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Just another ‘beware the coming bans’ post

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Unless you’ve been under a rock the last week, you know some guy in Maine (of all places) went sideways and killed about twenty people before taking his own life. As usually happens after these events, the usual crowd wiped the blood onto their faces and began wailing about ‘commonsense’ and ‘reasonable’ restrictions on…well..whatever they think was at fault.

To be fair, the administration really has it’s hands full right now and is probably not interested in getting into a domestic policy quagmire while it’s in the midst of a couple foreign policy quagmires. But…I’ve been wrong before.

But if they do get some traction on their usual ban-dwagon, you don’t want to be caught unprepared. It’s been 19 years since the sunset of the much-despised ‘Assault Weapons Ban’.  If you bought on pistol magazine and one rifle magazine each month (a very easy goal) since then, you’d have about 228 pistol mags and 228 rifle mags…an amount that almost everyone would agree is a comfortable amount to have.

And if you bought one ‘evil’ rifle every year, again not an outrageous or difficult goal, you’d have 19 AR’s in the safe.

But some people just will not learn. It seems like every time some whackjob shoots up a 7-11 and the media starts their campaign about ‘high capacity magazines’ there are people who sudenly think they need to buy. Dude…you should have had your magazine issues settled shortly after the ban expired. I encounter way to many people who think that “Oh, I have a dozen mags for my AR. Thats plenty.” That is wildly shortsighted thinking that fails to account for what perils the future holds. I’m not going to elaborate about that because I’ve covered it elsewhere on this blog more times than I can recall.

TL;DR for todays post: one of these days, these gun/mag bans will come back and you don’t want to be caught with your pants down. Stack it deep. And if you really want a positive habit to develop, buy one pistol mag per month, and one rifle mag per month. They are money in the bank. (Not that keeping your money in the bank is a good idea, but you get my meaning.)

Winter arrives

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Well, after a lovely week of wonderful warm days and crisp fall nights, winter came in last night like the KoolAid man. Heavy blowing winds, light snow, and the thermometer making a run for the bottom.

Time to transfer the winter gear to the truck, make sure the winter module is in my Bag O’ Tricks, and drive much more carefully.

And, you know, part of driving carefully means knowing when not to drive at all. Is picking up a couple frozen pizzas at Winco when the roads are icy really worth a trip to the ER and buying a new truck? Probably not. Thats one of the reasons we stockpile food to begin with – to eliminate risk.

Not sure what this winter is going to look like. (And, really, no one does…the notion that you can forecast how severe a winter will be seems akin to telling the future by squeezing the goat’s scrotum or something.) But you usually can’t be too wrong with “cold and snowy”. Really, the only variable is the quantity.

With all the stuff going on (and about to go on) in the Middle East, perhaps stocking up on fuel for heating mightnot be a bad idea this winter.

Article – Man Buys Abandoned Doomsday Shelter, Discovers ’20 Tons’ Of Supplies Stashed From The 1980s

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Anderson says he found a “fixer-upper” he liked after taking a fishing trip from Atlanta to the Bozeman area five years ago. The bunker only had one hole leading to the surface.

But the man who sold him the house left Anderson something extra. A big extra.

The “nuclear bunker” 20 feet below the entrance was loaded with food and medical supplies. They apparently had been stored since the 1980s, in case the worst happened.

If you think thats cool, imagine what it must be like for the fella that bought the old CUT (Church Universal Triumphant) bunkers from the 80’s.

There’s alot of these kinds of places still out there.

Other article.

YouTube

A show about it.

Article – How to found a new town

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Thought for the day: “A person isn’t who they are during the last conversation you had with them – they’re who they’ve been throughout your whole relationship.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke
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It’s a trope of virtually every post apocalyptic story: The townies come together to battle an outside force of bad guys. Its in virtually every. Single. Story.

So, if youre going to rally the townies, you’d want those townies to be like-minded individuals who are all on the same page. What are the odds of that? Well, you can stack the odds by stocking the town: start your own town:

But if you don’t love the way the towns and cities in your neck of the woods operate, you might be able to haul off and start your own. In fact, the United States is pretty much the only place on the planet where this is still generally possible to do, because we have a lot of what’s known as “unincorporated land,” or land that isn’t part of an established town or city (communities that spring up when people build homes on this land are called, unsurprisingly, unincorporated communities). It’s not necessarily an easy process, really, but if you want to establish your own brand-new town, you can probably pull it off.

Montana is a little tricky. The joke used to be that all you needed to b a town here was a bar and a Napa dealership. In actuality, it appears you need 300 like-minded voters and some sort of postal presence (which ,as I read, can be a Mailbox etc or UPS store that offers mailboxes).

Just to carry the mental exercise further, if you were to make your own town, I wonder if you could then create your own police force, automatically deputize every citizen, and thereby give them legal access to affordable post-dealer LE-only machineguns and heavier weapons. You know, a couple MAG58’s at the town entrance, MP5’s for everybody, maybe a quad-50 on a city gun truck for quick deployment.

If you start your own town, let me know. I could use a little pied-à-terre in such a place.

Unofficial Bring Your Gun To Work Day

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My boss is a fella from Tennessee. He’s all about college football and southern cooking. He carries a Sig P365SAS in his briefcase. I got him some 9mm for his birthday last month. He knows I like to shoot and am a gun guy. We get along.

He’s strolling through the office the other day and most of us are standing in the hallway outside our offices jawboning about nothing important. He says, “People, this thing in the Mideast has me worried. I know we’re not gonna see anything here in our little chunk of Montana but if you see someone weird out in the parking lot waving an AK, please notify someone.”

The next day, as I was getting him to sign some checks, he told me that he assumes I carry or have a gun at work (I do, but I don’t let anyone know…and I did not confirm or deny his assertion.) He said that he’s going to start carrying his pistol in his pocket rather than his briefcase because he “doesn’t like the way things are looking.”

And that’s, oddly, the sentiment that seems to be going around these days in my circles. Most people I know keep a pistol in the console of their vehicle. Maybe a bolt action rifle behind the seat. To a man, all of them have upgraded to something a little less Fudd and a lot more Dredd.

Oh, sure, this little quiet pocket of Montana isn’t exactly known for its Middle Eastern community, although being a college town you do get people from all over, but it is orders of magnitude unlikely that anything more dramatic than some graffiti on a synagogue (yeah, we have a couple) will occur.

Do I genuinely believe that some wanna-be jihadist will run through WalMart with an AK trying to buy himself some cred? I do not. Do I believe that some stupid hipster college kid who has spent too much time on Democratic Underground wiil throw a molotov cocktail at the local power transformers in the name of oppressed people somewhere? Eh…possibly, but unlikely. Do I believe that there will be the possibility of some homeless wastrel with a head full of bad wiring and a grudge might get belligerent when one of the girls in the office shoos him away from the garbage cans? Absolutely.

But whether its wanna-be jihadists with Ak’s or homeless crazy people with steak knives, there’s a definite vibe going on these days…and if my boss feels that his employees being discreetly armed is a good thing, who am I to judge?

Now, obviously there’s more to this than just wink-and-a-nod when the boss asks if I’m carrying a gun. As the president of the company it is a liability nightmare for him to condone, let alone encourage, employees to have Bring Your Gun To Work Day. But, he can publish something in the employee handbook clearly stating that we have an official ‘no weapons’ policy, and we can discreetly ignore it with tacit, unstated, unwritten approval. Dont ask, dont tell. Works for me.

Today he mentioned getting together with me, his 2nd in command, and my direct boss to form a ‘Security Committee’ to look at installing new locks and establishing protocols for evacuation and things like that. I like where his head is at. The trick will be to be helpful without tipping my hat too much about my sooper secret squirrel life as Commander Zero.

 

Peripheral notoriety

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Friend of The Blog ™, Tam, over at View From The Porch has a post about the Ruger P-series. I have a few P89DC but my favorite is the P95DC. It’s clunky, bulky, primitive in a pre-picatinny kind of way, with a DA/SA system that leaves a bit to be desired. Why do I love them so much? Because they are utterly unkillable and reliable. For $200 you can’t buy a more reliable and durable gun. Its prolific nature in evidence lockers throughout the US attests to the staggering number made, the low price point, and the abject immortality of it.

The notoriety? That ugly evidence-locker P89 on the cover of the book used to be mine.

Nowadays, the Palmetto Dagger is leaning towards my choice for cheap-and-reliable tertiary level of gun, although I’m not sure about it’s durability. But, compared to a P-series, the only thing more unbreakable is a lump of depleted uranium.

I should pull one of these Daggers off the shelf and send it to Tam for her to bang around.

Mantis Laser Academy dry firing

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About a month ago I was at a friends house and saw a small pistol target taped up on their wall. Whats that about, I asked. They said it was for their laser target practice system.

Huh..wha…come again?

My friend had one of these. I’m going to try and explain this, but really the video does a much better job.

You buy this kit and use it in conjunction with your smartphone. You set the smartphone on the included tripod and aim it at the target that youre going to use. You then drop a little laser module into the chamber of your firearm. Each time the firing pin hits the back of the laser it sends a little pulse out the barrel and onto the target. The smartphone, which is scanning the target, logs where the ‘shot’ hit, scores it, tracks your time between shots, and shows the motion of the gun (your follow through).

When it’s -12 outside and the snow is a foot deep, this thing is perfect.

The product is Mantis Laser Academy I got the 9mm version which means that not only can I drop the laser into my Glocks, but I can also drop it into my 9mm carbines and use them as well.

The software that you download to your phone includes shooting drills of all sorts, the kit comes with a dozen different types of targets, and the metrics are quite useful for measuring progress.

For me the practical use of this is it lets me practice drawing, getting a good sight picture, and smoothly pulling the trigger…..critical skills.

I ordered mine from Amazon for around $160 and I feel it is worth every penny.

Because the laser is actuated by the firing pin hitting it, that means you have to cock/reset the striker after each ‘shot’. For what I’m doing, which is practicing my draw and target acquisition, this isn’t a big deal..Im only firing one shot per cycle. However, there are aftermarket Glock triggers/slides that are made specifically for dry fire practice that avoid the whole issue. And, if youre shooting a DA/SA auto, you’ll have no issues.

They also make an AR version which is more money, but it features a replacement bolt carrier that is designed for dry fire exercises. Considering what 9mm and .223 costs are these days, for just practicing gun handling and sight acquisition this is a ridiculously economical way to do things. Plus, there’s that convenience of not having to pack up your gear and head to the range.

Door gunner

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Buddy of mine texted this picture to me last night:

Apparently, around 1030p or so, there was a heavy knocking on the door. My buddy checks the door and sees some Indian guy (thats Indian with the casino, not Indian with the 7-11) swaying on his front porch. Thinking this is a bad time of night for someone to be banging on doors, he discreetly grabs his 10mm and holds it behind his leg as he yells through the locked door to ask the guy what he wants. Our mystery man says that his car is stuck and can he please come in and use the phone. My buddy is a retired cop and he’s not the type to give someone the benefit of the doubt at his expense. Stuck car or not, the answer is no. Guy on the porch starts copping an attitude, but finally wanders to his car which is nose down in the barrow pit. My buddy calls the sheriff and says there’s some guy with his car in the ditch, banging on his door, and this guy is either drunk or having a medical situation. Must have been a slow night because three fire trucks and seven deputies show up.

My buddy watches as two guys get out of the car, the cops start their little talk, and then abruptly they scoop up one of them and stuff him in the back of a car. Other guy gets a gentler treatment, but still gets bracelets and a back seat. Turns out door guy gets popped for aggravated DUI. What makes it aggravated? Blowing more than twice the limit. Guy number two had warrants for aggravated burglary and failure to appear. He’s not going anywhere any time soon.

My buddy did everything pretty well. He didn’t open the door and he armed himself. Where he lost points was in not having a gun in a more readily accessible place but, unfortunately, his wife doesn’t like having guns laying about.

I always keep a gun by the front door because you never know whats gonna come to your doorstep. As many people have said, nothing good happens after 11pm. Sometimes, though, trouble doesn’t look at the clock and it can happen anytime. Moral of the story: it never hurts to be cautious.

Plates II

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In case anyone was wondering:

And T3 was having a sale on plate carriers so I got one of each – this and this.

I already have a couple sets of soft armour, which I believe everyone should have, and I have a carrier and plates next to my AR in the bedroom ‘just in case’. But, I wanted an extra set…perhaps for offsite storage…and I also wanted a low-profile set to keep in the truck. And, lets be real, the prices aren’t going to go down and at some point getting this stuff will no longer be as simple as a webform and a credit card.

And as tempting as it is to buy a set of plates and sock them away, don’t. You need to actually wear them and get used to how they feel and,  most importantly, how they affect your ability to function and move while wearing them. I promise you, bringing up a rifle and shouldering it will be a completely different game when youre wearing this stuff. And it isn’t lighweight. The smart survivalist will buy a dirt cheap plate carrier, a set of weighted replica plates,  duct tape the crap out of the corners and stress points, and use them for training purposes. Crom forbid, but when Der Tag arrives you really don’t have margin for a learning curve. So, yes, feel like a dork as you’re LARPing around your house in armour….thats part of the familiarization process. Your carrier needs to fit you, and it needs to do it in such a manner that donning it is as familiar and easy as slipping into worn shoes. Wear it…go the range, go for a hike, do a workout, but wear it and move with it and adjust as necessary.

And, finally, remember that these things will stop bullets (most of the time) but there’s no free lunch in physics so that energy has to go somewhere and that somewhere is going to be you. Don’t think you’ll have a round of 7.62 bounce off your chest and your gonna keep moving forward like the Terminator. Hollywood makes bullet resistance look like fun and game but it really looks more like cracked/broken ribs/sternum and bruises that make you queasy just looking at them.

BUT….it beats a sucking chest wound any day of the week.