Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

The big Missoula gun show was this weekend. Its the largest show in the great state of Montana and brings in dealers from far and wide. Observations from this show:

• AR’s are back in a big way. There were plenty of them, from pretty much every manufacturer. Plenty of sub-$1000 AR’s if you don’t mind lesser known manufacturers. However, AR parts kits and some parts were still scarce.
• AR magazines are also back and in quantity. Even the Magpul PMags were less than $20. Plenty of AR mags. Oddly, its all the other magazines that were a little light.
• While AR and AR-materials were in abundance ammo was still short and way overpriced. Not sure what planet youre on where you think $0.44 per round for 55 FMJ .223 is a ‘good deal’.
• Primers fell back to about $35/m when you could find them.
• Oddly, this was the first show I didnt see a buncha FAL’s floating around. Either theyre all sold or folks are holding onto them.
• Only a handful of vendors (out of around 800 tables) had Glock mags in any quantity. AK mags were around $20. Some people thought they could get $5-10 for HK91 mags….theyre delusional. CTD had them for a buck each last time I checked.

I saw very little at the show that I wanted. I missed a HighPower at $350 by just a few minutes, but I have a bunch of them so I don’t feel too bad. In other gun related news, a buddy of mine is paring down his collection and has made me an offer for a few guns I want – an FR-8, a Redhawk in .44 and a Siamese Mauser .45-70. The FR-8 fills a niche as a nice beater truck gun in .308, the Redhawk satisfies the itch I’ve been having for a big bore double action magnum, and the .45-70….well, I dunno about that one. Might use it as a test platform for my cast bullet experiments.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

Gun owners are packing heat in record numbers, fearful of stricter gun control under the Obama administration and higher crime in a sour economy.

Some states and counties report a surge in applications for concealed weapons permits since the November election. All states but Illinois and Wisconsin allow concealed weapons, but requirements differ.

Applications already have hit a record this year in Clay County, Mo., where the sheriff’s office received 888 through June, compared with 863 in all of last year, Sheriff Bob Boydston says.

In the past, applicants tended to be middle-aged men, he says, but now include “grandmothers, older folks, young women, young men.”

Where lay a man’s fortune, there lay his heart….or some similar maxim…comes tumbling to the fore. Essentially, it means ‘put your money where your mouth is’. Thats what you’re seeing here. Pundits may say that Obama doesn’t want those guns that youre ‘clinging’ to but, as we see here, not everyone is buying that line. Same for the economy…people may want the economy to get better but they’re not taking chances. It is hoped that these people, in addition to getting their guns, are also getting all the other accoutrements and supplies that they’ll need to ride out this ‘bumpy’ economy.

Montana is kinda weird about concealed weapons. You only need a permit if youre within city limits (or a railroad or logging camp) and if youre engaged in an “outdoor activity” you dont need one at all. (I believe they intend that to mean hunting, fishing, hiking, etc. but Im sure a clever person could stretch that to include things like jogging, bicycling or something equally mundane.) I got mine years ago so I wouldnt have to go through the hassle of the NICS background check every time I wanted to buy a boomstick.

I don’t know why anyone is surprised at an increase in ‘pistol packing persons’ these days. Only the hopelessly short-sighted and the delusionally naive would think that the economic slide isn’t going to have violent and/or criminal implications.

Of course, little matters like armed security and situational awareness were sorted out in this household a long time ago. The NPR crowd would look at us and cry that “I won’t live in fear!” which is kinda funny since, by virtue of our lifestyle, we’re not really in fear of much of anything.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

The dichotomy of being prepared is that one the one hand, you prepare for the Big Events…Katrina, zombie uprising, 9.0 earthquakes, comet strikes, civilw ar, etc., and on the other hand you prepare for events that are really only Big to you – job loss, house fire, extremely localized disaster, etc, etc.

Mathematically, the ‘mundane’ and small personal disasters are probably more likely. I’m not saying that someone isn’t going to trip a small nuclear device off in Washington DC…Im just saying that, in my opinion, its more statistically likely that I’ll have a localized blackout, severe winter storm, or personal financial crisis before that happens.

I mention it because its very, very easy to get caught up in the preparations for ‘the big one’ and ignore the preparation for the smaller events. While its true that if youre prepared for the Really Big Stuff youre probably going to be de facto prepared for the small stuff, that isn’t always the case. For example, if youre preparing for the zombie apocalypse the odds are pretty good youre not thinking youre going to need a lot of cash to get through it…whereas if your employer shuts down on two weeks notice, the really cool water filter you have may not be as valuable to your situation as a bundle of cash you’ve stashed away for emergencies.

So, the point for today is don’t overlook the more likely small personal disasters. Shift gears for a while and give “what if an EMP strike destroys our infrastructure” a rest and spend some time working on “what if I can’t get a job for six months”.
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My birthday is coming up (August 7 for those of you who might be curious) and I received an early birthday gift today from my dad. I received the uberhuge Dillon brass tumbler. My old tumbler finally gave up the ghost last week and I have thousands and thousands of cases here that need cleaning before I can load ‘em up and squirrel ‘em away against Der Tag.

The Dillon tumbler isn’t cheap, which is why I wouldn’t buy it for myself, but I have no doubt that it is probably right up there at the top of the list for quality and performance. My experience with Dillon stuff has been good and their famous customer service has never let me down. To be fair, all the major reloading equipment manufacturers have outstanding service (esp. RCBS) but none of them make a tumbler anywhere near the size of this Dillon birdbath.
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Somebody I know had the good fortune to come across an eBay auction for a pile of surplus police radios (and chargers, belt pouches, spare batts, microphones and even a few car units). The good fortune continued in that this person also knew someone who could program these radios to operate on other frequencies than the ones they came programmed with. Well, when you put those two things together wouldn’t you have gotten a few as well?

These are, apparently, police Motorolas that the folks in NY decided they didn’t need anymore. I had them reprogrammed to operate on local police, fire, and medical frequencies as well as on MURS and other common frequencies. The radios have a scan function so I set it up to scan the commonly used local frequencies. The upshot is that each radio acts as a scanner and, if need be, can transmit on those frequencies as well.

I think that having the ability to eavesdrop on local radio traffic is a useful thing to have. Although many departments and agencies have switched to communications that are a bit more secure and less open to interception, here in podunkville those sorts of advancements in local agency technology come rather slow, if at all.
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I continue to feel unease and anxious about, well, pretty much everything in general these days. This Obamacare debacle, if it comes to pass, will be undoubtedly a bad move. The economy is or is not doing well, depending on the news media reporting it, swine flu is or is not going to kill all of us, depending on who is reporting it, we are or are not going to go to war with Iran, depending on who is reporting it…well, you get the idea. There’s almost no certainty in anything. There’s very little that would surprise me these days. I can’t think of any headlines that would surprise me these days.

So what can I do to make myself feel at least a little more at east about things? Well, the usual, really….stocking food, fuel, ammo, cash, and information.

I did get an interesting phone call the other day. A fella I’ve casually known for about twenty years called me asking about 5-gallon buckets. He’s a disabled Vietnam vet who lives with his wife in a nice doublewide trailer outside of town here in one of the little outlying communities. He and his wife live rather comfortably on his VA 100% disability and both their Social Security checks. Between the two of them, they knock back about $3-4k a month…good money for out here, esp. when all you have to do to get it is not die. (Well, that and have some unpleasantness occur in Southeast Asia forty years ago.)

Anyway, once in a rare while we’ll talk about how things are just going to hell in a handbasket and isn’t it a shame blah blah blah. He had mentioned that he and his wife had been, over the last few years, putting away money and, as of late, putting away food. He knew that I socked away food and asked me about the best way to do it. I gave him a few GammaSeal lids and told him that if he was going to be storing stuff in buckets these things made storage a lot easier and more convenient. Anyway, he called to ask me where to purchase buckets and what kind to get. I told him most any paint store would have them, that I preferred the .090 mil thickness buckets but if you can’t find them the more common .070 mil ones will do. Told him that the local Sportsmans Warehouse (now rebranded as Wholesale Sports) had .090 mil buckets for about $5 each in the fishing section if you didn’t mind the SW logo on the side.

I think what I find interesting here is that this guy is the first ‘old’ person I’ve dealt with who is thinking along these lines. Almost everyone I deal with who is, to varying degrees and for varying reasons, into preparedness is usually within a few years of my own age. (Part of this, reasonably, is because people just naturally gravitate towards others of their own age group, I think.) Back when there were still plenty of people around who were old enough to have been through the Depression as adults it wasn’t uncommon to meet folks who had developed lifelong habits of thrift and preparedness from their experience. Old men who never threw away anything and never spent a dime more than they had to, old women who saved their coupons and green stamps long after the stores that redeemed them had closed, etc, etc. But I’ve met very few older (60+ years) people who take it seriously enough to stock food, ammo, metals, etc, etc. That doesn’t mean theyre not out there, it just means I haven’t met them yet.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

You know, you’d think I’d remember that the domain registration falls a few days before my birthday every year.

You’d think.