Stars and Stripes

Everyone knows why we have 50 stars on the American Flag… hopefully.

What many people may not know, or even realize is why there are 13 stripes. Do you remember learning the song “13 Original Colonies” in school? Maybe not, but that’s why we have 13 stripes; 7 red stripes and 6 white stripes, because of the 13 original colonies that our country had.

These were 13 colonies of Great Britain, inhabited on the East Coast, eventually declaring Independence from Britain in 1776. These Thirteen Colonies consisted of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. Most people don’t know that the 14th state, the first to be cut out of the classroom song, was Vermont.

The 13 colonies eventually created the ‘Articles of Confederation’ that served as our first constitution. It was ratified in 1781, but was replaced by the United States Constitution effective March 4th, 1789. The Articles of Confederation did not include a Supreme Court (Judicial Branch) or a President of the United States (Executive Branch), it included only a Congress.

Caliber vs MM and why

A common confusion in firearms begins with the ammunition. Some ammo has a decimal in front of it, some ammo has ‘mm’ after it, some says NATO on it. Let’s clear up the differences. All of these terms are regarding the diameter of the bullet/barrel being used.

Caliber is mostly an American term, and is written as a decimal of an inch. This means in theory a .45 caliber, has a bullet that is 45/100 of an inch wide at its widest point. Due to manufacturing and marketing reasons, these numbers may be slightly off. An example: the .380, .357 Mag, and .38 Special all use the exact same .356 bullet. This still gives you the idea that the bullet is between .35 and .39 of an inch wide. All of these rounds have different casings behind them holding different amounts of gun powder.

MM is for millimeter, or 1/1000th of a meter. This means a 9mm bullet is 9/1000th’s of a meter wide. A millimeter is 0.039 inch, so 9mm uses the exact same bullet as the .380, .357 Mag, and .38 Special as it uses a .356 bullet. A good conversion to get you a ballpark number is multiply the mm by four since 0.039 can be harder to calculate in your head. 9mm x 4 =360mm, convert to caliber and .360 and .356 are very close measurements to eachother. Another example is the 10mm and a .40CAL use the exact same bullet, differences are behind the bullet.

NATO is an ammo designation for ammunition used by NATO forces. NATO is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a group of 30+ countries in a military alliance. Since most of these countries use the metric system, all NATO rounds are referred to in MM. Common NATO rounds are the 9MM NATO, 5.56 NATO (similar to .223), 7.62x51MM (similar to .308), and the 12MM NATO (.50 CAL). NATO rounds do have slight differences to their civilian caliber counterparts.

What these measurements do NOT tell you is the power created by the gunpowder behind the bullet. Bigger bullets do no necessarily have more power. Rifle rounds usually have smaller bullets than handgun rounds, but fly 3-7 times faster due to larger amounts of gun powder behind them. You will also see ‘gr’ or ‘grain’ with ammunition size, this is the weight of the BULLET being held by the casing, the higher the grain, the heavier the bullet. This changes impact pressure, velocity, and long range accuracy.

What happened to Yugoslavia?

Yugoslavia is a former country that has a long history of suffering and bloodshed. After the end of World War 1, the territory of Yugoslavia formed in 1918 as the ‘Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes’ but did not actually adopt the name Yugoslavia until 1929. Before the sun rose on April 6th, 1942, Nazi forces (German, Italian, and Hungarian) invaded Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia lasted only 11 days of bombing by the German Luftwaffe before they surrendered. Over 300,000 Yugoslavian officers and soldiers would be taken as prisoner of war by the Nazis in the following weeks. Different parts of the country were taken control of by the Axis Powers. Over 500,000 were murdered in their own homeland, at the direction of mostly Nazi leadership. It is estimated that from 1942 to 1945 over 1,000,000 Yugoslavian’s were killed in World War 2.

After World War 2 ended, Yugoslavia rejected Soviet power and moved towards a Socialist government known as the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. This name lasted until the early 90’s when the Yugoslav Wars began. The ‘Yugoslav Wars’ lasted from the early 90’s to the early 2000’s. These conflicts were between multiple territories but all involved ethnic and religious conflict, as well as battles for territorial independence. It is estimated that the Yugoslav Wars took the lives of 140,000 people. These wars led to the separation of Yugoslavia into multiple independent governments. Yugoslavia broke up into multiple countries: Slovenia (population: 2 million), Croatia (4.1 million), Bosnia and Herzegovina (3.3 million), Serbia (7 million), Montenegro (630,000), Kosovo (1.9 million), and Macedonia (2 million).

Yugoslavia no longer exists as a recognized country but its history is still important, as it endured more bloodshed and unrest than most European countries have seen in the same century.