Kar 98A Primer
- Thread starter CRH113
- Start date
Guillaume d'Orange
Senior Member
I like the Kar98a very much. I remember Mae ranking it 4th or 5th of all WWI rifles (after the US1917, the SMLE, the Arisaka, etc). It's #1 for me.
He needs to learn more about the ammo , dates , how and when it was used in which rifles . He is still spreading bad info . They did not have to use the P-88 ammo in enblocs or S ammo in chargers , the ammo could and was used either way . German manuals show how to change ammo in clips or enblocs . His understanding of the Gew-88 is lacking and he spreads it in other video subjects .
CRH113
Senior Member
I’m sure he’d be more than welcome to get the info from you, his goal is to be as correct as possible. You can send him a message through their contact form. Make sure to cite your sources.
Contact - C&Rsenal
Due to the volume of questions we receive, please read the following FAQ before submitting your own: I have questions about my gun. Do you know ?Possibly. However, if it isn't in one of our episodes it's very unlikely we know much. Finding out takes a lot of research time. We are happy to
candrsenal.com
I have no interest in helping someone on youtube . They can find put in their own time and find the resources and info , but in may be easier just to repeat old and embellish it . Or do real shooting tests , not just fire into the air . He does low level cartoon videos , but that is what his followers want .
CRH113
Senior Member
How’s he supposed to know where to look if he doesn’t have a starting point? He was mentioning this kind of crap happening, people are sure as hell willing to poke holes in his research but they’ll be damned if they back up their claims. The only reason it is on youtube in the first place is because that is where the most people will watch the show. No network will pick up what they’re doing. They’re spending at minimum 60-70 hours a week making a documentary every 2 weeks, and they’ve been doing it for 10 years.
Cyrano4747
Well-known member
He's pretty responsive when you contact him about stuff too. I had a nice back and forth with him a while ago about something else.
MichaelWC
Senior Member
You're entitled to your own opinion. I don't really see anything wrong with helping somebody who is on youtube. In my opinion, the show is great to help spread information, help the community and help the hobby grow. There is nothing wrong with that.
Sure some information maybe wrong or incorrect. That is why C&Rsenal has updated several of there older episodes because information changes all the time.
In all honesty I have helped C&Rsenal on three of there episodes. They are great people.
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Cyrano4747
Well-known member
Probably because he drew from a source that had the incorrect information.
His channel does a huge variety of topics. No one is going to be a world-class expert on all of them. When you're doing that kind of thing you need to lean on published literature, and accept that if there are errors in it you will reproduce them. I have to give him a lot of credit for not insisting on his own infallibility or the infallibility of his sources and being willing to revisit and correct past mistakes.
This is how it works pretty much every where. No one is an expert on everything. At its most basic this is how teaching classes that aren't directly in your field work at universities. When I was still teaching my background was in German history, and when my number came up to do the World History 101 course that covered pre-history through 1450 I sure as heck wasn't in a position to have an expert opinion on the Aztecs and the Roman Empire and Medieval France and Tang Dynasty China and the Mongolian etc. So you pull a few books off the shelf, write a few emails to friends who DO know those areas better, get a reading list, and spend your summer reading and then digesting that into something the typical undergrad can interact with. And sometimes you screw it up and it turns out the source you were using on pre-Colombian Mesoamerica was outdated and just wrong on some things, so you say oops and edit your syllabus and fix that moving forward.
Pulling together and synthesizing a broad body of work is a very real skill, and one that's not trivial to develop.
With the caveat that I don't know him or his team well (again, I've had some pleasant email exchanges but that's it - he's not my best bud or anything) everything I've seen points to him doing it right. He's pretty transparent about what sources he's drawing from, accepts criticism gracefully, and attempts to correct errors when they're brought to his attention. The latter ,I may add, despite Youtube directly disincentivizing that kind of thing with how they handle older videos. He's not forging new trails in researching historical firearms, but he's doing a hell of a lot to bring them to a broader audience and to help grow and sustain this hobby. The fact that he's remained humble about the extent of his specific expertise and doesn't claim to be an infallible authority puts hm head and shoulders above the vast majority of pop-history content on Youtube, a good chunk of the firearms-oriented channels, and a damn sight better than Forgotten Weapons specifically.
edit: seriously, I have a ton of respect for people who make complex fields digestible for normal people. It does no one here any good for historical firearms to be that thing that normal people consider the preserve cranky old grandpas and the weird gun nuts. I know more than one person who has been drawn into the hobby by videos like that, and that is a good thing. The hobby needs new blood or it will die off.
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As I said , he delivers beginner level videos . Most of his viewers are fine with that , but still get bad info . His Gew-88 video was about 50% incorrect info from technical to the meanings of markings . In your university that would be a grade of F . Do people that got a F in a subject teach it ? So anyone that " took his course on Gew=88's " can now get a F in the subject . That is the problem with youtube , so much bad info . I have never seen the general public as Ignorant [ not dumb or stupid ] on so many subjects as of late . That is why I would tell about WWII , but not how to bake a cake .
Also I am more sensitive to people posting bad info . For about 15 years at my range , in all of my shooting contests I put on there was this one guy . He shot in all the matches . He was always last place or had a gun malfunction . He had no idea what he was doing and would not take help . BUT he was all over the internet and wrote for websites . There he was unbeatable , put everyone to shame . But that was not the worst part . He told people how to handload and how great his loads were . That was sad because so many beginners copied his terrible loading advice . His handgun loads were so bad [ in every caliber ] his bullets were tumbling on the 15 yard target . He could not get 5 shots on a 1 foot sq rifle target at 100 yards . He would shoot his own rifle targets at 10 yards and post them as 100 yard targets in articles . The damage he did to the shooting world was amazing . I also see some of this in magazine articles .
Fal Grunt
Senior Member
Ernie, we've been round and round on this subject. You still refuse, for whatever reason, to show your material evidence from your hundreds of guns and spend more time condemning people than educating them. People are ignorant because there is a huge generational period of people who like yourself, wish to condemn, or worse, people for not knowing something while simultaneously not being willing to educate them.
When I was a tool & die maker I was always amazed at the old men who spent half their day talking about how worthless and stupid the apprentices and younger journeyman were, and yet REFUSED, even when ordered by the company, to share and teach the younger guys. I can rattle off easily a dozen topics that have been totally LOST because preceding generations decided to bitch about the incompetency of the younger generation instead of taking the time to teach them.
You constantly boast of the hundreds of guns you own and all the research and data you have that no one else has. When you die it will be *GONE*. A complete waste of your time if it is not passed on. Your life is your own, live it as you see fit. But there is little point to constantly commenting about everyone that is wrong while being generally unwilling to correct them in any meaningful way.
Cyrano4747
Well-known member
You would be wrong.
For the sake of argument assume we're just looking at the last ~150-175 years or so of widespread public education in the US and chunks of Western Europe and ignoring the massive swaths of history where education was a) only for the wealthy elite b) religious or c) both. Even then the average somewhat educated individual had a decent grasp of whatever the curricula of the time deemed important, but little else. Heck, let's restrict it to just the period after the 40s, well after public education had been established in the US.
You have an absolute explosion in educational attainment in the US between 1940 and 2000 with the proportion of the population graduating high school almost doubling every two decades. Now, I will be the first to admit that this is a messy proxy for what you are talking about.
Here is a snippet of something that I had left over from a research project many years ago. It paints the picture pretty well. All data published by the US Census.
The picture gets a lot more complex when you start looking at male vs female, by racial category, and geographic area (the South in particular had really dire public schooling even for white students for a very long time), but that's the broad strokes. I'll also add that something similar can be seen if you look in the 19th century, roughly 1865 - 1895. Also Germany ~1800-1865 and the USSR 1917-1938. Educational explosions like that are amazing for how they reshape societies.
Someone who drops out of middle school might nonetheless spend a lot of time at the library and know far more about history than a disinterested student who finished high school. But, be that as it may, it is still a useful rough gauge. There is also a very big difference between what we can describe as the basic, basil level of knowledge a person might have about a subject through cultural osmosis vs. more in-depth knowledge. To use an easy historical example, most people have at least a crude knowledge of what a Nazi is based purely on cultural references, but far fewer have a reasonable grasp of German politics in the 1930s and the crises that ushered in Hitler's dictatorship.
What you're likely perceiving is the change in curricular goals between now and when you were in high school. It's fairly likely, for example, that some of the people you are lambasting for having deficient knowledge of history know a fair bit more than you do about a number of other things.
Anyways, I'll cut it off here. The history of education is something that I can go off at length about. It was one of the first major areas I did significant research, and remains a topic I'm passionate about. The long and the short of it, however, is that the world in general - and even the US - has never been more educated than it is today. This is doubly true if you're part of a group that has traditionally been denied educational opportunities.
edit: here's the table for educational attainment for women by race - this really puts it into stark relief. The jump, for example, in Native populations is staggering. Keep in mind this is all within living memory. When families start moving up the educational ladder it can happen quickly and have some jarring consequences. I say this as someone with a doctorate who's grandfather was a sharecropper who dropped out of the 4th grade. That sort of inter-generational mobility can cause some whiplash.
edit 2: oops, I cut the years off of this when I screen capped it. The columns are the same as above. Far left column (starting 28.1 for white women) is 1940, the far right one (starting 83.7) is 2000, with each column in between being the intervening decades in order.
There is a similar story to be told about post-secondary education as well. The long and the short of it is that in the years before WW2 you are looking at less than 5% of the population with a bachelor's (with the usual caveats - lower for women, MUCH lower for African Americans and Natives). By 2000 almost a quarter of the US had a BA/BS and the racial disparities, while still very significant, were much lower in scale.
I wish I had good data for how it breaks down by economic class, but the US Census just doesn't track that as well as I would like, especially before the 70s or so. Still, it very much is there. Looking at the data for an impoverished area of rural Appalachia looks very different from a professional-heavy suburb outside of Boston. The general picture I've painted holds true there as well, though, with the caveat that the magnitude of the changes are less pronounced in areas that were already starting from a higher baseline.
edit 3: Ernie, I want to be clear that this isn't an attack on you or me trying to show you up. But this is something I hear a lot and it's just wrong. For what it's worth, old people complaining about kids these days is a tradition that literally goes back to antiquity.
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I have shared a lot of info here that corrected old bad info , and it has been proven correct . I was the one who showed what a real Gew-88 S was and how to tell . What the notch was for in the 05 . The original 05 rear sight . What the bore sizes are . What the dot on the receiver means . Bullet sizes . That is educating , and it is harder to do when people contradict that with bad info quoted from the bad sources . I need a source of documents to tell someone the S cartridge is not longer than the P-88 cartridge ? [ another bit of bad info that will not go away ] I just thought that looking at real ammo was the proof . I feel it would be foolish to post photos of a large collection of firearms on the internet , then it becomes proof for whomever . Gew-88's are a small part . You do not have to post proof to me that you are tool and die maker , as a machinist myself I can tell you are real by what you say . I feel real provable facts prove them wrong , just like the cartridge size . There is a long list of things in the Gew-88 video that are proven to be wrong , pointing out the truth is not condemning them , it is correcting them . I do not care if someone wants to still think the S round is longer , I tried to help . What I do with my time is up to me and gun collecting and shooting , and running rifle matches , and building rifles , and test shooting 1000's of rifles was just some of the things I did for fun . I also built race cars , was a pro driver , own a car lot and buy cars , had a collection of classic cars , deep sea fished on my boat , spent a lot of time on tropical islands , own oil wells , hunt at my game ranch , teach kids to shoot and hunt , spearfish . I also do not feel the need to prove any of that with photos . I do not even own a camera , and for the response to that , not a cell phone either . And as far as teaching the younger gen , I am trying . Most do not care . I am teaching a friends 18 yo kid about working on cars , he is the first to show any interest . It is hard . He knows so little , like there is air in tires ? You can change your own oil ? No problem solving skills at all , they just try and look it up on their phone . That is why the bad internet info is so harmful .
The college or high school degree is worthless to most . A lot of those people can not tell a boy from a girl , think men can have babies , do not know the basic history of this country , can't do math . Just listen to them talk . I bet a person from Appalachia knows a man can not have a baby , compare that to a student in Boston . My grandfather went to 7th grade , he ended up an electrical engineer in a power plant . My father did not clear high school , yet became a top exec for UPS with a ton of college people working for him . A friend runs a major business , most of his dock workers have degrees , a few with masters . For many a college degree has nothing to do with if they are smart .
Cyrano4747
Well-known member
ok then