It appears that all the kerfuffle about the military brass destruction was either a mistake, or the response was so strong that those involved reversed the policy. Not sure which, but it’s good news. Georgia Arms has updated their site and it appears that the mutilation order only applies to shells larger than .50 caliber.
Now I’m off to buy a 25mm rifle.
I recently caught wind of this little gem via a post on Michael Bane’s blog. It seems that somewhere it was decided that the government will no longer be releasing it’s fired shell casings to the commercial reloading market. Currently the homepage of Georgia Arms, whom I’ve purchased ammo from before, talks about how they can no longer supply .223 and .308 ammo at all. Here is the notification they received:
Effective immediately DOD Surplus, LLC, will be implementing new requirements for mutilation of fired shell casings. The new DRMS requirement calls for DOD Surplus personnel to witness the mutilation of the property and sign the Certificate of Destruction. Mutilation of the property can be done at the DRMO, if permitted by the Government, or it may be mutilated at a site chosen by the buyer. Mutilation means that the property will be destroyed to the extent prevents its reuse or reconstruction. DOD Surplus personnel will determine when property has been sufficiently mutilated to meet the requirements of the Government.
Not only does this have a significant impact on ammunition availability and prices, which are already bad enough, but it will also incur additional financial penalties. The value of quality shell casings is much higher than the value of the brass as scrap. That’s additional income that will be lost. There is also additional expense as the casings have to be “mutilated” and that process needs to be approved and inspected by someone. So not only is it an anti-shooter move, it just doesn’t make any financial sense. It’s like busting your house up to sell off the wood.
What really sticks in my craw about this is that it’s a sneaky and underhanded way to discourage firearms ownership and hurt existing shooters. These “policies” and “regulations” don’t go through any legislative process and can have huge impacts on the firearms community. It’s certainly not a new tactic, but it’s one that really irks me.
If you are upset about this, please do as Georgia Arms suggests and contact your representatives.
I’ve recently moved our photo hosting operation over to SmugMug . Up until recently I’ve been using a local webserver with a statically generated BINS photo album. That combination worked quite well, but scalability was a bit lacking, and there’s no tagging facility. Not to mention that I need to leave my machine on all the time. SmugMug addresses those issues quite well. It also essentially provides an off-site backup of your photos and videos (with the $60/yr plan).
I began using F-Spot to manage the photo uploads from the camera, and from our previous archive, and to do all the tagging. Then F-Spot can directly upload to Smugmug. Everything works pretty well except for the tagging. F-spot stores the tags in the “Subject” field of the EXIF data, while SmugMug looks for them in the “Keywords” field. As a result the photos on SmugMug had no tags. Sad Clown.
Once the problem was discovered, with some help from SmugMug’s forum, a little Googling revealed an almost fix in this blog entry. There was a slight problem where it was munging multiple tags into a single multi-word tag, but that was easily fixed via the -b flag, or -sep on newer versions of exiftool. The version in Ubuntu 8.10 still uses -b but try -sep if that doesn’t work on yours.
So the following command successfully copies the Subject fields contents over top of the (empty) Keywords field. Since the path restricts it to a single month, it doesn’t take too long, and everything is peachy afterwards.
exiftool -overwrite_original -r -P -b -“IPTC:Keywords<XMP:subject” ~/Photos/2009/02/
Incidentally if you decide to sign up for SmugMug, you can get a $5 discount with my referral code: Wo6AztZyF7W7I
Yes, I get a kickback too.
