Monthly Archives: July 2010

The Chicago way

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

Chicago’s Mayor Daley, a fine and shining example of political corruption if there ever was one, isn’t taking the recent Supreme Court ruling regarding his city’s handgun ban lightly. In what can only be described as a world-class example of sour grapes, the mayor has determined that city residents may own a handgun. A handgun. But you gotta license it..and register it..and take a class…and some range time (but outside Chicago since gun ranges aren’t allowed there for mere civilians)..and you cant take it out of your house..and you can only have one functioning handgun per person per household. There were further restrictions that he wanted but they were discarded because even his own people said that there was no way theyd stand up in court.

So what does this mean to you and I? Well, its an example of how even if something is perfectly legal there are ways to make it virtually illegal. My own lifestyle would violate every line of the Chicago ordinance. I own more than one, took no classes, take one or two out of the house daily, and no way are they registered with the locals. And that’s just the handguns…the rifle collection would positively push them over the edge.

While it may be, on paper, legal for you to own a gun the government can make it so onerous and burdensome as to make it virtually impossible. As time goes by, Im sure that the Daley cabal will polish up their knives and make ‘improvements’, ‘modifications’ or ‘sensible changes’…prohibitively high fees, ammunition restrictions, magazine capacity limits, etc, etc, etc. You’ll see.

You may have a constitutional right to own a gun, as the courts have agreed, but theres nothing to keep that right from being fraught with restrictions. And, mind you, these restrictions can be slapped on at any point. One day you wake up and your local municipality has decided you only ‘need’ one gun, it needs to be licensed, registered, and ballistically fingerprinted, and those ‘extra’ guns you have need to be turned in, sold or taken out of the city limits immediately. To one extent or another this has happened already in places like New York and California.

When situations like this occur, the choice is pretty simple and straightforward – obey the law or don’t obey the law. It may not be much of a choice, but if you have your guns already then at least you have that choice. If you wait until after nonsensical legislation like this is passed before getting your guns then you really don’t have much of a choice at all..

Mayor Daley, living proof that corruption and malice may in fact be hereditary traits passed from one generation of weasel to the next, no doubt feels that his restrictions will somehow keep Chicago safe. Here in the great state of Montana there are more guns than people, yet we have a gun crime rate that is rather low. Perhaps the problem isn’t guns but rather people? Of course, espousing that possibility may not be politically correct but………

Here’s the lesson to take away from this: you’ve just seen how even when something is guaranteed to you by one part of government (gun ownership guaranteed by the feds) it can be nailed to the floor by another branch of government (Chicago local government machine) making it virtually worthless. Plan accordingly. Have these things before the time comes where you may be prohibited from having them (or having more of them).

Or, I suppose, move out of Chicago.

Random meeting

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

“How do I meet up with other like-minded individuals?”

That’s a question that pops up from time to time. Trouble is, you don’t want to ‘out yourself’ to someone thinking that they are of like mind and then find out that they aren’t. You’ve then tipped your hand and now someone else is going to start their tongue wagging about that ‘survivalist guy’ who chatted him up in the elevator at work. When it comes to networking, it seems like being a survivalist is like being gay – you don’t want others to know who you are, but at the same time you cant meet others like yourself unless you are willing to risk tipping your hand.

I mention it because I just had one of those serendipitous meetings. Here’s how it unfolded:

Im at the post office standing in line to use the automated postal center (sort of a postal ATM for getting stamps and such.) I notice the older gentleman in front of me has a small radio on his belt. I can see the display and it appears this isn’t some sort of FRS radio but a Yaseu of some fashion. My curiosity is piqued and since I have nothing better to do standing in line I look more closely. He’s wearing jeans, a forest green button shirt, and light hiking boots. His belt is leather, but not heavy enough for a gun belt. I figured the radio was a work thing or somesuch, but its my experience that people into preparedness usually have some outward manifestations of it…usually in the way we dress or the crap we carry on our belts. Casually, I ask “Is that a little 2-meter radio”? He says “Yup.” And goes back to getting his postage. Not too talkative, I figure, so I continue waiting in line. When he’s done he turns to me and says “Are you a ham radio guy?” I say that, no, Im not but my wife is and that she’d probably like to have a little radio like that. He says he and his friends are in a group and have them ‘for emergencies and preparedness’. As you can imagine, the little light bulb went off in my head. No kidding, I say, I think we may both be kind of like-minded individuals in that regard. We make some very meaningless and vague small talk and I know exactly what’s happening here..we’re sizing each other up. Is the other guy really ‘one of us’? I said that it sounded like we had the same interests. I said that I had a few friends who were into the same things, buying & selling silver (he seemed to perk up a bit at that) and that I had a line for selling freezedrieds.  As the conversation winds down he gives me his name and number and says to call him sometime. He wishes me a happy 4th of July. I tell him Im planning on spending it at the range like I do every Patriots Day and Independence Day. He moves in closer (because there are a few other people who have come into the post office and are standing around) that he and his friends will spend it ‘training’ (his words) at an indoor range they have. He also told me of a forum that they keep, which I had to hunt down a bit because he misspoke the URL – BSOSCBlog.com

Interesting stuff. I think I may have run across a few of these guys at the Hamilton gun show a time or two.

Quantifying ‘too many’

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

I had a chat with a cop the other day. We got to talking about guns and he’s not much of a gunny. He said he thought that five guns was ‘plenty’. I pointed out to him that according to the Montana Shooting Sports Association the average Montanan owned 26 firearms. He thought that was nuts. I said that you have a nightstand gun, a truck gun, a plinker .22, a hunting rifle, a couple guns you picked up because they were too cheap to pass up, etc, etc, and they can add up in a hurry. He thought about it and revised his estimate. He said that ten guns was plenty. I told him Id mention that to my Ballistic-American friends and we’d all have a good laugh over it.

There is no such thing as ‘too many’. Once in a while someone will opine on the discussion boards that anything over ‘x’ amount is stupid because you cant carry that many guns at once. The number of guns you can carry at once has no bearing on how many guns a person can have before they are ‘too many’. That’s like saying you can only wear one pair of shoes at a time so owning more than one is ‘too many’.

As someone who has had discussions like this with many, many people I can say that there are only two people who have a hard number about what constitutes ‘too many’ guns: people who don’t shoot and wives.

Personally, I know people who own well over 100 guns and I wouldn’t say that’s ‘too many’. If you specialize in a field of collecting you can easily get into the several hundred range. Even a broke college kid will probably have three or seven guns floating around at any given point.

Does anyone need more than ‘x’ amount of guns? Well, need doesn’t really enter into it. If I want a dozen AR’s in the safe and I can afford to then, by Crom, Im going to have just that. My buying habit is that I treat every gun as an irreplaceable object. What I mean by that is that I judge and value every gun in my collection as if I would be unable to buy another one tomorrow. My goal is to have enough firearms to take care of my projected needs in a worst case scenario for the rest of my life. If tomorrow every gun shop closed and all you had in the safe was all you could have for the rest of your life would you be content with what you had? If not, get out there and shop.

The problem with the notion of ‘too many’ is that it implies theres some arbitrary number where once you exceed that number you’ve gotten into wasteful and irresponsible behavior. Pshaw. Gun ownership is probably the most responsible behavior you can engage in. If I were to define what ‘too many’ is I would say it is the same as with any other thing that you do to excess – when your behavior negatively affects other aspects of your life. Or, put another way, when you let the car get repossessed because you wanted to buy another FAL you may have hit the stage where its time to stop buying guns and start spending a little more wisely. (On the other hand, if it’s a really nice FAL and the car needed a new tranny anyway….)

While I cant give you a hard and fast number about ‘too many’, I can easily give you a number for ‘not enough’. That number is 0. I think one gun is too few but even one gun is better than no gun. But two are better than one and three are better than two….
“Yeah, look man, Im not after a lifestyle I just want a number for adding to my checklist of zombie prevention gear.” Okay. Four. Anything between one and four is bad news. Less than four is skating on thin ice, driving on bald tires, being called to Al Gores hotel room for a massage, driving without a seatbelt…you’ll probably be okay for a while, but youre definitely flirting with disaster. Why? Four is a handgun and a rifle, with a spare of each. Four is a rifle, handgun, shotgun and .22. Four is a stash of handguns for barter or sale. Four is a minimum that provides enough versatile combinations to handle just about anything. There have been some times when I didn’t have whole lot of money to my name and when the gun collection shrank in the face of money problems there was still usually four guns that never got sold. So, I cant tell you what too many is but I can tell you what too few is.