- Joined
- Apr 25, 2020
After seeing an old article mentioning Karl, I was thinking about what got Ian and Karl to be friends in the first place. And I reached the conclusion that it was probably their shared love of history. Both men do very similar things when it comes down to it, too: they look for documentation to back their arguments. And as far as guns go, manuals of arms and doctrine manuals are their Holy Grail. But doctrine and real life are two different things and soldiers are infamous for bending and/or ignoring the rules once the rubber has met the road. So the official documentation needs to be supplemented by knowledge drawn from real-life experience.Does anyone else remember the whole debacle where he made a comment in one video to the effect of "You pull the charging handle on the G3 down and release it, you NEVER perform the HK slap the HK slap is a bad thing to do." and then people were like "Literally how is the HK slap bad for the gun and who has ever said 'don't do that'?"
And then Karl made at least one video where he pulled up the Bundeswehr operating manual for the G3 and appealed to doctrine to say "SEE? The Bundeswehr CLEARLY states to not do the HK slap! I'm right and you're wrong! nanner nanner nanner!"
And then everyone else was like "Yeah sure, maybe it says that but you still haven't explained why it's actually bad to do." alongside a couple guys who were claiming to be former Bundeswehr who were all like "The manuals told us not to do it but we did it anyways. No one cared and it caused no problems with the rifles."
I remember that.
So, both Ian and Karl come in from the same angle and have similar blind spots with regards to supplemental information. But while Ian will attempt some level of scholarly rigor and generally corrects himself (sometimes begrudgingly) when presented with contradicting evidence or first-hand testimony (possibly because he has talked to a lot of actual scholars and experts), Karl has become so certain of his opinions that unless someone forces him to change his mind getting that dude to admit he's wrong or even explain where he gets his supposedly unassailable information from is like drawing blood from a stone.
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