Gun Control, Controversy, so keep it clean.

I agree. Every concealed carry holder should be required to take dancing lessons.

If it was his service weapon, it was a Glock, which only has the trigger safety. Once something gets inside the trigger guard the safety is off, be it a finger or a jacket draw string. There have been a few cases of the of LEO's shooting themselves because the adjuster on their jacket drawstring slipped into the holster and they didn't clear it first

If you ask me, Glocks are nothing but one big design flaw.

The trigger safety is too easy to disengage by accident and the trigger itself on some models is too sensitive. That combination has led to a lot of accidental discharges, even among extremely well trained professionals. Besides that, most models are backheavy, meaning the gun doesn't naturally fall back into alignment with the target after a shot. You have to make a much bigger conscious effort to adjust after the recoil to get back on target than with something like a Beretta 92F, a Sig P226 or an HK USP.

The Danish Army and Air Force just went through the process of acquiring new service pistols. The politicians on the committee wanted Glock to be in the mix*, but due to heavy protests from our two special forces units, it didn't even make it into the intial testing round. They've had Glock 17s, 20s and 26s on trial in their arsenals before and found all three models lacking on all but one parameter, which was water resistance. For a long time, they begrudgingly used them when making infiltrations from the water because no other manufacturers had managed to make their sidearms as reliable in wet conditions, but as soon as HK and SIG caught up, the Glocks were locked away and haven't been in use since 2005.

*Probably because they knew it from TV and movies and thought it "looked cool". It wouldn't be the first time they bought things for the armed forces using that reasoning. The Home Guard was once handed M203 grenade launchers to stick under their M16 rifles. Unlike the US National Guard, the Danish Home Guard is not supposed to be deployable in combat operations abroad. As the name implies, their main job is to defend our own country. If the powers that be had decided to equip them with smoke and light grenades or rubber bullets and bean bag rounds for riot control, the M203 might have been somewhat useful, but of course they didn't think that far. All they bought was HE grenades and how often do you think you would be using those in urban environments on your own turf...?

I've never even thought they looked cool. they've always looked clunky and boxy to me.

but... but... but... American war movies!

DING DING DING!!! Give that man a prize!

That's an easy one to answer.

You either leave the patients to fend for themselves, or you let the motherlovin' building burn to the ground. Whichever option you choose, it'll be worth it because the brass get to feel like they've covered all their what ifs with the biggest, shiniest rig they could find and after all, making the brass feel good about themselves is the most important thing in the world, isn't it? I mean, they got all that stuff on their shoulders because they know better than everyone else, didn't they...?

[/sarcasm]

The infamous Lawn Dart. Yeah, we had that one too until we got the F-16 in 1980.

When we were looking at replacing the F-16, we had four candidates. The SAAB JAS 39 Gripen NG, the McDonnell Douglas F/A-18E Super Hornet, the Eurofighter Typhoon and the Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

If you ask me (and this opinion is backed by several fighter pilots I spoke to while I was in the Air Force), the smart choice would have been either the Eurofighter or the Super Hornet, but the politicians went with the F-35 because they argued that "stealth technology is the future".

Besides 70-80% of all missions flown by the RDAF being air superiority missions where they intercept and ward off Russian planes that "stray" into our airspace, in which case you actually want to be visible on radar and have no use for stealth, they just casually glossed over the fact that in order to make good use of stealth technology, you have to continually make expensive upgrades to it.

As with any other military technology, your enemies will be looking for ways to defeat it and as of right now, both the Russians and the Chinese have reportedly developed radar systems that are more than capable of picking out the signatures of both the JSF and the F-22 Raptor. The US Air Force may have the finances to develop countermeasures to that, but we're breaking our piggy banks just buying the damn things and won't be able to afford to upgrade them every 36-48 months.

Meanwhile, the Eurofighter and the Super Hornet are both tried and true platforms that have proven their worth, while the JSF is still under development. Initial estimates made it out as superior to pretty much any other aircraft in the world, except for the F-22 Raptor, but now it looks like the Eurofighter and Super Hornet will be able to outperform it on every parameter except stealth. They're both faster, have longer range, can carry heavier and more varied payloads, are more maneuverable and last but not least, we could have gotten three of them for every two F-35s.

But that's democracy for you... Expertise loses out to publicly appointed ignorance once again. That's what happens when the majority votes for whichever idiot shouts the loudest.

I think the SAAB would be the better choice for Finland, simply because the Swedes have built it to operate in the coldest conditions Northern Scandinavia can throw at it, which is where your jets will be spending the vast majority of their time.

The Eurofighter and Super Hornet could probably operate in that environment as well (not sure about the JSF), but there's no "probably" with the Gripen NG. It's already been proven to work and work well. There's a reason it's consistently on the short list in most countries looking to buy new fighters.