Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff, your podcast about people who were cool and did cool stuff, like in the snow. The snow is goh fuck. I wrote that on later into the script just locked it up. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy and with me as this week's guest and probably next week's guest, depending on the linearity of when we release these episodes, is Carl. Hi.
Carl, Hey, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Yeah. Carl is the host of in Range TV, which is where you can go to learn about guns from people who aren't bad people.
Oh no, we definitely don't want to be that's such a touchy topic, but we try to touch on things that from a very different perspective and bring like, for example, I know we're going to be talking about war today, and war is something that needs to be talked about as part of the human condition, but it shouldn't be glorified.
And that's one of the things, Like we talk about war, and we talk about guns, and we talk about topics around that on in Range, but it's not glorification at least it isn't meant to be.
Yeah, and I think you'll do a good job. Actually, even before I or do you want anything else, I've been watching in range TV because when I got into firearms after Nazis docked me, I was looking for things I didn't even like. I was like, oh, this person is not a right winger and isn't telling me to hate everyone. Not that everyone on on YouTube is that right, but it was just something I really appreciated about the
way you handle it. And you know who else handles firearms, well, Sophie two guns Licktormen.
Wow, what an honor. I'll take that nickname.
Yeah, well, I was.
Funny about the nickname from historical speaking is in the Old West, which is not what we're talking about today. But if someone was called a two gun person, they were actually a bad actor because you wouldn't come into town with two guns.
It's actually so your dog is secretly insult.
You just got secretly dissed.
Yeah, you know, I probably deserved it.
Well, it's because you just keep dropping one, you know.
Yeah.
Well, pirates had lots of guns, but that's because they were single shot.
Yeah. I mean you hold ten of them and you had eight shots. The two wouldn't go off on the other eight. Mite.
Yeah, yeah, I don't know.
I have a really big axe. Does that make me cool?
Yes? Axes are cool. Yeah, of course they're cool.
Axes are actually cooler, although the only time they've appeared so far in this story is real bad. But so do you think you're the greater wrath? I think you're the greater wrath, Sophie, the greater wrath. Licktermen, I'll take it. Okay, that's our producer, and Ian the lesser rat no no, Ian's nickname six guns. Yeah, I'm out of ideas. Uh Ian is the Ian the audio engineer. That is, that's Ian's name. And on woman whose name is already a nickname made our music for us. So the full round
of and I got killed Joy, I'm good, I already. Yeah. This week we are talking about snipers, and we're talking about World War Two. It's all an excuse to talk about the Eastern Front World War two and how complicated it was, and to make you all actually think it's interesting,
because it is interesting, but not always what Okay. The thing that's really interesting to me about this, and I swear I'll get back into the script at some point, is that I thought I knew this story because I knew the broad strokes, and then when I looked closer, it was a different picture than what I knew from the broad strokes, like the fact that, as we talked about last week, that the Finnish Civil War was not between Soviets or Bolsheviks and capitalists but instead between social
democrats and bootlockers who want to be part of the German Empire. But then also a lot of the stuff that we're going to talk about about what comes after the Winter War is going to be a similar thing where it's a different picture than I expected. It's not a pretty picture. We're not talking about pretty stuff today, which I about interesting stuff today because this is part two in our four part series about some snipers in
World War Two. So Simo hahe was born in nineteen oh five, which is a good year to be a failed revolutionary in Russia. That is the only thing I know about nineteen oh five. Besides that there's a good punk band called nineteen oh five. I don't know if they're named after the nineteen oh five revolution. Probably you should look them up. Good anarcho punk from the late nineties, maybe the early odds. Much like Simo, who was the seventh of age kids into a Lutheran family, not punk
Rock at all. In Karelia, which at that point was part of Russian Finland, in the southeast corner next to and now part of Russia. His family's farm wasn't a nice, good growing soil big old. It was like mostly forest, right because it's not a place full of fertile soil. So he grew up a lot of hunting, and it seems like his only interests. But there's a lot of mythologizing about him. But his main interests were hard work, hunting, hanging out in the snow with his dog, and also
hard work. This guy's completely mythologized. He's maybe the best sniper in history. There's a lot of argument about that. And he's a national hero. So people ascribe lots of good Finnish values, like hard work, humility, and never expressing emotion to him. It might be true, that's the vibe I get from me.
He's like a finished Johnny appleseed, but instead of trees, he's planting bullets.
Yeah, he's planting Russians.
Into Russians. Bullets into Russians. Was then germanyed into trees?
Yeah, put the little seeds in each bullet. The hollow point is for you covered up with wax. Oh, little oak tree. I don't know what trees are common, they're probably pine trees. He went to school for a hot minute, just long enough for reading and arithmetic, and then he went back to the farm for his real love, hard
work and snow. When he was nineteen, he went off to his compulsory fifteen months of military service, where he was an officer in a bicycle battalion, which will never stop seeming both cool and funny to me every time bicycle battalions come up. Last time I think was that the Dutch had bicycle battalions before the Nazis invaded them. He was a crack shot with a rifle and he did his fifteen months. He got out, he went back to hard work and snow farming. I think he was
a snow farmer. He stayed active in the Civil Guard, which is basically the reserves, and he won every shooting contest he entered, as far as I can tell, and he just like filled his house up with trope, like he just was like because he was in the shooting club and they would give awards the best could you imagine how annoying it would be to be in the same shooting club as this man.
Ah Simo showed up. Let's just go home, no, yeah today?
Yeah, well then you're just like arguing who gets second? You know, like you know what.
That's still like that in the competition circles in a different way. There's certain times you go to an event and someone shows up and you just know that you're not first that day. Whether you wouldn't get a chance at first or not irrelevant. You know you're not because you know who will be.
Yeah, that makes sense. It seems like shooting is a skill that the the gradients of levels like are. Yeah, it would make sense to me that there's like certain people. I'm like, like, I know a lot of people I can out shooting a lot of people who can out shoot me.
It's a weird thing. It's something that you can put a lot of time and effort into and you can always increase your skill, but there's like your skill only increases based on some level. Other level of also included natural ability. Natural ability. He won't get you there by itself. You have to practice to get it. But your natural ability plus the time you put in ultimately gives you your skill points whatever you want to do in like
a role playing game kind of way. So there are some people whose natural ability is just there and they put the time in and they will always beat you. And that's just how it works.
Yeah, which is why I'm glad I don't even stick to shooting competitions. I stick to plinking in my yard. But that's why I'm glad that I don't enter wars on a regular basis. I'd be more likely to enter competitions.
Oh what war is a shooting competition? Well, the part time.
Yeah, so he he was real humble about it though, which I feel like I don't wantedst to be mad at right, he shows up, he's gonna win, and then he's gonna stand at the back of the group photo, which one if I'm a photographer, I kind of hate him. He's five foot three, like he wants to stand at the back of the photo. Finns not traditionally tall people. Another thing that people don't understand because people assume that
Fins are Swedes, and this is not true. Not a traditionally tall people necessarily, but five foot three is not towering over anyone and he's standing at the back of these things, and so he's like gonna win, and then he's gonna stand at the back and like everyone's like, yeah, you're the most humble, and he's like, I do win the word for most humble, but he actually seems really
genuine about it. His rifle of choice was basically everyone on the planet's rifle of choice at this time, or at least everyone in that corner of the planet, which is the Mosen the Gaunt. This was developed in the eighteen nineties. It is a bolt action rifle. Every time you shoot, you have to manually cycle the next round into the chamber. I'm clearly not explaining this for Carl's sake.
I'm clearly explaining this for the audience's sake. It holds five rounds in a fixed magazine, which means you can't like pop the magazine out and put in a new one. The magazine stays in the gun and you feed another five rounds into it. You either have to do it one at a time or with what's called a stripper clip, which is a little clip of metal that holds five rounds for faster reloading. And this was an advancement over muzzleloaders, but it is not an easy gun to shoot fast.
Is was the gun that helped the Russians and the Russo Japanese War of nineteen oh four nineteen oh five, which means it didn't help them enough, because the Russians lost the shit out of that war. It was used in by all sides of the Russian Civil War and by all sides of the Winter War, which we're coming to.
Yeah, the most in the Gaunt is a really interesting rifle in terms of it's one of the earliest bolt action designs that was one would say, is modern and viable from a modern perspective, and as many of them did. It held five rounds in a box magazine. It was chambered in a cartridge that at least in this instance we're talking about here with the Russians of the Fins
with around seven sixty by fifty four rimmed. And that's interesting because rimmed is not modern and it's even though the so or so the Russians now fades of gray there shades of gray, they still use this round and a rimmed round means that it has this little extended piece of metal at the end of the cartridge itself that is a rim. Most modern cartridges are rim list. There's a little divot cut out from the back of the cartridge and that's what's used to extract the cartridge
from the chamber. But these are rims. That means that when you stack them on top of each other, imagine like a little pie dish on the back of each round. And if you stack them incorrectly and your gun isn't designed to work with it properly, they'll have something called rimlock where the rim of the cartridge in front of it will prevent the rim from or behind it will prevent it from feeding when you try to cycle the bolt.
So the most in the Gaunt has this interesting system called the interrupter that when you cycle the bolt, it only allows one round to pop up into the feeding angle to chamber into the chamber, because if it didn't you could have a rimlock issue. The other gun that deals with that is the old Enfield from Britain with their rimmed round, but the Most of the God did that. It's also one of the earliest bolt action modern guns
that dealt with smokeless ammunition versus black powder. And one of the things and the reasons you see it common in these environments. Is while it is I think, by most modern statements, not a good baul to action rifle. It is slow, clunky, and hard to use, and in some instance jams a lot. It is sort of better in some ways in very low temperature environments. It does work well in cold.
Okay, that makes a lot of sense with what we're what I've learned. My experience with the MOZONEA gaunt is that it's the only gun I've ever handled that went off without anyone pulling the trigger.
That's nice.
My friend had a broken one. Everyone was fine because we followed the rules of firearms safety. And then we put down the gun. And then my friend, who actually worked in a gun manufacturer or something, stop shooting that gun.
Did it happened when the bolt was closed. I bitched, the firing pin was frozen forward or something.
I couldn't I don't know. This was before I knew shit about guns.
So these things are like prolific. They made the Russians, the Soviets made sivee seven gazillion of these, and for a long time in the market, American market, whatever, these were the cheapest guns you could buy. You could get most of the guns for like sixty bucks. You can't anymore, but you could.
And I'm so sad I missed that.
Yeah, I mean their need is a history.
They're not great. I don't think it's like a useful firearm for anything, but.
I mean they can be still. I mean they are intrinsically oz bolt actions are very accurate, right it is, and that's something we'll get into, I'm sure talking about today with Cimo. But it's an accurate rifle and it's an accurate round. The Russian manufactured ones tend to be very clunky and hard, and sometimes bring a hammer with you, a rubber mallet because they'll get stuck. Called it's just the bolt. We'll get stuck closed. You have to beat
it open with a mallet. What's all about finish stuff is the fins took Russian most of the gunes, rework them, put better sights on them, and a finish most of the Gune, even though it was made on Russian machines, is a wholly different gun. It's actually reliable, it doesn't jam, and it's really good.
Okay, Well, if you hear of one for sixty dollars, please let.
Me know finish. Most of the gunes command a premium, but if I see one for sixty bucks, I'll keep you in mind.
I appreciate it. So so Simo. He's in this hunting club and he's doing his thing. He's hunting Santa Claus, he's winning medals, he's pulling off wild feats like the one that get cited all the time. But I'm like, I can fucking dream of doing this. He would with a mozaa Gaunt. He would hit a target one hundred and fifty meters away sixteen times in one minute with no scope and a rifle that only holds five rounds at a time.
That's that's a real feat from a stripper clip perspective, because you mentioned a stripper clip, which is the way you get five rounds quickly back into the gun instead a single one at a time. Yeah, and this is another deficiency of the most inda Gaunt. The stripper clips are wonky and tend to cut you when you use them. So if he's doing that, he's doing a good job and not hurting himself in the process. So yeah, that's impressive.
Yeah, I can't find a fucking word about his politics. If you know, please let me know. There are a million books written Abouthim and I have not read all of them or most of them, and which has me thinking he wasn't particularly political, because otherwise people will be trying really hard to claim him. Or he was like kind of right wing and people don't want to talk about it because being right wing is embarrassing. I don't know, but it seems like the things that he did were
all legit and cool. His priorities were defending his home and being a cool guy who liked nature and farming and hard work. He talks about hunting and respecting in the forest in a way that reminds me a lot of the animist roots of Finnish culture honestly, Like he talks about like the spirit of animals that he's killing and stuff like that.
Yeah, I've never seen a thing about it. As well. Everything I've ever seen about Simo is exactly that, which is stalwart defender of Finland and an amazing sniper.
Yeah and yeah, I think that this thing. So he's doing his thing, he never gets married. Then the USSR invades his home and specifically his home like he is in the line of he is in Karelia and people are like, he defended his home successfully in Finland State Finland. He loses his home spoiler alert. During this war, the Soviet Union takes Karelia and his home. But he's like, all right, back into the army, that's what I'm here for.
And he starts off as a machine gunner. And half of his kill count was a machine a submachine gun, the Swami KP thirty one, and it's one of the first really good You talked about this a little bit before, but what I've learned about it is this is one of the first really good submachine guns. It's way more accurate than most submachine guns. This list has a longer barrel than what you think of when you think of
a submachine gun. It's heavy as fuck for submachine gun, which helps with recoil and muzzle rise and later if you read about it, it's like a seventy one drum magazine, but actually when he was using it, I believe it was more likely a forty round drum magazine, and then had an interchangeable barrel so you could swap it out when it got too hot. That's what I got about it.
Honestly, it is one of the best submachine guns, like there's more undred generations stow machine guns now that are maybe safer for lack of a better phrase, but the KP thirty one, the Saomi is a fantastic gun. It's well machined, it's well made, the parts are interchangeable, the magazines work from one gun to another. It's incredibly reliable. It's weight, and some of them have a muzzle break on at A muzzle break is a little some cuts in the front of the barrel that reduce climb when
it's firing in filado. It has a high rate of fire, typically like nine hundred rounds a minute or even a little more. But with the weight and the muzzle break and the capacity, you can pull what are called bursts for you press the trigger and let out like say three, four or five rounds and reliably hit at distances with that subgun that you normally couldn't with others, like one, two hundred even three hundred round Aimed fire at a
man sized target with a Sawomi is totally viable. In fact, I have a video not to promote in range, but I have a video on in range where we were shooting one of those original saamis and you can see the what's called beat zone where the bullets hitting the berm and it's it's extremely accurate. They're a pleasure to shoot.
Actually, yeah, I get the impression he did some of it sniping with this thing.
Oh yeah, I believe he did a lot of work with the song. With the song, he did a lot.
He absolute a lot of work with it.
Yeah, that's because sniping is always considered like, I don't want to get too far and what we're getting into now. So many people think about sniping is this long range precision work, and there's some truth to that sometimes, but sniping is actually more field craft than it is precision fire.
And that actually seems to be like most of the people that he shoots are going to be one hundred, one hundred and fifty meters away from him when he's shooting them, which is very different than like modern sniper stuff, as I understand, where you have a lot of like killing people at a half mile whatever, you know they're in the forest and shit. Yeah, and the fact that he knows a fucking forest is why he's so effective.
Yeah.
Yeah. In Finland, like the idea of shots, long shots are not a commonality there. Like you said, it's almost all forested. There's not a lot of large areas to see for very far field craft applies, and so yeah, making one hundred or one hundred and fifty meters hits with a KP thirty one sub machine gun is is totally doable.
Okay, So the USSR invades and they have tanks, planes, artillery, and just fuck tons of people. No one in history has cared less about the value of his own people than Joseph Stalin. If there is a problem, throw Soviets at it. That is how he gets shit done. On the other side, the Fins have a grand total of thirty two tanks one hundred and fourteen aircraft compared to like three thousand and four thousand, three thousand tanks and
four thousand airplanes on the Soviet side. But they've got skis and unlike the Soviets, they've got weather appropriate clothing, which is funny because the Soviets are even from a fucking cold place.
Not as cold as Finland. Yeah, at least not as cold, or at least not as in terms of maybe that's not fair. They have places that are as cold as Finland.
Right, Soldier is not equipped or a place like Finland totally. The Finns mostly don't have uniforms. They just have a military hat and whatever clothes they were able to show up to do to even which means that they have a lot of white clothes for snow and they're actually camouflaged. They they've got morale on their side, and they grew up in these woods, and so they fuck the Soviets up. At the end of this one hundred and five I think day war, Stalin loses like one hundred and fifty
thousand soldiers. Finns lose about twenty six thousand. That's a really good I don't want to be one of the twenty six thousand to die, right, but that's a fucking good ratio. The Soviets are still gonna win sort of, but they're not going to steamroll like they thought they would. And it is quite likely that this fierce defense is the reason that Finland is around today. I don't know whether or not Stalin could have held Finland or not, but Simo specifically, we'll get to the quote later speaks
about how this is why there's a Finland. So he's a machine gunner and he's fighting gorilla style. He's fighting under a man named arna Edward Utulnen aka the Terror of Morocco, who is not a good person. He fought in the Finished Civil War on the White Side when he was fourteen years old. I think he was like helping load ammunition or something, and then he went and there wasn't enough war happening, so he went and joined the French Foreign Legion. He fought in the colonial forces
occupying Morocco, earning his shitty nickname. But apparently he didn't like really like he wasn't like such an effective soldier that like people were like the Terror of Morocco while he was in the French Foreign Legion. It's when he got back to Finland people are like, oh, where were you Morocco? Oh yeah, you're like the Terror of Morocco,
aren't you. There's this probably apocryphal story about his leadership style where he one time joining a firefight in order to convince his friends his soldier sorry not friends, he's an asshole, to convince them to not worry. He pulls out a chair and he just like sits there on the firing line. He's like, what the fuck fighting fucking cowards or whatever you know, which is always like a cool move when the like officer fights in the front line.
Whatever.
Anyway, he's also known for getting drunk and beating his own soldiers. He's not a cool guy at all. His own nephew wrote, and I'm gonna quote this, Arnae was a bad person. That's the quote. I didn't cut the sentence short. There's not a butt after it. The full quote is like a paragraph about like people call him a war hero. I guess that's technically true. God, he's a piece of shit.
Yeah, I mean, like if like speaking from like just finish, like my knowledge of Finish culture, that sentence is all you need to know. That says it, all right, we don't need to add more to that. This is Matt person. Okay, I'm gonna take your I'm gonna believe that.
Yeah, but you know what you should believe also, you should believe that every one of these ads for goods and services was made in good faith, with your best interests at heart, and not within the context of a capitalist system that only rewards short term gain of profit.
Nothing says altruism like corporation. So I believe you.
Yeah, you gotta be rich to be a philanthropist. You gotta steal everyone's shit in order to here's some advertisers and we're back. Sosimo started off not as a sniper, right, but as a unit leader submachine gunning Russians. Overall. The Fins had a strategy where like, Okay, so the Russians have like tanks and shit, and there's only certain paths
and roads that they can move on. Like one thing I read was like it took a lot while to like pack down the snow enough to get a fucking tank across, right, So there was a lot of long, single file marches into Finland. Basically there was a lot of like, let's get ambushed, and so the Fins were like, Okay, we can do that for you. They would cut off the tanks from the rest of their support and then just fuck them up by using Molotov cocktails. I am
not going to tell you how to make. You can look it up yourself with a VPN, but it is a homemade firebomb that is easiest shit to make. I am not advocating that anyone do it because the cost benefit analysis of making them molotovs in the US is grim. They will not advocate anyone break any laws.
You know, Molotov got a cocktail and Ribbentrop did not.
That's true. That's fucked up. That's not your range. Fuck, So the history of the Molotov cocktail. Fortunately, I James Stout Channel zero network what no Cool Zone Media. The problem is that I'm on two podcasts networks with the named fucking initials basically CZN and CZM, and I get that mixed up constantly. Cool Zone media journalist James Stout, that's an article. Oh, he's cool. Most famous as a bicyclist. He has an article about the origin of Molotovs in
the Winter War quote. The war began with a bombardment of Helsinki, which Soviet foreign Minister Vitchislav Molotov claimed was a humanitarian aid drop. The Fins, retaining their dark humor, called the bombs Molotov's bread baskets. Soon everything bad was associated with Molotov. Blackout curtains used to stop bombers from spotting urban areas from overhead by blocking out visible light from the windows at night, were called Molotov curtains, and
bombing planes were called Molotov's chickens. So the Fins found a great pairing for the bread baskets and churned out at an industrial scale by distilleries the Molotov cocktail with which to toast the invader, which.
By the way, if I might add, when you look into this, if you do listener, the Finnish Smotov cocktails are actually interestingly better than what you think of. They're not as crude. They're actually produced and manufactured and almost like how I put this, they're not they're not they're not they're not rogue at all. There's a sign that's better than most. Yeah.
Oh, interesting, they have.
Their own ignition systems and such that are better.
Okay, that's actually really interesting.
Yeah, they made their own thing. Not to go too deep into it. Instead of just a burning rag, they actually had like burning flares that were taped to the glass.
No, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, yeah, I just know someone who went to jail for At a talk, someone asked him how he had already gone to jail for burning some shit as part of the Animal Liberation Front. And at the talk someone was like, oh, how did you burn the things? And he described how he burned the things, and so then he went back to prison. Yeah, I'm like real fucking nervous about that shit.
No, totally, but it is an interesting topic and if you look at it, it's interesting to see how the Finnish Molotov cocktail is actually greatly improved over the let's say original design.
Yeah, no, that makes sense. Do you know it was originally a fascist invention?
No?
Actually didn't.
The Spanish fascist in nineteen thirty six, under Franco invented the bottle bomb, as we understand it now.
Didn't know that. That's fascinating consider now it's seen.
Now, I know absolutely it's the weapon of the working class.
It's like the Molotov cocktail and the machete, right, those two things are like so iconic.
Yeah, yeah, totally. Both have been used by good people and bad people.
Yeah.
Nineteen thirty six, Spanish fascist troops started using them, and then soon enough both sides of the Spanish Civil War, including the good guys, were using them. But they got their name during the Winter War a couple of years later, and they are a great way to fuck up a tank. I actually don't know as much about I've heard. Basically, it was like the old tanks weren't enclosed, and so
if you like set the outside on fire. It's like causing a lot of problems and it like forces the tank people to get out and you can shoot them or something.
The rear of the tanks usually have a ventilation system which allows for the intake of air for the people inside to actually survive, or ventilation system for the actual engine because it needs air to be able to do combustion and drive. And so the target on the tank
where the ventilation systems at the rear. So if you threw fire into that, it would leak down into the ventilation system and either a make it impossible to survive inside by breathing, or it would choke out the engine or get to a part that would cause the rest of the tank to combust.
Okay, yeah, and they were I love when there's a I remember reading this article a million years ago called bashing the laser rangefinder with a rock about like low tech solutions to modern problems, you know, mm hmm. Yeah. So they have these low tech solutions to modern problems, but they do it at an industrial scale, and they do it with their own actual carefully engineered they put
their own on it. Eh ah. Yes, So Finns on skis are fucking up the tanks, burning the shit out of him after cutting them off from everyone else, and pretty soon Simo's commander needs a specific Russian sniper takeout taken out who keeps killing Finnish officers and I think this guy's off. His officer Arna is like, I don't, I don't want to get shot, Hey, Simo, can you go? Can you go shoot a dude? And Simo's like, yeah, I can go shoot a dude, and he shifts over
to sniper and counter sniper duty. Back to the mozen Nagaunt, he was offered one with a scope. Supposedly, he had no interest for a few reasons. First, and I think this is the actual main reason. The first and foremost, he'd never trained with a scope. That just wasn't this, that wasn't what he's used to. But this worked out really well for him. One, you have to raise your head an inch or two or higher to cite a scope.
Two And if you're trying to get shot, the higher you lift your head, the more likely area to get you shot. Apparently the glass could fog up in the cold, and this is minus forty degrees out And the cool thing about minus forty degrees is I don't have to tell you whether it's celsius or fahrenheit because it's the one place where they both meet.
Ah, the neutral ground of temperatures.
Yeah, the dead Man, but that's land of.
That's specifically true about the most and na gaunt sniper, which is the most common iteration. It's called the ninety one thirty. But the scope is really high off of the comb of the stock where you would normally rest your cheek to look down the iron sights, so you do this thing called chin weld where you kind of rest your chin on the stock to see it. And the scope isn't bor centric. It's kind of off to the left of the actual rifle bore, and so sides
fog ammunition in it. Well, it's just kind of up and high, so you can get your hands and you can't use stripper clips anymore when it's gotta Yeah, there's another example of going with iron sights. Because the scope is on there, you can no longer use the stripper clip and feed quickly. You have to feed into wividual rounds one at a time. Yeah, But it's also so the scope has to be higher on offset so that you can actually throw the bolt and cycle the gun.
Ah okay, okay.
All that turns into harder to shoot. So him being already proficient with iron sights makes a lot of sense that he would stick with it.
Yeah, no, totally. And then the other thing is that half of how he killed enemy snipers is he'd like wait till the sun reflected off of him. Like he literally wait all day till the sun was in the right place reflect off of the enemy sniper off the scope, and then shoot them in the face. And Simo wanted to go as long as possible before he got shot in the face.
So that's a usual you know what. I spend every day of my life trying to not get shot in the face. That's a good goal.
Yeah, I actually take it for granted.
But the United States, you never know.
I know, I'm like, wait, I got my concealed Gary permit because Nazi sent me pictures of my family, Like anyway, fuck those people. So he's the original no scope guy, and he is fucking methodical. He works sometimes alone, sometimes with a spotter. This actually like fucks up his like kill count, you know, and like as if it's as if life is a video game. Because only confirmed kills get to count, and if no one's around to see if a tree the Soviet falls in the forest. So
he goes out at night. He gets himself nice and cozy in a spot, uses natural cover, lots of snow. He wears all white. He wraps a white bandage around the stock of his rifle. And apparently he shot. I only found this in one place, But apparently he shot from a sitting position, not prone, because and because he is in a foxhole natural depression anyway, and he's not very tall. This is not a problem for him. I
mean it clearly worked. Then the sun would rise, he would do a murderer thirty he aimed center masks instead of for the heads, sorry video game players of the world. And then the sun would set and he'd leave. And before he when he was setting up, he'd pack down the snow in from of his position, so the report didn't set up a cloud of snow. Other versions that he poured a little bit of water on it so
that it would freeze. And he also sometimes supposedly kept snow in his mouth to keep his breath from showing. He sustained himself by chewing on bread and sugar that he just like had in his pockets, and then he laid still in the middle of the fucking winter, coldest winter in years, and waited. The Soviets had green uniforms, made them very easy to pick out and then pick off.
And of course it didn't help that Stalin had just purged seventy to eighty percent of all of his top leadership during one of his fits of paranoia, so there's not a lot of good leadership in the Soviet Army at this point. There's one story that is probably apocryphal, but one of my Finnish friends told me about Semo. I remember when I first like asked my Finnish anarchist friends about Simo. I was like expecting them to all
be like, are you fucking kidding me? Fuck, that guy's a national hero, and instead, at least the person I talked to was like, oh, my god, let me tell you stories about him. And one of the stories I heard is that he would basically just get buried under the snow and then he'd wait for a rabbit to go over his head and then he would like stick a knife up through the snow to catch the rabbit and then like bring it down in and eat it raw.
I have no source on this besides a fucking drunk friend of mine at a party, but I wouldn't put it past Semo is what I'll tell you now.
I mean it kind of tracks and like everything you just mentioned about what Simo would made him effective at what he was doing was like mentioned earlier in the discussion, was field craft not to undermine the marksmanship, but this is all field.
Craft totally, no, that is yeah. I remember like reading something that was like with no sniper experience, and I'm like, the guy was a moose hunter since he was like the baby like anyway, whatever, Soon he gets the nickname the White Death. The general version of the stories that the Russian started calling this because they're afraid of him.
The far more likely version of the story is that the Finns started saying that the Russians started calling him in this because it's because it's good propaganda to be like everyone's afraid of the White Death, which apparently was also like the word for just like dying in the fucking snow is the White Death.
I don't know, what's a cool name. I think you should take it. It's awesome.
Oh yeah, no, absolutely, someone did. Yeah. Absolutely. The Russians are really fucking not excited about him. The Fins also started calling him the magic shooter, but no one mentions that nickname in the English language accounts because it does not sound cool or metal in English. Sorry, magic shooter, white death translates better. Several times Soviets call down artillery strikes just to get him to flush him out, but
he wouldn't flush. He actually apparently like turned down orders, like his commander was like, get the fuck out of here. They're fucking artillery, and he's like, I'm good, and he just sits there and he lets the artillery come and go like a bad storm. One time shrapnel caught his coat on fire. Apparently there's other versions where he lost his coat in it, but it like fucks up his coat,
but it doesn't get him. Enemy snipers are constantly trying to hunt him, but they all die mysteriously, and by mysteriously I mean from bullets that Simo has shot them with the same Finnish friend telling me apocryphal stories says, and one time shooting people with a rifle wasn't effective enough. Too many people were coming through the past, so we just went down to the enemy camp and submachine gun submachine gun to them all down only grammatically correct, And
I don't know. I mean he absolutely killed a fuck ton people with submachine gun and a sniper rifle. I don't know if that particular story is true or not. Overall, the war wasn't going well for anyone. The Russians wanted to steamroll, but no steamrolling was possible, kind of the original like Zurig Rush Army. The Finns wanted to drive the Russians out, but no driving out was possible either, And in February a new wave of Russians hit the country and the Fins fell back to a line that
they were trying to hold. Sniping wasn't the only thing he was doing. He was still a commander, he was still fighting as a machine gunner, and during some battles, and during one battle, like a week maybe before the end of the war, and exploding bullet hit him in the face. Now I know what you're thinking, Carl, you've
never heard of exploding bullet before. But I googled and I found a video explaining exploding bullets with a nice man named Carl explaining it, which is basically that these bullets were initially designed to help zero rifles, making little explosions when they hit, So maybe it's a little less like some of the what I read is like and those evil Soviets used exploding rifles because they hate humanity. It sounds like these were more like what was used
for piercing armor. And also, if you're shooting some in the face, you're shooting some in the face. What's your take on this?
Actually? And even more than that, they were used most The most common use of the exploding bullet or was for hit indicators from coaxial machine guns and tanks, so when the tanks would fire, they would fire machine gun rounds to try and see if their ranging estimate was correct, and when the bullets would hit the enemy tank, these exploding rounds would make visible sparks and explosions and smoke when they were hitting the armor of the enemy tank,
which helped them zero the main gun. That same concept of technology got put into aircraft for armour piercing inscyndianary, which is rounds that are intended to cause fire or flame inside the tanks and the gas tanks of enemy aircraft.
They are also standard rifle rounds that can be fired in standard rifles most of the time, and so they started getting used very much so on the Eastern Front as well as in Finland by both sides or high value targets, because once they penetrate a couple inches of material, they detonate, and of course if you are doing that in a person's chest, that is a confirmed kill for sure. In fact, yeah, oh, we show some of that in the video which we shoot this ballistic soap stuff and
you can see them detonating. It's really just an inertial firing pin with a primer and some some sort of explosive compound and when the bullet accelerates, the firing pin hits the primer and then it causes to detonate inside the target. And Okay, what's interesting about that is it's again a Navy, not cool person that didn't do cool stuff.
But there's a book sniper on the Eastern Front which was a Nazi sniper, and he talks about the use of this ammunition against high value targets, typically Russian or Soviet officers, and describes in grim detail about their heads turning into like mist and such from it.
No, that makes a lot of sense, because I've read there's a lot of different accounts about this, particular like his injury that took him out and stuff, you know, and some was like a lucky shot, and some was like it was an enemy sniper, And that makes an enemy sniper seem way more likely, right because if it was like because there was almost certainly someone who's like, at any given battle, it's like, your job is to kill Semo.
You know, if Simo was your target, it would make sense to use explosive ammunition for a high value target because if you got the hit, you would hope that it would be amazingly he survived it, but yep, it's not likely to survive and exploding around yet they're quite lethal.
Yeah, yeah. On March sixth, nineteen forty, Simo took an exploding bullet to the jaw, destroyed half of his face. He went down thousand versions of how he was saved. The version that seems to line up the most with his own recollections is that basically people were like, we are not fucking leaving until we find Semo, Like, we are not leaving this, and so probably at the bottom of a pile of bodies, someone's like, oh, that leg's
twitching or whatever, you know, But he wasn't dead. He was just missing half of his face and looked real dead and was unconscious for most of it. Ragged off to safety. By the time he came to the war was over and the Fins had lost after one hundred and five day war. He read a newspaper report about his own death and sent a correction to the paper. Stalin The way that the war had come to an end is Stalin had kept trying to install this puppet government, right,
so he wasn't negotiating with the actual Finnish government. He couldn't because he didn't respect them. They weren't a legitimate force. But somewhere around like January or so, I can't remember exactly, he gave up. He was like, all right, no one fucking believes my fake government. I guess I'll start talking to the actual Finnish government. And so the Finns had to give up half of Karelia, which was Simo's homeland, as well as the city of Viporo, which is one
of the largest cities in the country. There's different It was either the second biggest or the fourth biggest, depending on which population survey you're looking at. But it was a big fucking important place. A huge chunk of the Finnish population lived in this area. It's a small country and most of the people live way in the south, and Karelia is as south as you can get in Finland. At first, the government is like, no, you can't fucking
have our second biggest city. What the fuck? And they kept writing the Western power Sweden and France for military support. They kept being like, hey, we we're democracy, we don't want to become Bolsheviks. Excuse you give us some stuff. And everyone's like, oh, what's that. I can't hear you
over the sound of not listening to you. Sweden, I think I think they had this thing where like they were like, look, we're not going to stop volunteers from going over, but we're not going to do anything beyond that. I think I might be mixing that up with like I read about like five Finish wars to write this fucking thing. Anyway, twelve percent of the Finnish population has to flee the conquered territory because they're genociders, right. That is the thing is the people who just genocided all
the Finns took a bunch of Finland. Everyone has to leave, so they lost, but they took out so many Russians in the process. Stalin himself said, and I cannot tell if this is a direct quote or paraphrase, but I'm gonna present it as a quote. The Finns were a primitive people, the inhabitants of marshes and forests, but they had stubbornly defended their independence, unlike the Belgians, civilized people
who surrendered right away. If they had been Fins instead of Belgians, I thought they would have fought hard against the German aggression. So Stalin did this like weird kind of racist, like you know, oh, you primitive strong people, you backwards fighty assholes anyway, whatever kind.
Of shades of something you'd hear way a way later in a much different conflict with two different countries of the Vietcong.
Oh huh, I don't know about that.
That's how they were labeled too.
Yeah, no, that yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So Simo exits world history at this point. I mean, we know what happened to him. He doesn't disappear, but he wanted to fight in the ongoing hostilities against the USSR, and we'll get to those. But he was too wounded. He had twenty six surgeries and his face was reconstructed with grafts from his hip. He lived a long and healthy life, probably not a happy life. He preferred to never marry. He just hunted moose and raised dogs and
tried to stay out of the limelight. But he would like go hunting with like the president and shit, there's this centrist guy from the Agrarian Party named Kekkonen who was president of Finland for twenty six years, who was anti communist but also anti fascist. He was a centrist guy. I don't know. Simo struggled with PTSD. It seems like you know, talks about him like having night terrors the
rest of his life. Most reports say that he was fairly lonely and he was isolated by from society by his experience, and like mostly only hung out with fellow vets. He wrote a memoir and he wrote it like right after he's recovering in the hospital, I think, and he refers to the around five hundred people he'd killed as his sin list. It is unclear to me. Someone probably knows, but no one I read about nos. No, it's unclear if this is an earnest expression of like penance or
whether it was this dry, finish humor. It doesn't like. I don't think he's like sorry, right, but like you kind of can't tell whether it's just a dry, dry humor or whether it was a you know, a religious thing in a more penitent way. When asked if he felt remorse near his ninety sixth birthday, he said I did what I was told to do as well as
I could. There would be no Finland unless everyone else had done the same, And he also talked about who he didn't hate, the Soviet soldiers, even though he knew that he had to fight them. His actual sniper count is hard to confirm. Five hundred five is the most common number of confirmed kills. It's also the lowest number by far, of the people of what is ascribed to him.
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No fucking good at it. Here's some other ads. We're back. Okay, So his actual sniper count is hard to confirm. Five hundred and five is the most common number of confirmed kills, but this is the lowest number also that has ever ascribed to him. There's an expectation that this leaves off a lot like times where multiple people shot the same
target or no one was around to confirm. I cannot imagine being in a shooting war and then being like fucking legoless and gamely being like forty three forty four like, I just I can't imagine this process. Some people think that the number is closer to eight hundred. Other people are like, look, this guy's like real good, but this is all propaganda. The number is probably like two hundred or something. I actually think that the around five hundred is a pretty safe I guess he is not a braggart.
That is not a thing that one get ascribed to this man who stands at the back of his fucking photos. You know, he's seen as the most successful sniper in history, which is incredibly disputed and probably not true. And also whatever, I don't know. There's non Western snipers with counts that are presented as way higher. Those are harder to verify. There's also a fuck ton of Soviet snipers from the war against the Nazis with very similar accounts to his.
And then the other thing is that life is in a video game and we don't actually keep score this way. I don't know what have you heard about, Like is it in your world? Is it like, oh, yeah, no, seme as number one, or is it like, oh, it's disputed, or.
There's a handful of these of these famous snipers that are It's interesting sometimes their fame doesn't come from their supposed kill count, but from other things they've done in terms of like amazing shots or whatever. Like. Yeah, Carlos Halfcock is an example of that. His marksmanship was like considered legendary and some of the things he did in that regard. But and that also has a high number
as well. But in general, I that the the consensus seems to be that Simo might be, if not the top, he's He's definitely right up there.
Yeah, yeah, And what matters the reason he's on Kobeble did cool stuff. One is because I want to talk about something real messy, and two because he was a farmer who, alongside countless others, went and did what he had to do to save his homeland from genocidal invaders and got shot in the face for it, and then tried to survive and did survive the rest of his life dealing with the ramifications of what had happened, and in the process he and his compatriots likely save Finland.
And you know, obviously this completely transformed his life and likely not for the better. But I don't blame his actions for that. I blame Stalin for that, just clearly and simply It's worth talking about the rest of Finnish history in World War Two, though, because it's one of the messiest political webs I've ever seen in my life.
I remember once I was like started reading the Finnish history and I was like talking to my girlfriend and I was like, you know, when I was like teenager or whatever, and I was like, wow, you fins like you never did anything wrong because I'm an American and all I come from is I'm a white American, so I come from all we did is wrong, right, And I don't even mean that. I guess Civil War was all right when we stopped the Confederacy, but like, overall, we're not.
There's a couple of shining moments, but.
Yes, yeah, like D Day and yeah, D.
Day's pretty amazing, right, Yeah, there's some stuff that's good. There's just it's it's moments of good. The best thing I ever heard was someone that said to me on in Range and maybe I don't know if they quoted this or they quoted someone else, but American history is punctuated with doing the right thing after exhausting all the other choices.
Yeah, that is it. Yep, even like trying to stay out of World War two or trying to not abolish slavery. Yeah, so I remember I saw. I was talking to my girlfriend about it. I was like, you didn't do anything wrong in history and she's like nope. And then I like I sorrow. Week later, I was like, you were an axis power and she's like, ooh, you got me. And that is Yeah, that is the finish attitude about this.
They were not technically an axis power in that they did not sign the you were an axis power?
What is it?
The tripe prior to a pact.
But they were driving around Nazi Nazi armor like the Stug three. In fact, if you go to the Finnish Armor Museum, there's a bunch of what would have been like German era Nazi technology tanks and uh huh. Their helmets are the stahl helm right, they're using all of this German gear. Yeah, because the Germans were supplementing their war effort against the Soviets seeing it, you know, because at that point the Germans were clearly losing on the
Eastern Front. Always were really, they just didn't know it yet. Yeah, okay, And but forgiving a bunch of gear to the Finns was like they saw the Finns as there as one of the few allies that was actually successful against the Soviets, and so, yeah, they used a lot of Nazi equipment
and met with Nazi leaders. There's necessarily notes about Mannerheim meeting with Himmler and it's interesting and they talk about the tactics of the war, and then there's a quote and a paraphrasing where later Mannheim was like, what an unimpressive man. So they had this weird relationship in which they used the gear and were allies but didn't necessarily like it.
Yeah, and I'm going to talk about some of that because they yeah, it's okay. So Hitler sees Stalin failed to conquer this tiny, sparselyss sparsely populated Finland, and suddenly Hitler gets an idea, And the idea is, what if Stalin is a fucking push This turned out to be an incorrect assessment of the situation, luckily for the rest of the world. A year or so later, on June twenty second, nineteen forty one, Hitler betrayed his friend Stalin
and invaded in Operation Barbarossa. Basically, Germany had no oil production and didn't want to rely on foreign aid. That is the quickest version I've ever heard. It seemed to make sense to me.
Yeah, I think there's a quote from Hitler where he essentially said, you kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come falling down.
Yeah, worked just as well as it did for Napoleon. Don't invade Finland and the winner and don't invade the USSR basic rules of life or Russia whatever, Okay, And so Finland helped Germany invade the USSR. Finland joined World War Two on the side of Nazi Germany in what is called the Continuation War. For three years, they fought against the USSR and helped the Nazis do the same. They let Nazis set up bases and launch attacks and
ship from their territory. They never officially joined the Axis Club. They have the odd to distinction of being the only German ally to remain a democracy during the war. All Right, here's where it gets real wild from my point of view. During the Finnish far right had a lot of Jewish leaders, and the leftist didn't hate the Jews either. So Finland was on World War II on the side of the Nazis, which means that Finnished Jews were in World War Two
on the side of the Nazis. The Finnish soldiers had a field synagogue at the front so that they could keep going to synagogue. It's probably the only synagogue for soldiers fighting alongside Hitler. History is so fucking messy. Finland didn't deport its Jews. At one point, someone in the Finnish government turned over eight out of five hundred refugees, and the rest of the Finnish government like flipped the fuck out and was like, this is not happening. Several
Jewish officers were offered the German Iron Cross. They did not accept it. They were probably like what the fuck, Oh god, what the fuck is happening? Oh God, I can't imagine being a Finn in World War two and not just spending the entire time being like what the fuck is happening? Over and over. The Finnish government, especially the Social Democrats who were allies with Germany, were like, hey, once again, we're not Hitler's allies. Were co belligerents in
a war, right, and that is their line. Other Finns are like, fuck yeah, being a Hitler's ally rules and they are like fighting for like greater Finland and shit like. Most Finnish historians agree that it is fair to refer to Finland as a German ally for most of World War two, but there's a lot of tension. Most Finns were fighting to reclaim the nineteen thirty nine border. They
just wanted back what they had just lost. Other folks wanted greater Finland, which involves concrete and all the places the Finnic people traditionally lived, like Iningria and therefore Saint Petersburg slash Leningrad. When the Finnish soldiers passed the nineteen thirty nine lines in December nineteen forty one, some soldiers started basically being like, oh shit, are we the baddies? Because they're no longer reclaiming territory, they are now invaders.
The Finish top general Mannaheim, is that his name Mannaheim. At one point he refuses to attack Leningrad. And there's like historical argument about whether or not the Finns participated in the Siege of Leningrad, and the fact that historians don't know this is wild to me. That is a not a small thing, you know, No.
It's a huge thing. The siege of Leningrad was horrendous, and so to not be able to ascertain that is a weird I don't know. I gotta say what, every time I run into something in my historical work, whether it's this recent or older, because World War Two is recent, When something like that isn't known, my little antenna goes up and it feels like something that's been suppressed.
That's Finland is trying really hard to come out of this clean. They're trying as hard as possible to be the best Nazi allies that have ever happened. Not the best is in the most allied with Nazis, but the least allied with Nazis. And so they're playing up a lot of this stuff. But it also but some of it is true, you know, but it doesn't make it okay.
And that's what's so interesting to me about this. Finland maintained relations not with the Nazi occupation government of Norway, but with the government and exile of Norway, and they tried really hard to play both sides. They weren't starving to death because they were getting German grain, but they were making like secret deals with Western powers to be like, hey, like we promise we won't do this or that attack
on the USSR. We promised we won't go along with this particular part of it, or this is all Finland trying to cover it tass in history books. The Eastern Front didn't go well for anyone. The Finns hadn't really been big on the war ever since they'd hit their old territory and reclaimed it. After the fail of the Battle of Stalingrad nineteen forty three, the Finns formed a new government mostly concerned with how to get the fuck
out of the war. The Soviet Union kept offering them peace terms which involved taking even more finished territory, and basically the Finns felt like they couldn't say yes to it because Stalin genocides them, right or because of pride, But yeah, they they didn't know what the fuck to do. Seems to be the impression. But in nineteen forty four,
the Fins were beat. The Soviets successfully invaded them right back, and they're just like, the Fins are in no position to be picky about the terms anymore, right, so they sign a peace treaty with USSR on September nineteenth, nineteen forty four. They lose even more territory than the nineteen forty line. But once again, their fierce defense once the war turned might have been part of why they didn't
lose at all. I don't really know. Then Finland joins the war again, this time on the Allied side, and they go to war against Hitler in the Lapland War. It's not like a they're not like invading Germany, right, but they are like militarily shooting the Nazis who aren't leaving Lapland the northern part of Finland. So you have the same folks who the Soviets then alongside the Nazis marched up to northern Finland and did a war against
the Nazis. The Nazis or fucks. So they did scorched earth, they burned everything, they landmned everything, which of course mostly fucks up the indigenous Sami people who were part of all of these wars on all of the sides, including the bad sides with reindeer pulled sledges, which is cool. The Communists, they weren't fucking around with the continued The Communists in Finland weren't fucking around with the Continuation War.
When I was talking earlier about how the Communists went and joined the Winter War to fight against the Soviet invasion. When it came time to be allies with the Nazis, they were like fuck no. Right the far left in Finland fought against the Finnish government. It fought against the Nazi allied government. Hundreds of leftists were arrested and many were executed for fighting against the Finnish government because you
can't be allied with fucking Hitler. After the war, anti communism was turned into right wingness and Finland to turn to the right. By the late sixties you get anarchist groups like the Winnie the Pooh Society who used folklory mythology to talk about leftism, which did not single handedly bring leftism back to Finland. I'm just including it because when you run across the anarchist group called Winnie the Pooh Society, you have to include it in your script.
If you're Margaret Kiljoy and that's Finland ed Simo. Next week, we're gonna talk about sniper on the opposite side, Ludmilla Pavlchenko, who fought the Nazis more consistently the entire time because the Nazis were the ones invading her country, and she fought Soviet sexism. Along the way, she became close personal friends with Eleanor Roosevelt, first Lady of the United States. And we get to talk about more messy history on
go people do cool stuff. Do anything more about like FEMO or anything major imissed or No.
It's just so wild, isn't it. I just it's like I think about it, and it's in a smaller context. It was a couple of years ago when I was in Finland. There's this sounds off topic, but it isn't There's this really interesting strange art complex north of Helsinki, a couple hours drive, and it's this weird statuary with a bunch of statues with filled with dentures and maybe human teeth. You can look it up on Atlas Obscura. It's insane, okay, But it's right on the Finnish Russian border.
And this is of course before the current conflict was going on in Ukraine that forced, not forced, finally got things to change where Finland is now part of NATO. But at any rate, it's right there on the border. And this was there was this barbed wire fence and this sign in Finnish and Russian about the gigantic minefield that existed just east of that. So you're standing in this statuary and like a few feet away as a minefield,
and that was a couple of years ago. And that's an example of the of the feeling in Finland about their Russian neighbors, and of course now with what's happening with Ukraine that that feeling is not just justified legitimately concerning like there's a real real thing there that they experienced once before and they look at what's going on now and they see it like that's not that different, and who knows if it's next us next again? Right. So I think that that has shaped so much Finnish culture.
And I think the Winter War and Continuation Wars shaped Finnish culture not just from a military perspective, not just from a from a from a from a war type perspective, but in how they just approach life like compulsory service. A lot of people are reservists still. They have a shooting culture now called the SRA, but the same was over the US ESRAH and they go out and they practice and train and all of that is the idea that they're trying to be potentially ready if the Russians
did it again. And I think that that's part of the psyche. And I think that that trickles down into even other simple things like how you prepare for winter or your food stores or other things. Yeah, and it still affects them.
Now, Okay, I have a question though about standing next to a minefield? Did you have intrusive thoughts about wanting to throw rocks into the minefield?
Yes? How do you not have that as a human being?
I can't imagine otherwise?
That seems like the natural order of things?
Yeah. Well, also the natural order of things is watching in range TV. Do you want to talk about that or something else?
Yeah, I mean, sure, that's the I mean, I don't know if that's part of the natural order, but it's it's not.
I'm just trying to, Yeah, make weird transitions. No, I like, do it in regular conversation now, And my friends are like, you're not recording. You don't have to make transitions anyway. Sorry, you're a podcaster, I know.
Being a content creator, it is nice to know people want to watch your work or listen to your work, or consume your work because it has value. To them and hopefully that's the case. So yeah, you can find in range TV at range dot tv, which is my website, and from there you can find all the different distribution points. Predominantly most people watch on YouTube, and it is a I always hesitate to call it a firearms channel, although
it is. We have a lot of gun content, a lot of competition content, but it's mixed in with history and culture and hopefully that shapes the narrative in a way that it's unique and is more about community and
humanity than it is about glorification of the horrors. And so it's also very much about where firearms like messy history like this, which is where firearms have been used in what I call intentionally induced amnesia events where people don't know about it because it's been left out of the general cultural narrative to do amazing things and save lives.
And there are people alive today because they had a gun, and we don't talk about that as much as much as we talk about the times where people have been lost to them. But it's a difficult and messy topic. Anyways, if you like that approach to it in range dot.
Tv, yeah, and I do like that approach, and I suggest people listen to it. The history of One of the things that comes up over and over again on the show is people fighting and dying literally to just find small arms. You know, so many times access to small arms is the difference between being wiped out as
a culture and not. It's not a great system by which to wage a war, but it is a great system by which to offer community defense, which can make all of the difference of being a spiky target versus a not spiky target. But it's also complicated and it's more than I can get into right now. Obviously, choosing to be armed as a very personal choice with a
lot of variables, but okay, I want to plug. I wrote a book a while ago called A Country of Ghosts is an anarchists utopia book, and it's about some people in some mountains defending themselves on skis and rifles against It's like an against an invading army, and it is absolutely People are like, wow, what is your inspiration on this, And I'm like, I was a finophile as a kid. I read about the Winter War was very
influential on me. I had to at some point do something with people with rifles and skis and it's called a country it goes. That is not the part of it that is what most people think about. But I'll plug that. The most recent publisher of it is Akpress and has a fantasy city painted on for the cover, and I was like so excited. It's my first like
fantasy city painting on a cover. And I actually am probably going to write a book with a dragon in it literally just so that I can have a book of mine with a painted dragon on the cover at some point in my life. Sophie, what do you.
Got just at cool Zone Media?
Buck, Yeah things. Next week we're going to talk about more of the shit and it's going to be good buck to you.
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