Happy Veterans Day!

Thanks to all who have served their country in uniform, past and present.

William Belmont, who has been vouched for by a very trustworthy friend, is trying to raise money to upgrade the magazines used by some of our troops. Faulty magazines can mean misfires, which can lead to tragic results in battle. I reproduce an email I received from him, below. Help out, if you can.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

I am sending this email to ask for your help in assisting our soldiers that are fighting in Afghanistan .

They are not asking for Gatorade, toothpaste, sweets or baby wipes, all things that would make life in the desert tolerable…What they are asking for is life saving equipment.

This year, at my children’s elementary school, they started an Adopt a Soldier/Pen Pal Program. Each class was assigned a deployed soldier to correspond with and assist if needed.

We received an email from one of the soldiers, Matt S, who is in desperate need of an equipment upgrade. Matt tells us that the rifle magazines they have now (the standard issued aluminum magazines) have been having a lot of feeding issues into their weapons which puts him and his soldiers at risk during fire fights.

Matt told us the following:

The aluminum magazines that are issued are pretty terrible. They require a lot of maintenance and many times they account for over 80% of M4 malfunctions with an otherwise good, well maintained M4. Weapons malfunctions are potentially deadly. We had a close call 2 days ago when we were engaged in a fire fight with the enemy and the guns jammed. More specifically, as you already know, M4 malfunctions are deadly because a soldier must go through certain steps to perform immediate/remedial action in order to fix the issues. Some of these steps will not solve an issue with a magazine. It will require a soldier to get a completely new set of magazines for his kit. Many of my soldiers have been using aluminum magazines and have been having lots of weapons malfunctions. Polymer mags fix this problem because they are more easily well maintained and are able to keep their spring compression a lot longer than normal magazines. These are absolute life savers. Unfortunately they also come at a higher cost than normal magazines.

To replace an entire combat would cost a typical Private about ~$150 dollars at a minimum. For a lot of these infantrymen, with costs of their own (dealing with family issues- Unfortunately a lot of these soldiers are dealing with child support or some kind of family pay issue), but a lot of them are also making out of pocket purchases for additional pieces of kit which makes their life easier. This is an important component of their kit because it directly determines how their weapon fires/feeds. It’s a life and death matter when an individual has only 1 weapon system.

The total cost to properly outfit Matt’s platoon is $2300.

There is an issue with shipping military related equipment overseas (ITAR Law). The US Department of State has restrictions and limitations on who is allowed to ship military type equipment overseas. Instead of boring you with the specifics, I will tell you the good news.

I spoke to an executive at Magpul (a manufacturer of Pmags). He was very cooperative and will do the following:

1 - He will file the necessary paperwork with the USDOS so that Magpul can ship the pmags directly to Matt.

2 – Magpul will absorb the cost to ship the pmags to Matt.

2 - He dropped the cost to $11 per magazine so the total cost to get Matt and his platoon 210 polymer magazines will be $2310.

What better way to acknowledge Veterans Day then to assist our young men and women who are in harms way overseas.

Each magazine is only $11.

Please call or email me if you would like to donate money to this effort. The sooner I get the money, the sooner I can get the Pmags in their hands.

Hopefully, we can get the pmags to them before Turkey Day.

Thanks,

William Belmont, Esq.
The Belmont Group, LLC
118 East 60th Street, Suite 2100
New York, New York 10022
Direct: 212.695.0086
Cell: 917.647.6609
Fax: 917.591.3361
Email: bill@thebelmontgrp.com

www.thebelmontgrp.com

* * * * * * * * *

Since Magpul is helping out, I encourage people to visit their web site and check out their wide variety of fine shooting products.

Update: From Yojimbo in the comments:

And our thoughts are also with all our Commonwealth buddies on this Remembrance Day as well. A red poppy to all our Blairite buddies out there, especially in Canada as "Last Post" is only a few minutes away now in Ottawa.