‘Tis a day not fit for man nor beast.

Its a cold, immensely windy day out there in western Montana. I had originally planned to go to CostCo but after doing a 360 spin through an intersection (albeit at slow speed and with no witnesses) I decided perhaps discretion was the better part of self-preservation and carefully drove back to the house.

For those of you in states that aren’t Montana, there is usually the notion that winter here is brutal, harsh, and runs fourteen months out of the year. Not exactly. You’d think that the harshest winter month would be December, right? Nope. Usually it is February that is the killer. Oh sure, December can get cold but as bad as December gets February is invariably worse.

Today, Im sequestering myself in the house to do drudge work, work on some preparedness things I’ve been letting slide, and, regrettably, studying math. But, it beats being ouside right now. While it isn’t as cold as it could be, nor as snowy, the wind is nuts….blowing, drifting snow is making everything impossible to see.

But….ah, preparedness….I have food, I have heat, I have electricity, and I have internet. That makes this sort of thing much more tolerable.

The last thing the blogosphere (or any other sphere, for that matter) needs is another person espousing their opinions about the latest school shooting. So..I’m not going to do that.

Instead, I’m going to prattle about how this is the first time something like this has happened where I didnt feel the need to hock a kidney or lung so I could panic-buy more AR’s or magazines.

I’ve enough on-hand that my needs are, I think, met for a long while AND I have enough to make a hefty profit off the unprepared if they pass another magazine ban. So…no panic.

It’s been fourteen years since the Assault Weapons ban ended and we could once again have normal-capacity magazines. If you can’t remember what those dark days are like, lemme dial up the Wayback Machine for you…

Too many people think that because Trump is in office we have nothing to fear in terms of future prohibitions. People who think that are short-sighted, unrealistic idiots. But, if you’ve had fourteen years to get you magazine/gun needs taken care of and still haven’t…well… maybe you’re not really the kinda guy that needs to be reading preparedness blogs.

Moral of the story: being able to not stress about magazine/gun bans is a nice thing. And that peace of mind is only because I haven’t been sitting on my hands these last few years.

Hmmm.. AR mags are still only $11 at CheaperThanDirt. Someone must have forgotten to mark them up 800%.

You know Joe Blow. One day, Joe Blow says “Hey, a buddy of yours from a while back called me looking for you. He said he was your roommate in college. I gave him your [number/address/email].”

Joe Blow has no idea if that guy was really your roommate or your girlfriend’s crazy ex-boyfriend. And he handed him your personal info.

Don’t be that guy.

From time to time, someone will ask me if I know someone who has a particular gun or similar item for sale. I’ll say yes and they’ll ask for that person’s contact info. I never give out anyone’s personal info. Instead, I’ll tell the person to give me their info and I’ll pass it along to the other person and they can make contact if they are interested. In this manner no one’s personal info is ever out of control. The buyer controls whether they pass on their info or not, the seller’s info is never out in the open unless the seller chooses to contact the buyer, and little ‘ol me is the cutout. You may notice, at this point, I have the contact info for both parties. True. But…I only have it because both parties willfully provided it to me.

Folks like you and I have a lot of reasons to be private. We have stashes of..well… lotsa stuff .. that makes us high-value targets for everyone ranging from neighborhoodlums to cops looking for a quick boost to their stats (or egos).  Unfortunately, ‘networking’ is tough to do when you have to worry about the risk of every potential new contact.This is why it is so hard to meet other like-minded individuals. It’s also why, in my experience, your most likely candidate for a new survivalist buddy is probably someone you already know.

I don’t hang around with anti-gun people, leftists, socialists, morons (“But I repeat myself” – M. Twain), statists, and that sort of ilk. So, whom I hang out with is, naturally, probably going to fall into that set of people who do share my interests. After that, it’s a Venn diagram of ‘likes guns, personal freedom, fiscally conservative, well-read, intelligent’ and a few other features. Point being, the choices you’ve made for the last several years (or decades) about who you hang out with have probably already naturally landed you in a pool of people that have a much higher than average likelihood of being like-minded individuals.

But all it takes is one mistake to undo a lot of plans. “Hey, you’re a survivalist? I am too! Show me your gun collection!” is not the smart way to do things. And it goes past that… maybe this person is exactly the sort of person who want to bring into your private world of freeze drieds and silver coins. But what about their friends? What about their spouse? What about their blabber mouth kids? Or their brother with the meth habit and need to sell other peoples expensive gear to fund it? What about the people who intersect their life?

It’s a challenge to try and juggle the need for security and avoidance of risk with the desire to expand your network a bit. Most of the time we humans are social critters and as much as we may like to think we don’t need other people, it is kinda nice to have someone you can talk to and do this sort of stuff with.

I started this post with an example of how many people betray other peoples privacy. Anytime you meet anyone, survivalist or not, you have to keep in mind that whatever information they choose to share with you is between the two of you unless explicitly stated otherwise. “Hey, can you give me Joe Blows phone number?”, “No, but if you give me yours I’ll ask him to call you.” That sort of thing. It’s a balancing act because you don’t want to be rude, and you don’t want to call the other person out on being nosy, but privacy matters.

I get this on the blog once in a while. Someone will email me and ask if I can give them someone’s email address or somesuch. No. Never. I’ll pass your contact info to them but that’s as far as it goes.

It isn’t always this awkward though. My friend whom I eventually figured out was on the same page eventually introduced me to his friend who also had the same inclinations we did. Since I trusted my friend, and my friend trusted his friend, there was already a high level of trust in place. (And this is, in fact, how it works in the mob when you want to meet someone.)

So the thought for today is that privacy is paramount. And trust comes slowly but when it does come it is worth maintaining. Sadly, the corollary to that is that once trust is broken you have to disengage and disconnect immediately and irrevocably. And that can be a major pain in the ass if you’ve trusted someone with the location of the Batcave. So…always protect your own privacy but be just as vigilant with the privacy of others. In this way we’ll all prosper and have better experiences with each other.

I’d mentioned earlier that after years of wanting, I finally caved and got a pair (well, two actually) of the surplus magnesium snowshoes that never seem to run out of inventory at the various surplus dealers.

The bindings that come with them are, to put it mildly, challenging. Oh, if you get good instructions you can suss it out and get them the way you want them but isn’t there a better way?

Might be.

Some research showed that these bindings were recommended for this sort of thing so I went ahead and ordered a set. The instructions were NOT terribly clear, but between YouTube and some comments in the reviews on Amazon, I got it figured out.

Bottom line: You will want to use different screws. I used 1.5″ 10-24 with nylon locking bolts and a couple washers on either side. About $1 at most hardware stores. The guy in the video cut away some of the wires that were in the way and then cable clamped the loose ends. Maybe that works for him, I dont like the idea of cutting anything. I used some safety wire to pull the webbing wires apart where I needed more space.

Getting in and out of these bindings is a breeze. Highly recommend. If the weather would just cooperate, I’ll take these things for a hike up in the hills but right now we’ve got rain and virtually zero snow on the ground. But, February us usually our winteriest month, so who knows.

As you may have noticed in some earlier posts, I am quite excited by Rugers introduction of a 9mm carbine that takes pistol magazines. The carbine comes with a magwell adapter to take Glock mags, but as-is the thing is made to take the mags from Rugers American series and their Security-9 gun.

Wait..Security what?

Waaaaay back in the day, Ruger made a k-frame-style pistol under a few different names – Police-six, Speed-Six, Security-Six. They were no-frills six-shot revolvers marketed towards police and security markets. A reasonable strategy in the day when only the most forward thinking groups equipped their guys with automatics.

As the revolver faded from duty holsters, Ruger tried to capture the market with their very good, very affordable, and very ignored P-series of automatic pistols. Their extremely low price would make them attractive to buyers who needed to equip agencies/departments on a budget. Sadly, the P-series never really caught on and it was quietly discontinued a few years ago. Personally, I’m a huge fan of the P95 series (Specifically the P95DC) and I can usually pick up a couple each year on Gunbroker for less than $200.

When Ruger came out with their PC9 carbine, the plan was that it would be a police carbine that would use the same mags as the pistol the officer carried. A couple problems with that concept was that a) cops that carried longarms usually went with M4s or 870’s, and b) virtually no department issued the P series as a standard sidearm. The Ruger 9mm carbine was discontinued about ten years or so ago and they command stupid prices on Gunbroker. But..that’ll change now because really the only market for the PC9 will be guys like me who have a mountain of P-series pistols. But….

Ruger has, it seems, decided to get into the budget wondernine market again with the Security-9 series. The most interesting thing is that dealer cost on these things is…$260~. Yeah, that’s not a typo. So you get, basically, Ruger’s version of the Glock 19 for only a hundred bucks more than a HiPoint. (Or, put another way, for the same money you get twice as much capacity, half as many guns,and  three times the respect of a HiPoint.)

The Security-9 is getting some reviews at the usual places, and I’m sorta curious about them simply because I still have the inexplicable attraction of a carbine and pistol taking the same mags. However, since the Ruger carbine will accept Glock mags there’s no need for me to get a couple (or five) of the Security-9’s to go with the carbine. But, considering their low dealer price, if they turn out to be a quality gun, at least on par with the P-series, then there might be some interest there. There are some differences…the P-series are hamer fired versus the concealed hammer, DA/SA, and have second-strike capability. The Security-9 offers…well..not much that I can see except perhaps slightly better ergos and a rail. I’d be very curious to see if theyre as durable as the tank-like P’s.

I’ll probably wind up getting one just to try out and if I like it, who knows…maybe I’ll retire the P-series to Gunbroker and restock with the Security-9’s.

Anyway, I find it interesting that Ruger has gone back to trying to get the ‘budget’ market for autopistols again. I suspect that these things will replace the P-series as the most common ‘big name’ autoloader in police evidence bins.