GUNCRANK DIARIES

As I sit typing these words, our country is in the throes of the most acrimonious presidential election in recent history. As far as I can tell, it is...

The sordid story of the Batavia Massacre serves simply to illustrate that, if left to our own devices, human beings are indeed reliably bad.

Human society rightfully venerates its heroes. On a certain primal level, this is a survival mechanism. For the species to endure, bravery and selflessness...

In 1984, TV producer Donald Bellisario thought the 222 looked pretty sharp and chose it to be the science fiction gunship in his exciting new TV series...

Aluminum is a ubiquitous material in modern society. In 1956, when Gene Stoner and a few others designed that first AR-15 rifle around aluminum receivers,...

World War II was the bloodiest conflict in human history. We’ve been offing each other wholesale ever since Cain first got cross with his brother Abel....

I came of age in the 1970s hunting behind the levee in the Mississippi Delta with my dad. Though I took it for granted at the time, this was the coolest...

What would happen if a bunch of men were entrusted with a whole pile of nuclear bombs? They would dig an enormous hole and create the world's biggest gun.

Most people start out with about the same amount of raw material. As a result, everybody is the sum total of the choices they make in life. Some of those...

“Doc, I have sinus,” says almost everybody. At that point, I typically smile and inquire about how long someone has felt bad and explore the sordid...

Army aviators will do absolutely anything to fly, and to keep flying. In some cases, that means a little selective truth management.

If random armed rednecks are a deterrent to crime, that seems like an opportunity to me. Enter: Will's Redneck Rentals.

As a card-carrying man, I have little use for safety stuff. I have an antique lawn mower I inherited from my grandfather. Everything on it is pressed steel,...

When you work in an urban emergency room, so much of the unfettered tragedy you see there is the result of poor impulse control or just rank stupidity. Now...

I’m on my fifth career. You really cannot start medical school at 32 and convince anybody that’s what you always wanted to do. I like to tell folks that...

It is this dirt, this accursed Tennessee soil. We venerate this place because of what it has seen, what it has endured. While it is gorgeous and peaceful...

We live in the weirdest world these days. According to the curious moral calculus of the Information Age, it is okay to blow somebody to bits with a...

Being a patient in an American hospital is innately dehumanizing. We try to keep it dignified, but that’s often more a voyage than a destination. It’s...

CAUTION: Read at your own risk! No activity mentioned in this article should be duplicated, replicated, or copycatted for fear of injury or death ... seriously!

I recently saw a very sweet lady in the clinic who had gotten her finger stuck in a sewing machine. I encounter folks at work who run afoul of sundry wild...

Eve Gordon was the most compelling public speaker I have ever heard. A small-statured elderly woman with a pronounced limp and an impeccably gorgeous...

Kylie and Lauren had not seen each other in more than a decade. They had been roommates and Chi Omegas at the University of Mississippi for four years....

Our great nation was built by rugged individualists who bent the world to their will. These days, it seems populated by professional victims whose day jobs...

The human animal is such a curious beast. To learn to do something, we must practice it. They say it takes 10,000 iterations before we can get really good...

Mike was the first of my comrades to “see the elephant.” This term has nebu-lous origins, but in martial parlance, it means to have experienced war. In...

My walk-in medical clinic is the best place in town for meeting people. Everybody ends up there at some point. My quaint little southern community has no...

Capt. McClintock’s contrivance has come to be known as a Bangalore Torpedo. You may also hear it referred to as a Banger, a Bangalore or a pole charge.

As a young man, I admit to having harbored a fairly stylized mental image of criminals. My vision of the typical run-of-the-mill burglar was a...

The Israelis call Oct. 7, 2023, Black Sabbath. On that one day, Hamas terrorists murdered roughly 1,400 people. They further took 240 hostages. The...

"Listen, stud, I tell people they are going to die from lung cancer about once every six weeks, and I deal with the stress of my job without cigarettes. You...