profile. This design is even carried into the hexagonal shaped cylinder making for a flatter profile when carried (especially handy for legal concealed carry).

Eric Holder and Barack Obama

A.J. Strata argues that it was not just random luck that nobody did anything to stop Major Hasan before the Fort Hood massacre and not just one of those things that Abdulmutallab was given a US visa and never promoted to the no-fly list, counter-terrorism effort has been slackened by the current administration and liberal pieties prioritized above saving American lives.

This new, liberal leaning administration took the high tempo of a heated war against a dangerous, evil enemy and turned into a cautious criminal investigation of ‘extremists’ who cause ‘man made disasters’. This change had consequences – intended and otherwise. War means ‘whatever it takes’, crime investigation is slow and cautious and shrouded in personal protections for the ‘accused’.

They also legally threatened those who were tirelessly defending this nation 24×7. Where people were once willing (and rewarded) to go the extra mile, make personal sacrifices, spend the extra time to ensure a lead was not the next 9-11, the new administration deflated that drive and made our defenders more concerned with their own security than national security. …

We have growing evidence Team Obama made changes in our national security posture which could easily have resulted in the Nigerian bomber getting through our defenses. First from a career State Department source:

This employee says that despite statements from the Obama Administration, such information was flagged and given higher priority during the Bush Administration, but that since the changeover “we are encouraged to not create the appearance that we are profiling or targeting Muslims.

And then there were these massive organizational changes to a system that was protecting us:

Obama fundamentally altered the culture and risk-taking incentives of the intelligence community with policy and personnel changes. The sense of urgency is gone, and he’s made it uncool to call the war on terror a war at all. If he wants to treat terrorism like a criminal act, rather than an act of war, we should not be surprised when the results look a lot like the bureaucratic foul-ups that happen all the time in law enforcement. He gutted the Homeland Security Council coordinating role, he diluted the focus of the daily intel brief, he made CIA officials worry more about being prosecuted for doing their jobs than capturing terrorists. … He’s made it his business to turn much of the national security apparatus set up by Bush and Cheney upside down and has succeeded …

…

Richard Clarke was a thorn in the side of President Bush for years after 9-11. He was in the Clinton Administration on the National Security Council. He is also quite accurate in his assessment of what happened inside the Obama Administration that led to these incidents (Ft Hood Massacre and Flight 253):

“It points to something fundamental,” said Richard A. Clarke, a former top counter-terrorism official in the Bush and Clinton administrations. “No matter how good your software is or how good your procedures are, at the end of the day it comes back to people. And if people think that this is a 9-5 job and they’re not filled with a sense of urgency every day, then you’ll get these kinds of mistakes.”

That is the distinction between fighting a war and the job of investigating crime. That is the difference between being rewarded for extra effort instead of scrutinized and threatened for it. Same tools, different attitude. Are we surprised in the different results?

Science News

Most of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activity does not remain in the atmosphere, but is instead absorbed by the oceans and terrestrial ecosystems. In fact, only about 45 percent of emitted carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere. …

Many climate models also assume that the airborne fraction will increase. Because understanding of the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide is important for predicting future climate change, it is essential to have accurate knowledge of whether that fraction is changing or will change as emissions increase.

To assess whether the airborne fraction is indeed increasing, Wolfgang Knorr of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol reanalyzed available atmospheric carbon dioxide and emissions data since 1850 and considers the uncertainties in the data.

In contradiction to some recent studies, he finds that the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide has not increased either during the past 150 years or during the most recent five decades.

The paper’s abstract reads:

Several recent studies have highlighted the possibility that the oceans and terrestrial ecosystems have started loosing part of their ability to sequester a large proportion of the anthropogenic CO2 emissions. This is an important claim, because so far only about 40% of those emissions have stayed in the atmosphere, which has prevented additional climate change. This study re-examines the available atmospheric CO2 and emissions data including their uncertainties. It is shown that with those uncertainties, the trend in the airborne fraction since 1850 has been 0.7 ± 1.4% per decade, i.e. close to and not significantly different from zero. The analysis further shows that the statistical model of a constant airborne fraction agrees best with the available data if emissions from land use change are scaled down to 82% or less of their original estimates. Despite the predictions of coupled climate-carbon cycle models, no trend in the airborne fraction can be found.