www.faisal.com/geek/guns.html
Our thanks to the US Army, whose training manuals we have shamelessly cribbed for material. We would like to encourage other knowledgeable members of the CS community to share their expertise in a similar fashion. There is a real need for this kind of dialogue in the department. The new students come in here every fall, and are totally unequipped to handle the realities of graduate student life at CMU. Computability theory and lexical scoping are fine things to know about, but they just don't cut the mustard when somebody from the Psych department opens up on you with an Ingram set to full auto. I had recent occasion to view your Presentation Announcement on care and feeding of automatic weapons during lecture hall. I would very much like to see and/or contribute future material. We have similar problems here at Berkeley, though it has been difficult to wean our students away from more the more mundane assortment of Browning Hi-Power's, Beretta 92SBF's and Sig-Sauer P226's. The 9mm clique is pretty strong here, and the young grad students fairly parsimonious. They tend to balk at the idea of spending enough money on ammo to make full auto firefights practical. Lately, they've taken to sniping at each other from the Campanille tower and engaging in loose hit-and-run guerrilla tactics during finals. This is obviously not the American Way and needs to be changed. While I've been able to slowly ween them into more progressive arms (such as the Beretta 93R and an occasional mini-uzi), I still can't seem to get past the supply problem. It was certainly interesting to hear of conditions out on the West Coast. The faculty is absolutely first rate, and they all take pride in their weapons skills. We are admittedly a pretty opinionated bunch, which provides for many interesting interchanges within the community. Yes, I am aware of the West Coast predilection for 9mm pistolry. When I was an undergraduate, I spent one summer doing AI hacking at the MIT AI Lab. We'd hired this west coast guy to do Lisp hacking, and I can clearly remember being a little stranged out by his attitudes. He just wouldn't shut up about Interlisp and Browning Hi-Power's. He just couldn't get it through his head that I didn't want to hear about Interlisp, and I damn sure didn't want to hear about 9-fu1king-millimeter automatics; I'm not quite as adamant about that sort of thing as I used to be. But I've always thought that the west coast was really missing out on a good thing. I mean, on the east coast, public comment sometimes requires you to tuck a Beretta discreetly away in a shoulder holster. But when you are in Berkeley, it being the sort of place that it is, you can stroll down the street toting your automatic rifle of choice without so much as raising an eyebrow. I think that while LA represents the dark, twisted climb-the-water-tower-and-start-shooting-until-the-Marines-settle-i t side of California weirdness, Berkeley represents the very best of the pure, innocent-killer side of it all. The first weekend I ever spent in Berkeley was in the summer of 1983. I was sitting down at one of those really delightful cafes you have out there. To my left some old man was drinking cappucino and practicing Chinese calligraphy; It seems a shame that ammunition is so hard to come by out there, though. The departmental attitude towards logistical support really crystallised for me in September of my first year. One of the incoming first-year hot-shots had taken out Prof. We were all really impressed, and I think it was generally agreed that Felton couldn't have asked for a more painless, appropriate end. It was a beautiful, almost poetic way to cap what had been a textbook career of brilliant, original mathematical insights punctuated with outbursts of random, deeply unhinged violence. Many were the stories of Felton told that week -- we were particularly touched that, in a very real sense, he'd died with his boots on. You've probably heard of Felton (National Academy of Science, IEEE Past President, NRA sustaining member). My advisor told me later that Felton's academic peak had come at that now-infamous 1982 Symposium on Data Encryption, when he presented the plaintext of the encrypted challenge message that Rob Merkin had published earlier that year using his "phonebooth packing" trap-door algorithm. According to my advisor, Felton wordlessly walked up to the chalkboard, wrote down the plaintext, cranked out the multiplies and modulus operations by hand, and wrote down the result, which was obviously identical to the encrypted text Merkin had published in CACM. Then, still without saying a word, he tossed the chalk over his shoulder, spun around, drew and put a 158grain semi-wadcutter right between Merkin's eyes. At Felton's funeral, our departmental chairman delivered the eulogy. They are interested in training *real* academicians, suitably prepared for life in the jungle of university-level computer science. And that means time spent practicing our teaching skills and weapons handling *as well as* making fundamental research contributions to the field. The department does not care to just crank out PhD's, half of whom aren't going going to make it through their first semester as a junior professor without winding up in a body bag. They are committed to a solid grounding in small arms fire, and if that means spending some grant money for the necessary resources, they are ready to stand up to the line. So the short answer is, the department supplies us with all the ammunition we can use, and then some. They even keep those crazy Czechs supplied, who come in here every year with the absolutely strangest knock-off versions of other countrys' guns that you have ever laid eyes on. The free ammunition has some nice side effects, too: the campus police never, ever give CS grad students parking tickets. And you just wouldn't believe how attentive the students are in the courses we TA. Any opinions expressed on this site are not the opinions of my current or former employers nor of any projects or organizations which any of us are or have been associated with.
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