Support your local sheriff

Posted on by
9

As you may know, my wife works in law enforcement. As a result, I spend a little time hanging around the cop shop and that sort of thing. I sometimes help the individual officers when theyre looking to buy/sell a gun or have gun-related questions.

I was at the courthouse today and ran into the sheriff, whom we affectionately refer to as “The Moustache”. (He has an awesome handlebar moustache that is probably wider than his head.) The Moustache and I were talking guns and it went like this:

Moustache: Yeah, I’ve got a [gun] that I bought from a guy years back. He had three of them and one that belonged to my dad, so he sold that one to me.

Me: Thats awesome. I’ve always wanted to shoot one but they’re hard to find and ammo wasnt a walk in the park either. Next time you take it out to the range, let me know. I’d love to add it to my resume of guns I’ve shot.
Moustache: Sure.

The Moustache continues on his way down the hallway, doing, I assumed, his sheriff duties and all that. A half hour later Im still sitting outside the courtroom when the elevator doors open and The Moustache steps out of the elevator with a plastic ammo box and a pistol rug in his hands.

Moustache: Here.
Me: Oh, man. You went home, got this and came back? No way!
Moustache: Have fun. Its a bit complicated to takedown so don’t worry about cleaning it.
Me: I will take exceptional care of this! Thank you!

And thats how I came into temporary possession of this:

photo-32Yes, indeedy…the .44 AutoMag. In city hall, outside a courtroom, the sheriiff walks up to me, hands me an AutoMag and 50 rounds of ammo, says ‘have fun’ and walks away like nothing just happened. Is this state awesome or what?

Our sheriff also has his own personal collection of supressed and short-barreled goodies, so when the ATF form requires the chief of local law enforcement to sign off on it…well, the most difficult part is not spending a half hour jawboning about cool guns with him.

We loves us our local sheriff! Solid guy with values like ours. A+++++ would vote again!

The pulp that men do…..

Posted on by
1

To paraphrase Billy Wigglestick: The pulp that men write lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones.

Yes, the last book in the series was twenty years ago
Yes, the author has been dead for almost a year
Yes, sleeping dogs should be left to lie (or lay, I suppose)
and…..
Yes, there is a new “The Survivalist” book featuring Ahern’s uber-mensch survivalist.

That’s right, kids. Survivalist #30 is now on Amazon. ( The Inheritors of Earth (The Survivalist) (Volume 30))

I know, I know…kinda left me speechless too. And what’s really, really embarassing is that I’m probably gonna buy a copy :::headdesk:::

I guess if they can ‘reboot’ Star Trek………….

 

h/t to: ModernSurvivalOnline

Observation from tornado coverage

Posted on by
14

I found this article from the UK Daily Mail about the tornado in Oklahoma. Scroll down a bit until you get to this picture:

The caption is “A man and two children walk through debris..”

Uhm..no. Take a close look at that picture. What youre seeing is people climbing out of a tornado shelter. Notice the concrete construction, the kids clean feet, the man wearing work gloves….to me it looks like someone planned ahead and got the kids into the bunker and they came through without a scratch. I’m going to say thats a private shelter and not a public one..if it were a public one I think we’d see a lot more people and definitely some first-responders in the frame. Also, looks pretty small…might fits just a small family in there and not much else. No, I think what we have here are some folks who actually..y’know..prepared. Good on ya, mate!

ka-56 “Wasp”

Posted on by
2

Oh the things you discover on the internet. How cool would it be if your BOV was a small aircraft that could be broken-down to fit in a closet, setup in less than 15 minutes, fly at around 60 mph, and have enough range to get you far enough from trouble in a hurry? Awesome, right? Turns out the Soviets came up (almost) with such a rig back in the 70′s. The ka-56 was designed to be shot out of a torpedo tube, re-assembled by spies/infiltrators and used to GTFO in a hurry. Problem was the little 40hp air-cooled motor couldnt quite handle the task and anything larger wouldnt have fit the size parameters. I think that with todays technology something like this would be highly do-able. (Although having my head that close to the rotor blades scares me.

Some linkage:

The Soviet Torpedo-Sized One-Man Helicopter

KAMOV KA-56 PORTABLE HELICOPTER

This would be an awesome rig for the person who wanted a discrete BOV for getting out of a large metropolitan center. Haul it up to your rooftop, assemble, and wave adios as the zombies envelop the city.

 

Space-saving properties of vacuum-sealed clothes

Posted on by
7

One interesting thing about the internet is that, once in a while, people you haven’t heard from in a long, long time may suddenly pop up in your email box with a “Hey, I dont know if you remember me but….”

I’ve had that happen a couple times. I just had it happen last week with someone I last saw about 32 years ago. He emailed to say he had been in this neck of the woods looking to relocate with his family. Why the relocation? To be away from the Bad Places when the eventual Greece-style rioting starts as the economy implodes. And, by the way, we are studying hunting, gardening, off-grid living and homeschooling.

This is so odd….people I recall from childhood, whom I have not seen in decades, when they find, turn out to be very Like Minded on their outlook. I wonder how that comes to be.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

I hvae the convenience of living fairly close to where I work. Really, its about a twenty minute brisk walk or a six-minute bicycle ride. The notion of needing a ‘Get Home Bag (GHB)’ for such a short distance is pretty unlikely. Worst case, all I’d really need is foul weather gear, a flashlight and a pistol….But, you never know what kind of curve ball fate is going to throw. Even if I dont have to “Omega Man” my way back to the house, there’s always the mundane headaches. One thing I’ve been wanting to do was keep a complete change of clothes at the shop in case I get caught in the rain, I destroy/damage a shirt or pair of pants over the course of the day, the dog throws up all over me, etc, etc. I took one of the handy-dandy Hardigg cases and decided it would keep all my emergency incidentals in one place at the shop. Now, while these things have a good amount of room for that sort of thing, I figured why not go a step further. So, I vacuum-sealed a complete change of clothes. Not only does it cut the amount of space down considerably, each clothing component enjoys a redundant layer of preotection – individually sealed and stored in a disaster-proof Hardigg case. Suspenders-and-a-belt, folks! (Actually, I need to pack a belt in there too….) So…when you vacuum-seal a pair of jeans, socks, t-shirt, underwear, and heavy outer shirt this is what the space difference looks like:

IMG_0796

To be fair, that stack on the right should be shorter because as the packages shrink down they sometimes ‘buckle’ or warp and that makes them a bit taller than they would otherwise be when you stack ‘em. Once all that is tucked into the box, theres still plenty o’ room for other ‘just in case’ sundries.

IMG_0799

Plenty of room left for a spare field jacket, boots, Maglite, batteries, radio, ammo, couple bottles of water, backapack, and all the other little geegaws and odds-n-ends that separate the victims from the victors. I’ll add in some winter gear for those infrequent trips where the day started nicely and ended with 9″ of snow, add a sleep system (packed separately) in case I have to spend the night at the shop and we should be good to go.

 

 

The Subaru of War

Posted on by
13

The idea behind camouflage is to make something blend in, or at least not stand out. We can agree on that, yes? That’s why I had to stop and take a picture of this:

warbaru

“Dude! What did you do to mom’s car?!”

First off, it’s a Subaru. Fine, durable cars. I still see tons of the old GL’s still on the road. But if you want to hide your Subaru you dont paint it in such a manner that makes passerby, like me, stop and take a picture. Thats, like, anti-camo. Leave it in its usual ‘Forest Green’ or something and it will blend in with the millions of other Fubarus in the organic supermarket parking lot.

There’s a time to be wearing camo and being stealthy. 10 AM in front of Ruby’s Cafe is not it. And, really,. of all the cars to butch up…a Subaru? In the body shop behind me is an old Dodge Crew Cab Power Wagon being restored. That monster is worth a camo paint job. It looks like it’ll mow down anything that gets in its way. Camo’ing up a Subaru is like putting a heavy spiked leather collar on your basset hound.

Interestingly, I do see a fair amount of vehicles with homemade camo paintjobs on ‘em. It can’t really be for hunting, since youre not supposed to hunt from vehicles and the wildlife here is pretty inured to vehicles (sometimes fatally so). Honestly, when I see vehicles with paintjobs like that I think of stereotypical redneck scraggly-bearded camo-wearing folks that give survivalists a bad name. Yes, I am succumbing to a stereotype.

Were it me, I’d just stick to a nice, even, flat-finish paintjob in something ‘coincidentally tactical’ like ‘coyote’ or a not-quite-military shade of green (‘sage’, perhaps. And when did they rename all our favorite camo patterns to these new names? We used to have desert, OD and a few other greens…now we have ‘sage’,'foliage’,  ‘coyote’ and some other trendy names. WTF, man?)

And what really kills me is that you go through all the trouble of painting up mom’s old car into a camo pattern and then you leave the bright chromey door handles. Fail. Also, the skid plate is a nice touch.

Portmanteau – disasturbation

Posted on by
4

I was reading a blog and the writer mentioned ‘disaster masturbation’ to describe getting overloaded on negative media inputs and the resultant effects on ones desire to prepare. In short, if you watch so much CNN, Alex Jones, Glen Beck, and Coast to Coast AM that you  develop the unquenchable desire to head to WalMart right freakin now and stock up on everything…well, that might be ‘disaster masturbation’.

Wishing to leave my stamp on the language, I hereby coin the term “disasturbation” for when you take in so much information (usually visually through internet mediums) that your overwhelming reaction is to run out and stock, prep, buy, hide, now now now!

This is not to say that a little disasturbation isn’t a good thing. Sometimes we need a little reminder that the world is not all sunshine-n-stun-grenades. A little refresher to make our minds wander back onto the course we’ve laid out for our future is a good thing. It’s when we overdo it and the next thing you know theres a Unimog on your Visa card…well, thats a whole other story.

So, thats our word for the day: disasturbation – v. To overindulge on preparedness-, disaster-, and survival-related media to the point that it causes atypical responses that can be interpreted as overreactions.

Use it, and use it well. But not so much that you go blind.

DIY

Posted on by
1

Oh the things you find on Amazon. Solvent Trap Adapter 1/2-28 3/4-16

Clearly whomever polices Amazon’s website hasn’t quite figured out these little geegaws. Ostensibly, the purpose of them is to prevent solvent spray when you’re cleaning the barrel of your gun. You thread this onto the end of your barrel and screw a capture/containment system, an oil filter usually, on the end of the barrel. When the bristle brush exits the muzzle the filter catches the spray of particulate and solvent, thereby keeping things neat and clean. And, in fact, this is exactly what happens.

But there’s always that creative group out there that thinks outside the box (which in this case might lead to thinking inside the cell) and re-purposes products like these. (A YouTube search for “solvent trap” comes up with some interesting results.) There’s an outfit that is actually selling these with the necessary regulatory procedures in place, but there appear to be more than a few that not. This looks like one of those ‘grey areas’ that aren’t going to look too terribly grey to someone with a badge and a federal paycheck. I doubt the “I just had it for cleaning purposes” excuse is gonna work.

Couple this with the recent tempest-in-a-teapot about 3D-printed guns and you can see that where there’s a will, theres a way. I don’t really understand the fuss about the 3D guns…its been legal for a long time to build your own non-NFA firearm. I suppose the fact that previously you needed rudimentary equipment (usually) kept the pool of homebrew gunbuilders fairly small. After all, Leroy The Gangbanger wasn’t terribly likely to have a bridgeport mill set up in his garage and know how to wire weld. And, really, its equally unlikely he’s gonna drop the money for a 3D printer to make a singleshot zip gun that would be made easier, faster, and safer out of a couple pieces of pipe and a nail.

While I can appreciate the DIY ability to create a firearm or firearm accessory out of virtually nothing but what you find in a scrapyard, there is no substitute for the genuine purpose-built article. But its nice to know that if the powers that be get really out of control and start swinging the banhammer with too much enthusiasm there’ll always be a way to get something that goes bang.

As an aside, that slamfire pipe-shotgun appears to be the same kind that was used in the over-the-top Death Wish 3. (And its a guilty pleasure but…that was one of my favorite Death Wish movies.)

Today’s bargain

Posted on by
1

Well, nuts…..for a deal like this, wouldn’t you have picked up a buncha these too? (Real deal, not the Korean stuff.) Normally, I’d just stick with the usual 30-rd aluminum mags. Theyre plentiful, theyre affordable and theyre usually pretty reliable. But, I guess that there might be a time when a couple magazine changes just aren’t in the cards and having a hundred rounds on tap might be a good thing…in which case I think I’d rather do that mag dump out of a piston gun rather than a DI gun, but thats a whole other post.

Realistically, though, I’m just picking these up for future resale value. (Of course, if the world just hapens to end before I get a chance to sell ‘em…well…guess I’ll just have to use ‘em on the zombies.)

I remember during the ban years these things were north of $600. Ah, the old days.

Admin stuff, Hardigg cases, planting, website observations

Posted on by
14

Man, Yahoo is being a gold-plated PITA with these little server errors. If you come looking for me and get some wierd errors, check Yahoo’s System Status and see if they’re having a Chinese fire drill or something. I’m hoping that these errors the last week or so are just the result of Yahoo doing some upgrades or something. Usually things go along pretty smoothly, but when the road gets bumpy it gets bumpy in a big way.

=======================

Still have a few of the Hardigg cases available. Additionally, some larger ones may be coming in here shortly so you might wanna keep an eye open for those.

=======================

Been out in the yard planting the Choate Grow Buckets. Its been in the freakin’ 80-degree range the last few days so I figured we might(!) finally be past the frost threat. The Choate Grow Buckets seem to be living up to their expectations and I think theyre going to prove to be very useful.

=======================

Speaking of growing things……I read quite a few preparedness/survival blogs. (And, to a degree, some of the ‘patriot’-style blogs) and it almost appears that you can break them all down into one of two camps. The first camp sees a collapse and everything is about living like the kids in Red Dawn. Military tactics, patrolling, OPSEC, improvised munitions, sniping, caching ammo and supplies, etc, etc. Second camp sees a collapse and everything is about woodstoves, biomass, greenhouses, food preservation, and what could only be described as Mother Earth News roleplay.

Personally (and your mileage may vary) I’m not seeing either camp really being 100% correct. I’m virtually certain that the UN (or anyone else for that matter) isn’t going to invade the US. I don’t see an armed revolution with heavily-armed people wearing armbands emblazoned with “III” running around shooting evil authoritarian black-helmeted .gov thugs. Nor do I see a likelihood of a nationwide catastrophic (although I suppose entropic is possible) failure of national infrastructure that leaves us needing to tear up our front lawns to grow vegetables, and filling the koi ponds with catfish and carp.

I do, however, imagine there could be some situations that are a blending of the two, to some degree. Certainly, any disaster is going to bring out the bad side of people as well as the good…so, yeah, lets stack the AR’s and Glocks as deep as possible. And, yes, things like the economy could go so far south that if you don’t start taing a more pro-active approach to your own food production you may wind up eating government cheese and learning the WIC-approved food schedule by heart.

But I’m having a hard time genuinely believing that within my lifetime the future of the US looks like what some of these folks are preparing against. It really doesnt hurt anything, I suppose, since anyone preparing for Civil War II wil sorta be de facto prepared for most other eventualities, but sometimes it just seems a little…I dunno…too fantastic.

Of course, I could be wrong. I’ve been wrong before, I’ll be wrong again. Maybe in a few years there’ll  be a genuine nationwide shooting war going on. Or maybe in a few years all the GM-Monsanto-’Big Agra’ conspiracies will actually turn out to be real and our food supply turns into something from Soylent Green. But I think that long before that happens we’ll have more ‘mundane’ ends-of-the-world. Job losses, earthquakes, civil disturbances, floods, etc, etc, seem far more likely (to me) than some of these dramatic and exciting scenarios that some folks seem certain are going to happen.