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

It occurred to me that its been just a few weeks over a year since the Carter II victory. When this long national nightmare started I was pretty certain we were on the track to $1500 Ar’s, $40 magazines and those funky ‘thumbhole’ stocks. Thus far (and that’s the key qualifier here) it hasn’t happened. Sure, right after the election prices got pretty wild, and ammo is still a problem, but to be fair none of that has been the result of passage of any new federal legislation. In fact, even proposed federal regulations have barely gotten anywhere.

Does this mean I was wrong on my supposition that Obama would mean a return to the Clinton Assault Weapon ban years? Well, this goober still has another three years and change ahead of him, so it would certainly be premature to say he wasn’t an enemy to my gun rights. Before the comments start flying in, let me make it clear: I’m not saying he doesn’t have plans against me and you in regards to gun ownership, Im just saying he hasnt really made any serious efforts in that direction…yet. I do, however, remain convinced that there’ll be some sort of ‘reasonable’ gun control proposals thrown at us before long. (And before anyone posts the links, yes I know that Obama’s AG has said that they’d always been upfront about wanting ‘just a few’ gun control changes.)

A year ago I was telling people “In a year these magazines will be $50 each, these stripped lowers will be $200 each and complete ‘pre-ban’ style guns will be worth twice what they are now.”…and for a brief while that was true. But the panic buying dwindled and now mags are as cheap as before, stripped lowers are still reasonable, and complete guns are generally available at Pre-Obama prices. In that regard, I was wrong.

For now.

But I genuinely do believe that before this guy leaves office theres going to be a hard push to bring back some version of the Clinton Assault Weapons Ban. I really do believe that this very moment today, will, within Obama’s term, be considered as a ‘good old days’ period by you and I….access to affordable firearms and magazines and no new restrictions to inhibit our enjoyment.

I still believe, quite firmly, that stockpiling for your anticipated firearms needs right now is a good idea. If you don’t have your guns, get the guns. If you’ve got the guns, get the mags. If you’ve got the mags, get the ammo. If you’ve got the ammo, get more guns.
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I was mucking about in the deep freeze the other night and have determined that I’ve been a bad boy in regard to keeping the inventory levels where they should be. We’ve gone through a good bit of chicken and are down to the last 10# or so. A trip to CostCo is definitely in order. I’d like to have another 30# of chicken, 20# of beef, and a few other meats put back for mid-term storage. I like the CostCo chicken because it comes already packaged in individual sealed packages. I don’t have to pull chicken breasts out of a stack off of a Styrofoam tray and individually vacuum seal each one. Already been done for me. That convenience is worth the niggling few cents a pound more that CostCo charges.

In addition to the meats, I need to stock up on a few other household goodies. I had a cold for the last two weeks and put a pretty good dent in the Kleenex stash, so might as well go long and get another dozen or so boxes of tissues. TP never goes out of style, so at least one 36-roll pack is in the future. Soaps and detergents are also on the list. And bleach. Bleach actually will ‘go bad’ (What actually happens is it loses its efficacy) so may as well pick up a couple gallons and rotate out what we have….fortunately its pretty cheap stuff and is dandy for cleaning up the odd biohazard…and great for diluting and wiping down anything that needs to be bacteria free such as bathroom fixtures, cooking instruments, etc, etc.

It’s not unfair to say that part of the drive to stockpile is related to the economy. It’s simply good planning to buy when you have money against the day you might not. If, Crom forbid, we were hit with a bout of unemployment or severe cut in income it would be nice to be able to make whatever money we had last longer by not needing to purchase toiletries, paper goods, meats, staple food items, and other goodies. Plus, it’s a pretty decent long-term strategy for saving money if you believe inflation will be nibbling (or chomping) away your purchasing power.
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What is going on with the economy, anyway? Sometimes it’s a bit daunting to try and make sense of what the various media says about the current state of things. The conomy is like the wind – you don’t see it, but you see its effects. I know little about economics, but I can see the impact of the current economy all around me…more and more empty storefronts, businesses with less employees, more people paying with food stamps, more people clamoring for benefits, unemployment figures hitting new highs, car dealerships with lots of new cars unsold, more people looking for bargains, etc, etc….each one of those little observations is fairly meaningless but taken as a whole they say that if the economy isn’t in trouble then theres a lot of people who sure think it is. And, regardless of the condition of your economy, if people think the economy is bad, then it’s bad.

While I used to put higher stock in the notion of a terrorist-induced EOTWAWKI I came around to thinking that it would more likely be some sort of economic upheaval. That shift in thinking was somewhere in the early years of 2000. It was pretty much a dead heat between terrorism and economic turmoil. (Fortunately the preparations for each are not necessarily mutually exclusive of each other.) As a result, while not immune to the ravages of the economy we aren’t as vulnerably exposed as some folks.

What Im curious about is the ‘survivors syndrome’ that will follow this recession/depression. Will it be decades before the people who went through it feel comfortable making the kind of purchases and taking on the kinds of debt they did before all this happened? I know of people who, after making it through the Depression, made permanent, lifelong changes to their spending habits. Or, once the crisis has passed, will people go back to their jet skis, borrow 115% of their equity, put nothing into savings, and pat themselves on the back for having dodged a bullet?

And, if the former, how will that affect any real economic recovery?

I was never exactly a big spender…I never really had the income to do so. But the last couple of years have certainly drilled into me that even if times are good, and the money and jobs are free for the taking, it might not be a bad idea to keep an eye on the horizon and keep an eye on the wallet.