Article – Off-grid community ‘The Citadel Project’ gets thumbs up to manufacture firearms

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A company called III Arms has just received ATF approval to manufacture firearms. Setting up a gun manufacturer is just a small part of III Arms’ plan, which is to establish a completely self-sufficient community in the mountains of Idaho.

It will be called “The Citadel” and include a walled urban center—10 feet thick by 20 feet high and four miles long—surrounded by rural plots for farming. It is, to turn a phrase, a planned prepper community.

Despite being armed and armored, the Citadel isn’t being made to defend its people from military or government action, rather, it’s intended to be a safe haven for forward-thinkers to weather a social, economic or environmental collapse. It is at the leading edge of anti-establishment living, but it “is not designed to withstand any direct .mil or .gov attack. Nor is the Citadel, in any manner, attempting to provoke any government entity,” according to the project FAQ.

Hmmm. So…theyre not attempting to provoke any government entity. But when they get their 07 FFl they proudly display it and the one-finger-salute. Now, I hate the ATFE as much as the next red-blooded guy. heck, I betcha I hate them even more. But I would call that ‘provocative’. Sure, it’s perfectly legit…heck, I bet you could call your gun company ATFESUCKSDONKEYBALLS LLC. and make an AR called the WACO-15 and ATFE would have no choice but to sign off on it as long as you crossed all the t’s and dotted the i’s. But it it smart? I’m gonna say no. Sure, the satisfaction quotient will be off the scale, but that doesn’t mean its a good idea.

There’s a little bit of heat in the discussion thread in the previous post, so let me clarify – I think the notion behind this ‘Citadel’ project, having a community of like-minded individuals working together, is a great one. More power to you. But I think the scale that they want to do it on is unworkable. Historically, the only societies that functioned on a large-scale like that had either an intense religious belief holding them together or an oppressive government forcing them to work towards common goals. (And while you could argue that the current government is oppressive enough that it is forcing people to band together in a case like this, that isn’t how meant it.) So, as far as I can tell, the only large examples would be religious cults and dictatorships…not the kinda place I want to be.

I do think something like this could work, but on a much more scaled down version. I’d like to be wrong, but this is sounding more and more like a Johnstone ‘Out Of The Ashes’ Tri-States fantasy.

Article- Another survivalist development in Idaho?

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Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

ST. MARIES, Idaho (AP) — A group of survivalists wants to build a giant walled fortress in the woods of the Idaho Panhandle, a medieval-style city where residents would be required to own weapons and stand ready to defend the compound if society collapses.

The proposal is called the Citadel and has created a buzz among folks in this remote logging town 70 miles southeast of Spokane, Wash. The project would more than double the population of Benewah County, home to 9,000 souls.

Locals have many questions, but organizers so far are pointing only to a website billing the Citadel as “A Community of Liberty.”

“There is no leader,” Christian Kerodin, a convicted felon who is a promoter of the project, wrote in a brief email to The Associated Press. “There is a significant group of equals involved … each bringing their own professional skills and life experiences to the group.

 

Good luck with that. Getting 7000 families of people together in a demographic that encourages individuality and independence is a textbook definition of cat herding. Consider all the sub-groups, good and bad and wierd, that fall under the ‘survivalist’ umbrella – back-to-the-land folks, ‘anarchists’, christofascists, gold bugs, conspiracy theorists, christian identity, hippies, ‘anti-government’, pro-government, etc, etc – and you’d have a heck of a time finding seven families, let alone 7000, that are going to share quarters and make things work.

“Ties that bind” are formed in varying degrees of strength. First and strongest are familial or “blood” bonds. Siblings, parents and children, then weaker relations such as cousins and uncles/aunts. Next down the line would be ideological bonds such as a shared belief system (religious, political or philosophical). Next down would be the close friends..the guys you served with, childhood friends, etc. After that, casual friends and coworkers. At the bottom of the list, one step above ‘people I’m trapped in an elevator with’ is ‘people who paid an entrance fee to live in the same compound with me’. If the world truly comes to the stage that living in a Fujian Tulou improves your chances of survival, I would feel far more comfortable if that retreat were peopled with folks I loved and trusted rather than people who read the same websites I did and could afford a U-Haul.

Could such a ‘survival community’ work? Maybe. You’d have to start with a base of people who already had a well-developed sense of connection to each other…more than just ‘I love [liberty/jesus/guns/america].’ And even then, 7000 families just seems ridiculous. The Free State Project, the largest cat-herding project so far, is looking for 20000 people to commit to their cause and if you figure a family is defined as an average of three people then they too are looking for 7000 families….and theyre still coming up short and they have a much better campaign (and image) than this Citadel project.

A ‘survivalist’ community could work..heck, it already exists on some levels with just folks being good neighbors….but seven thousand families co-existing together as a unified group is just a pipe dream. Three or for families living along the same stretch of road, situated next to or across from each other, is probably about as big a ‘survival community’ as you can get without dipping into ‘Woodbury-esque‘ power games and intrigue.

Crasche not-a-helmet, Sony radio, seeds

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These look interesting. They’re knit caps that incorporate lightweight protective inserts. No substitute for a PASGT or similar helm, but when you want to have your melon protected from casual abuse and want to be discrete, these look like an interesting choice. Looks less dorky than your average bicycle helmet.

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Picked up one of these the other day. (Sony ICF-SW7600GR AM/FM Shortwave World Band Receiver with Single Side Band Reception, plus External Plug-in Antenna) I’d been wanting a relatively inexpensive portable battery-powered radio that would also pick up SW and this one seemed to get great reviews. I’ve been playing with it for a few days an am liking it quite a bit. At some point I’ll spend the big bucks for a more ‘serious’ receiver but for now this’ll do. I like listening to news broadcasts from other countries. It’s just good sense to get your news from as many sources as possible and I especially like foreign news services’ take on things.

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Our shipment of seeds from Victory Seed showed up last week. Personally, I like starting them indoors as early as possible so I need to get off my butt and get them going. Peppers and tomatoes FTW. Sometimes I am amazed at the size and productivity of plants that I can grow out of a 5-gallon-bucket. I have a fantasy about someday having a piece of property with a natural hot spring on it. One thing I’d do is run that water through some piping and heat a nice glass-block greenhouse with it. Year-round vegetables, baby. Man, that’d be sweet.

 

Tripwire alarms

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Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

http://minisentryalarm.wordpress.com/

This landed in my email the other day: http://minisentryalarm.wordpress.com/

I actually built something very similar a few years back out of plumbing parts from Home Depot. Difference was, instead of using a nailgun blank, mine used a shotgun primer….to ignite cannon fuse.

Years ago a fella had a couple options for this sort of thing ‘artillery simulators’ or ‘boobytrap simulators’ were available from some of the usual mil-surp sources and they were ten shades of cool. They havent been offered in many years. For a number of years, outfits like CTD, Sportsmans Guide, BQ, etc, etc, offered a trip-wire system that would let off a 12 ga. blank. (Homemade version here) Those were great but I guess some folks modified them into ‘trap guns’ or somesuch and they disappeared from the matket, only to be replaced with a Nerfed-down version that uses a cyalume lightstick instead of a 12 ga. blank. Lame.

If you hunt around a bit, you can find some slightly different designs ( 1, 2, 3 ) being offered.

These arent new ideas…about a hundred years ago there used to be cool little devices called ‘trap guns’. They were nothing more that short barrels affixed to an ation and the trigger was usually a long rod with some food attached. Youd nail one of these things to a tree and when a critter came and niggled on the food, the trigger would be activated and the gun would go off…shooting the animal in the head. Sort of a ‘fishing yo-yo’ for mammals. Of course, there was always the chance you’d wind up shooting a neighbors stock or pet.

The designs eventually led to ‘sentry guns’ or ‘burglar guns’ that were a similar design and meant to be affixed to a window or door. When the window or door was opened, it would trip the action and a small (usually .22 or .32) blank would go off. Most of these were big in the pre-War era of the 1920′s or so. They turn up as novelties at gun shows from time to time.

If I had a chunk o’ property and I wanted a fairly maintenance-free warning system I’d probably get something similar to the 12 ga. systems, but scale it up to 26.5mm, and a length of tubing to act as a barrel, and make sure I have a clear shot through the tree camopy and use 26.5mm flares. Illumination and warning at the same time…nothing makes folks freeze in their tracks like that popping noise and suddenly finding your stealthy ninja-approach illuminated in that ghostly flicker of a parachute flare.

Probably in about ten years even this stuff’ll be obsolete. We’ll have tiny copters the size of a deck of playing cards that will patrol our perimeters giving live-feed video. Or they’ll just have a few grams of explosive on board and a kamikaze subroutine when an intruder is detected. Seriously. You know someone somewhere is developing one of these things in their garage right now.

 

Mirrors

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Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

Man, I’ve been busy lately. It’s just non-stop work, work, work lately. These sorts of episodes of high-demand don’t happen very often (thankfully) but when they do you have to strike while the iron is hot. So..this is why I haven’t been around much lately. however, that doesnt mean that there arent things going on…….

I picked up one of these the other day to go along with the marker panel from the same outfit. It’s made of glass (albeit thick glass) so it may not be as unbreakable as other signal mirrors out there but its hard to beat the reflectivity of a good glass mirror. I’d been shopping around for a signal mirror to put in my little survival kit for when Im hunting/fishing and I just wasnt finding anything that I really thought was any good. I picked up a few of the non-glass mirrors from countycomm and while they would probably do the job, I have a hard time finding anything thats as good as old-fashioned breakable glass.

I need to do some empirical research and see just how visible these mirror flashes are at a distance. next time the wife takes the dog for a run up the nearby mountain I’ll have her call me from the top and tell me if she can spot the flashes from up there. I would imagine reflected sunlight must be rather highly visible at range since the military used to use heliographs for communications.

When bellyguns go bad……..

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Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

So I’m sitting in front of the missus’ Mac, watching a movie (Dredd…way bloodier than I expected), and I see her little KelTec 32 sitting next to the keyboard. I pick it up and examine it. Pull the mag, rack the slide to eject the cartridge and…hey..is that a spot of rust on the breechface? Hmmmm. I stop the movie, Google up some disassembly directions and….

photo-31Someone is going to get a spanking. And not the fun-Friday-night kind. And it ain’t gonna be me and it ain’t gonna be Nuke.

A half hour later I’ve cleaned it up and mitigated as much damage as I can. Mostly cosmetic but…some barrel pitting. How does this happen? Well, really, a maintenance routine would be nice. (Like, maybe every time we switch to/from Daylight Savings Time we should detail strip our carry guns?) But, mouseguns like these are especially prone to this sort of thing.

Here’s a S&W 36 that I carry sometimes when I’m just too lazy to carry the Glock. Please observe it from two sides:

IMG_0608

Not a bad little gun. It’s a former NYPD gun that I got for a good deal years ago. Why so good? Well, lets flip it over and see…….:

IMG_0609Oh! Thats..thats not right! I know, I know…I probably should have warned the weak-stomached S&W fans that there was some gun-gore coming. In my defense, this is how I got the damn thing. I take much better care of my thundertoys than to have that sort of thing happen. As an aside, the Smith works flawlessly…it’s just damn ugly on that one side.

Here’s the skinny – mouseguns and other hideout firearms are usually carried in a manner that is not terrbily conducive towards gun health. Take the case of the Smith shown above…why is all the pitting and funk on one side of the gun? Heck, even only one side of the cylinder has it. The reason is simple – the cop who carried it carried it with the pitted side facing his body. Moisture and corrosive sweat, combined with typical cop gun maintenance, slowly started defacing that side of the gun over time. The other side, which was free to ‘breathe’ didnt suffer as bad. Same story on the KelTec..she carries it in the ‘appendix carry‘ style, which puts it close to her…uhm…well, let’s just say that I bet I could get a lot of money from her fans for that KelTec. But seriously folks….when you carry any small gun tightly against your body you are asking for this sort of trouble. That doesn’t mean you shouldnt do it, it just means you need to have an accelerated rmaintenance shedule for these and other guns that are in the ‘elevated risk’ category.

I carry a Glock, normally, which is fairly difficult to damage. Oh, you can do it, but it’ll take damage that would kill lesser guns. I usually fully disassemble and clean my EDC gun every other month or so. My little pocket guns, like my 640 or 21A, get cleaned and oiled more frequently.

Don’t think that stainless steel is going to get you off the hook, either. It’s stainless..not rustless. I use TetraLube on most of my guns and I’ll wipe it on with my fingers, getting it into every nook and cranny on the gun, and then wipe it all off with a paper towel. This leaves plenty of lube behind but doesn’t leave a gooey mess that can attract pocket lint and become gun-jamming sludge. Use whatever lube you want, but use your head in the selection and application.

Moral of the story: even with the use of a holster (especially with the use of a holster, since if you just leave the gun in it all the time youre leaving it in there trapped with whatever moisture and body funk youve generated) you need to take these things and air ‘em out and clean ‘em once in a while. To quote Michael Ironside from the unfathomably bad ‘Highlander II’ sequel: “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, if you dont take it out and use it, it’s going to rust”.

 

 

Link – Guide to Military Survival Kits

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I thought this link was rather interesting. It’s educational to see how the contents of the kits, as well as the materials used, have changed over the years. It’s kind of hard to think that there are places in war zones where you could be stranded long enough that you’d have to worry about things like fishing for food, but then again sometimes you wind up stranded in wartime in some places where no one will ever find you.

Given the technology and materials available nowadays, I would think you could put together some amazingly compact and effective kits. Pencil flares, small radios, water purification…all that stuff has come a long ways.

The ban list

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Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

Here it is – Feinsteins targeted gun list.

Ruger’s AR is on there but the Mini-14 isnt. Neither is my PTR’s although the HK’s are mentioned by name. No doubt they’ll fall under the part that bans them by a list of features.

Apparently stuff gets grandfathered in but a national registry is created for them.

This should prove to be highly contentious. We shall see.

Voting

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Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

The current gun (and accessory) panic buying is keeping me busy in my ‘civilian life’, but sometimes something happens that you just gotta make time for. Like today’s interesting forray into small government: I received a notice from the election administration saying that since I did not vote in the last federal election, I would have to re-register.

:::headdesk:::

Me not vote in a presidential election? You better damn well believe I voted in the last two and I’m not ashamed to tell you who I voted against. So now I’m wondering if my vote was even counted. Down to the courthouse I go. The gal at the counter asks if she can help me. I wave the card at her and say Im a wee bit concerned about this and could she check it out. She gets the sign-in book from the polling place and flips through it. “There!”, I triumphantly point when I see my signature. Sure enough, I voted. She assures me that my vote was counted and that when they had to enter all the signatures and their associated reference numbers into the computer thats where the error occurred. Hmm..okay, if you say so. I do remember checking the count on the scanning machine when I slid my ballot into it and making sure it changed over by one number when my ballot went in. I know that it registered. I’m fairly confident my vote counted. But to imagine that they had no record of me voting??? Damn well better believe I was gonna make time to get that straightened out.

The “if voting changed anything they would make it illegal” crowd will disparage all this but, screw em. I think it makes a difference and I don’t take kindly to the notion of the election people telling me I didnt vote when I know I did.

Anyway…..an interesting day so far.

Review – CR123 Waterproof Delrin® Battery Locker from CountyComm

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If you’ve never been there, Countycomm.com has an odd and eclectic mix of goodies that definitely have some merit for those who share our rarefied interests. I’ve never ordered from them before but I finally got around to picking up a few things and thought I’d mention at least one of ‘em here.

From their website:

 

We have a limited overrun of “waterproof Delrin® battery lockers”. The battery locker fits CR123 batteries perfectly. Brand new, never used overrun from government contract. Possible uses include: geo-caching, pet identification, emergency cash stash, water purification tablets, pill storage.

  • Delrin® is a lightweight, extremely stable space age polymer.

  • Overall length: 47.50 mm or 1.87″

  • External diameter: 21.10 mm or .83″

  • Internal opening: 16.80 mm or .66″

  • Internal depth: 33.30 mm or 1.30″

  • Weight 10.20 grams

  • Lid is secured via flange to cap seal internal o-ring)

  • U.S. Made / U.S. Issue Item

 

I dunno about you, but too much of my gear takes the CR123 batteries. Usually these batteries are limited to things like SureFire flashlights and weaponlights, but those are pretty much the high-end pieces of gear that you do not want to have crapping out on you when you need them.

Ideally, I want a battery carrier that is bombproof. Something that keeps things dry, protected, and free from accidental shorting. SureFire makes a Spares Carrier that is quite nice, but a bit bulky for some of my needs. There was, to me, a need for a method to carry just one or two CR123 batts in an absolutely secure manner. So, I ordered up a few of these battery carriers and figured I’d give my impression.

They’re pretty much exactly what I wanted. They are knurled at one end for a solid grip as you grasp the other end and unscrew them. Once open you can see the o-ring in the cap that contributes to the waterproof seal. A CR123 battery fits in there quite nicely with minimal room to rattle. I’ll wind up stuffing a tiny piece of gasket material or something into the bottom of the container to completely eliminate any noise. The cap the container is not captive, so there is a chance you could lose it. There’s a hole in the cap for a lanyard and I’ll wind up putting two of these on a loop of paracord and keeping them with my support gear for my 870, since I got the new SureFire forend for it and want to keep spare batts handy.

Construction is from hard plastic and short of stomping on one they look like they’d hold up quite nicely to the rough-n-tumble of being bounced around in my bag. These things are offered in AAA and AA batt size and I’ll be picking up a few of the AA sized ones as well.

Biggest drawback is that these things are about nine bucks a throw. There just isnt any way a plastic geegaw from a military contract overrun should cost that much. But…if it does what I want then I guess price isn’t worth complaining about.

A very good question to ask would be “Why do you need one of these?”. I don’t know about you, but my bag is loaded with all sortsa gear…lotsa little odds and ends that might come in handy. Things like zip ties, large paper clips (sometimes a small piece of wire is exactly what you need), spare ammo, pocket knives, lanyards, radios, etc, etc, etc. Throw a handful of AA or CR123 batts into that mix and at some point theyre going to contact something and short themselves..in the case of the CR123, possibly in a conflagatory way. Most of the time I segregate my batteries in the Maxpedition battery carrier (MAXPEDITION VOLTA Battery Pouch). As much as I like the Maxpedition carrier, it isn’t 100% waterproof and airtight. For stuff that is ‘mission critical’ (GPS and radio spring to mind) you absolutely do not want even the slightest chance of having you spare batteries being crapped out when you need them. So, most of the time my spares are in the Maxpedition carrier, but in my little survival kit that I take with me hunting and fishing, the extra batts go in these battery lockers from CC.

Too expensive for all-around use, but for those pieces of gear that absolutely, positively need to have the spare batteries kept in perfect condition these things would be hard to beat.