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How we burned in the prison camps later thinking: What would things have been like if every police operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive? If during periods of mass arrests people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever was at hand? The organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt.
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  • The only version of the Madsen sold in any quantity was the .30 caliber (.30-06). These were bought by Columbia.
  • The only version of the Madsen sold in any quantity was the .30 caliber (.30-06). These were bought by Columbia.
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Article Of The Moment
Antique Japanese (samurai) Edo period tanegashima, showing the firing mechanism.

The Snap Matchlock is a type of matchlock mechanism used to ignite early firearms. It was used in Europe from about 1475 to 1640, and in Japan from 1543 till about 1880.[1]

The serpentine (a curved lever with a clamp on the end) was held in firing position by a weak spring[2], and released by pressing a button, pulling a trigger, or even pulling a short string passing into the mechanism. The slow match held in the clamp swung into a flash pan containing priming powder. The flash from the flash pan travelled through the touch hole igniting the main propellant charge of the gun. As the match was often extinguished after its relatively violent collision with the flash pan, this means of ignition fell out of favour with soldiers, but was often used in fine target weapons.

The technology was transported to Japan, where it became known as the Tanegashima, in 1543 by the Portuguese[3] and flourished there until the 1900s. The Japanese Matchlock, or Tanegashima seems to have been based on snap matchlocks that were produced in the armory of Goa India, which was captured by the Portuguese in 1510.[4]

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