A man took his 11-year-old grandson fishing at a South Miami-Dade canal over the weekend. But he didn’t use the typical squirmy bait on a hook. Nor were they looking for dinner. Duane Smith saw a YouTube video on magnet fishing and thought it would a nice family activity for the two to try. So Grandpa and Grandson prepped a line with a 5-pound magnet and dropped it into the C-102 canal in Princeton. They hoped to see what they could pull up from the bottom. Metal scraps, perhaps. Or maybe something valuable. The magnet could pull up as much as 2,600 pounds of material.
…After five minutes, they got their big one. One of the rifles. “I figured, since it was our first time, this was beginner’s luck,” Smith said.
But when he threw the magnet back in, they pulled up another catch. An identical sniper rifle. The guns were not loaded and they didn’t find any ammunition. “The Barretts had so much mass,” Smith said. “The magnet went straight to them.”
Smith and his grandson found the lower receivers of the weapons — that is, most of the gun except the barrel. The Barrett .50-caliber rifle is a semiautomatic weapon chambered to fire a large bullet designed for the M2 Browning heavy machine gun.
Boy, grandfather reel in 2 sniper rifles in Miami-Dade canal | Miami Herald
Call me crazy, but I do not think those are Barret lowers for .50 cal.
Hat Tip WillK
I concur. They don’t look very 50-cal-ish to me, either.
The linked article claims the two weapons they found had a combined weight of 40 lbs.
A Barrett M82 weighs 32.7 lbs. Even discounting the weight savings from the lack of barrels, there is no way that two of them weight less than 40 lbs.
The article mentions that it just the lower assemblies, not the whole gun. If you watch a field strip of a Barrett , you will see that most of the operating mass is in the upper, and dont discount the weight of a 28 inch heavy barrel, bolt assembly and spring and buffer.
The picks look like Barret lowers to me, which is just the stock, magwell and trigger pack the upper rests in.
Be nice to see a follow up on this
Surprised the Miami “bird cage poop liner” Herald didn’t went all pearl-clutchy and put a headline in all caps about these murdery black rifles being AK-47’s or something. /sarc
Newspaper reporters and editors are not among our bestest and brightest. Their adjective selections indicate an intelligence, knowledge, and maturity level of an eleven year old girl.