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Small and Heavy Arms Traded On Facebook By Libyan Militants (rt.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A report entitled "The Online Trade of Light Weapons in Libya" on Thursday revealed machine guns, grenade launchers and anti-tank missiles are being traded in Libya via Facebook. Some of the weapons include those supplied by the U.S. allies to their Libyan proxies, while most come from raids by militants on the arsenals of former Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. "Many of the players in this new market began to use new technologies to hawk their wares," the paper says. Online sales from social media platforms such as Facebook "are one of the tools currently being used for this purpose." Machine guns made up the bulk of the Facebook offers, including six Soviet-made 12,7mm DShKMs, 11 14,5mm KPVs, and one Belgian 12,7mm FN Browning M2-type heavy machine gun. Large-caliber anti-material sniper rifles and a handful of other weapons have also been advertised on Facebook, according to the research.
I gave them a shoddy bomb casing full of used pinball machine parts.
How 'bout all of them? Russia's share of the market has dwindled significantly during the Obama years. Hillary's legacy is one to be real proud of, eh?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
they found me, I don't know how but they found me. Run for it, Marty!
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How is Zuck going to monetize this?
Wow: A whole 18 machine guns - man-portable ones from 1933 and 1938, and a vehicle-mounted version from 1949 (suitable for taking potshots at WW II aircraft, if you have a set of four working together, mounted on a trailer behind your Jeep).
There are collectors with far more than that many. I think typical shipments from nation-states to their anti-establishment proxies have more than that many per package.
Somehow I don't think they've found the underground arms market that's arming any major insurgency.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Well, maybe in the US where it's essentially exercising 1A and 2A rights - that should be banned, after all. But it's fine in Libya and other places overseas because it's part of their culture and Facebook would show microaggressions if they didn't allow such trades and discussions to take place.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Is there a link to this Facebook weapons bazaar?
[ISIS] was, you know, pretty much decimated when US forces were there in Iraq. It had maybe 700-or-so adherents left. And then it grew quite a bit in the last several years, when it split then from al-Qaida in Syria, and set up its own organization.
Seems that Brennan claims it was basically dead when President Bush handed it over to President Obama. And it's grown since then...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Wow: A whole 18 machine guns - man-portable ones from 1933 and 1938, and a vehicle-mounted version from 1949 (suitable for taking potshots at WW II aircraft, if you have a set of four working together, mounted on a trailer behind your Jeep).
There are collectors with far more than that many. I think typical shipments from nation-states to their anti-establishment proxies have more than that many per package.
Somehow I don't think they've found the underground arms market that's arming any major insurgency.
, , , and MANPAD and antitank missiles.
From second link; "The research group recorded 1,346 sales over the course of the last 18 months and found between 250 and 300 sales posts went up each month." That's maybe not huge, but more than you've quoted.
I wish people would make at least an attempt at informing themselves before they try to be authoritative about things they do not understand.
First of all, the Dushki in questions are Ms, which means that they are not from the Thirties. They date at the very least from the late Forties, and were manufactured well into the Eighties. I remember when we started replacing them in Bulgaria, and we were manufacturing the NSV (Nikitin-Sokolov-Volkov) ourselves. Countries that did not manufacture the superseding machine guns (NSV or Kord) must have kept theirs. In the early 2000s, the DShks were still one of the most common heavy machine gun. They are not obsolete by any means.
Second, those guns have proved themselves against relatively modern planes and helicopters, as the British (for some reason) have been learning through the Eighties, Nineties and Oughts.
Third, this heavy machine gun is a pretty solid piece of work. The barrel you have to keep keep replacing anyway, if you ever use it in earnest, but the rest of it is solid and lasts for long time. I remember tinkering with the three heavies we had in the 80s in Bulgaria, and the dushka was the one with the simplest, most solid inner workings.
Fourth, I am sure that GAU-19 and Kord are much superior, but those are probably orders of magnitude more expensive, and probably impossible to get unless you are well connected (which unfortunately describes the people in whose facilities ISIS goes shopping) So a DShk is still a very desirable machine gun, and in a completely different class from RPKs, let alone good ole AKs and their ilk.
So, no, these are not museum pieces, but rather effective death dealing machines.
No good deed goes unpunished...