This is too good: Get Your War On (slideshow).

Interesting profile in The New Yorker on Jerry Baber, an Appalachian gunsmith who wants the military to adopt his robotic soldiers. The technology is made possible by his recoil-less automatic shotgun, which allows the robots to fire without having their aim disrupted:

Until recently, Baber’s reputation as a firearms craftsman was known only to a few dozen gun-trade insiders. Then, a few years ago, he started producing, from start to finish, his own weapon: a fully automatic shotgun called the AA-12. The AA-12 has the power of a twelve-gauge shotgun but none of its bruising recoil. Recoil is a problem with any shotgun; a typical single-shot twelve-gauge will, as Baber puts it, “just rattle your damn teeth when it goes off.” A gun’s kick occurs when gas from ignited gunpowder propels the shell out of a gun barrel, creating an equal and opposite force that pushes the gun’s firing bolt backward. That force eventually gets transferred to the shooters shoulder, and the pop of the recoil also sends the barrel upward. Trying to fire an automatic version of a twelve-gauge shotgun would be like holding a fire hose with one hand.

By contrast, you can fire an AA-12—which shoots five shotgun shells per second—with one hand and hold a mug of coffee in the other without spilling it. Made almost entirely of aircraft-grade stainless steel, the gun can fire thousands of rounds without cleaning. Baber spent a dozen years, and upward of a million and a half dollars of his own money, perfecting the gun. He believes that the AA-12 is the most deadly close-range weapon ever created.

Here’s a YouTube demo reel. I thought the one-hand claim might be an exaggeration, but I guess not.

Seven hundred billion dollars:

The cost of the war in Iraq will reach $320 billion after the expected passage next month of an emergency spending bill currently before the Senate, and that total is likely to more than double before the war ends, the Congressional Research Service estimated this week.

Seven. Hundred. Billion. Dollars.

I'm thinking we could have spent that money better.

I was going to make a joke about how big a wall we could have built around the US, but wasn't willing to put in the work.