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

Read “The Road” today. Still not sure what I think about it and still rather unsure just what exactly it was about. To me it seems to be some sort of obvious statement and exploration about devotion, human condition, and, I think, man’s selfish nature versus his ‘humanitarian’ one and how it does or does not reward that behavior. Much like how ‘Moby Dick’ wasnt a book about whaling, but rather a book about the price of revenge and obsession using the whaling story as a stage for presenting ideas and metaphors, I think ‘The Road’ is the same way – an allegory that uses a post-apocalyptic setting to present its explorations and examples.

And it makes me uber grateful to live in a country where I dont even have to get out of my chair to have delicious hot food delivered to my door.

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

Well, the Hamilton gun show came and went…

I saw aluminum G3 mags for $2 but they were pretty tired looking. Two bucks is a good deal though..I paid about that for the 250 I have socked away.

Saw a Colt 1991 .45 ACP with bluing issues for $400. That almost tempted me into doing something stupid but I managed to resist. Really, the finish wasnt that bad and when else can you get a big-name 1911 for $400? But…if I had $400 Id get another G17 for the stable. Only other handgun I saw that made me think twice was a stainless 5.5″ Ruger MKII heavy barrel. Just like the blued one I picked up the other day.

Primers were there if you were willing to pay, as I predicted, $40 per brick. AR mags could be had for $10 for GI or $20 for new. Saw almost no AR’s for less than $1200 with one notable exception. A nearby gun store was selling NIB Oly AR’s with A1-style sights and carry handle for $710. Apparently Oly, sensing a chance to get market share, is putting out a ‘no-frills’ AR for the man with a thin wallet. One drawback…its Oly.

Picked up some 60 gr. A-Max to load up for my HBAR so I can sight in my IOR M2 scope. Im looking forward to trying this optic out.

Trochmann wasnt at the show so there was no interesting ’survival gear’. Too bad, because every so often he comes up with some cool stuff. I have a huge bin fulla parachute flares and smoke devices Ive picked up from him over the last couple years…prolly from a cruise line that was rotating out their SOLAS stuff in the lifeboats.

No FALs, no PTRs, no high-end AK’s. Good selection of magazines at decent prices but ammo was still thin and overpriced. Did see one item I hadnt seen before – an AR-180B with a side folder stock. I was under the impression all the 180B’s, unlike the original 180’s, came with a fixed stock only. This thing had an FAL-para-style sidefolder. Interesting. I rather like the 180B…you get gas-piston reliability and AR mag compatability in something a little more robust than the Keltec.

Only purchase I made at the show was a couple boxes of 12 ga. rubber slugs. Nothing else jumped out at me, although, as I said, that 1991 made a strong case for doing something reckless.

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

Interesting post over at TSLRF regarding standardization of firearms.

If you read the comments, someone suggested that all you really needed was to agree on a caliber and let everyone get what they wanted based on their needs and budget.

Lemme tell you a story. Many years ago I went to visit some friends. We were planning on doing a bit of shooting so I packed up my guns and flew out to visit. On my return trip, there was some difficulty and my guns didnt make it back. In fact, it was several months before they finally came back to me. So when I returned home, I was essentially unarmed. Sure, I had a 10/22 in the safe and probably a .38 somewhere, but no AR, no autopistol. (Keep in mind this was before I had the level of redundancy I have now.)

One of the LMI, who was in a position to have spares of his stuff, came by and dropped off a rifle and pistol for me. No mags, no ammo, no optics, no slings. Just a couple guns. Because we had standardized on a particular platform, I already had everything else I needed…already had plenty of mags, ammo, slings, optics, holsters, etc. Thats pretty much a classic example of how standardization has benefits.

Standardization isnt the exclusive domain of the thundertoy. I’ve standardized on things like battery sizes (AA, D and CR123), sheath knives (Glock), canteens, Nalgene bottle sizes, etc, etc. It streamlines logistics and allows for discounts through bulk purchases.

People who are into preparedness tend to be a fairly…individualistic…lot. Getting several of them to agree on something (especially something like firearms) can be a challenge at times. But, ideally, in addition to being rugged individualists your associates are also reasonable and logical beings as well. People who can appreciate the advantages and disadvantages presented to them on this issue, and come around to a decision thats mutually acceptable to all.

Even if your ‘group’ is no larger than you and your spouse, its still an excellent idea to have commonality in these matters. Similar models of GPS, similar models of flashlight, similar models of backpacks, etc, etc….it really does make things easier. Just be sure to think things through and be willing to accept that maybe your idea of what should be the adopted [firearm/flashlight/tent/pack/radio] for your group of like-minded individuals may not stand up under arguments from the others. Be flexible, be open minded but always keep your eye on the big picture – your goal is a commonality that meets your anticipated needs. What are those needs? Thats for you and your buddies to decide.

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

Was up at CostCo the other day and was kinda surprised to see this in one of the aisles:

Looks interesting enough. For someone who simply wants a turnkey system it would have some appeal. No getting parts from five different vendors, wire/outlet compatability issues, etc, etc. So..what does $300 get you from CostCo? Lets look:

Now I am no expert, not by a long shot…but I think that a careful consumer could get a lot more bang for his buck shopping ala carte rather than going for the combo platter here. Im not really sure, to be honest. I’ve been meaning to investigate setting up a small system for quite a while now but it keeps getting shoved on to the back burner.

Before anyone asks, yes the label that I saw did say “Made In China”. I bet youre not surprised, right? I noticed these kits are available on eBay at various prices…most of them north of $300.

Anyone have any comments or opinions on this versus putting something together on one’s own?

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

Ruger has announced their gas-piston AR for those of us who can shell out two grand for an AR.

Please note the copyright at the bottom of the page:

Thats right, the gun isnt even on the shelf yet but “Strum, Ruger & Co” are going to have to issue a recall for the webpage.

Im sure that after the usual one or two recalls, it’ll be a fine rifle ..errrr ….webpage.

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

I noticed over on ,Rawles’ SurvivalBlog that there is a link to a trailer out for the upcoming movie “The Road”. It appears bleak, stark and utterly gloomy which is, I would imagine, what the end of the world would be. For me, the gloomiest, most hopeless End Of The World movie was ‘Threads‘…a British import that was pretty darn depressing.

A common theme in both appears to be the notion that even a decade after the apocalyptic event society will still be in total shambles with the usual Mad Max cast of characters running around.

Im not sure that an event can take place that will knock the socks off humanity so hard that ten years down the road we’re eating the weak, engaging in white slavery, and taking orders from the Lord Humongous (The ayatollah of rock n’ rollah, you know).

Asteroid strike? Sure…that’ll put a crimp in things but ten years? I dunno? Peak oil? I dont think so. Global warming? Get real.

Even the much vaunted (and discredited) ‘nuclear winter’ scenarios don’t seem to keep civilization on its knees that long. Sure there may be a lot less people around at the end of that ten years than at the beginning but I doubt theyre going to be cannibalistic mutant savages.

Or maybe Im an optimist.

I think about some of the truly horrible historical events that knocked civilization on its ass and not many went on for ten years in terms of their effect….the Black Death ran for less than 10 years, World War 2, depending on where you lived, ran for about five years. Events that had people as desperate and doomed in year ten as they were in year one? Not many spring to mind. I suppose some political regimes like the Soviets and specifically the Stalin years might count but they were regional…not exactly a global thing.

Regardless, I’ll go see this movie. Movies like this always give me impetus to stay focused and prepared, even if the situations portrayed arent plausible to me.

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

Oy…I had ‘one of those’ dreams the other night. In the dream I was in some distant city, at night, and suddenly noticed what appeared to be a dark mushroom shaped cloud on the horizon. As Im remarking about this to the people Im with, the streetlights start to flicker and Im thinking “this might be very very bad”. We run down the street to a storefront that has in the window, of all things, a seismograph. The needle is wildy pegging in each direction. Next to the graph theres a small computer display with a news alert saying a bomb has exploded in Seattle (or maybe it was Spokane). And, at that moment, I think “Im not nearly as prepared for this as I could be”.

Fortunately, I woke up at that point.

I haven’t had one of those dreams in a while. When I do have them, they usually spur me to greater progress in being prepared. This time will be no different, Im sure.

I remember reading a review, years and years ago, of a play about life after a nuclear holocaust. The play, whose name I cant recall, took place five years afterwards when life has returned close to normal. One character is a ‘Calamity Jane’-type woman who laments the return of civilization. The chaos and turbulence of the aftermath of the nuclear exchange brought her into her own..she became the rough-n-tough individual she’s portrayed as…and she doesn’t want to go back to being whatever person she was before. Her character discusses the return of civilization the way some westerns have cowboys and mountain men sadly talk about the encroachment of civilization and its attendant rules and regulations. The ‘Wild West’ lifestyle made her realize her full potential and she doesn’t want to give that up. In short, the end of the world was the best thing that happened to her and she doesn’t want to give it up.

I think about that from time to time because sometimes its easy to sound like we want some sort of disaster so we can be heavily armed superheroes of the wasteland. Or we want to be able to shout “I told you so!” from the rooftops. Or we want the chance to be someone other than who we are now and the end of the world is as good a time to reinvent yourself as any other. Some folks, it seems, see it as an opportunity…for advancement, personal growth, personal gain, revenge, vindication, whatever.

For me, none of that is the case. I do what I do because I like my life more the way it is now than the way I think it will be like ‘after’. If I die a quiet death in my sleep thirty years from now without ever having used any of the piles of gear and supplies we have I will think of it as a triumph. After all, we buy insurance because we don’t want a particular event to happen to us, right? I see this accumulation of gear and supplies as insurance – if I never have to use it, it’ll be money well spent.
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The news is saying that the swine flu (“hamthrax”) had its first US death. Wait, wasn’t this thing supposed to be a non-starter? We were told the end of the world was coming with every sneeze and then we were told that its only as bad as your averafe flu bug. And now the media is trumpeting this death in Texas. There seems to be a certain lack of consistency going on here. Since Im not exactly an optimist I tend to trend with the negative reports but at least that way if Im wrong theres no harm.
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Started rotating out the stored gas from last year. The preferred method around here is to fill a Euro-style can, add a little PRI-G, close it up, and secure it in a safe place. I try to rotate the stuff out every year although I do think that it could go at least another year if it had to. PRI-G or StaBil will work but I like what I read about PRI-G. Cant say Ive noticed a difference between the two so maybe its all just hype, but I use the PRI-G anyway.

The only gasoline dependent thing we have at the moment is the truck. We have enough stored gas on hand to tank it up three times. I figure that gives us about 700 miles of range…on paper. I actually only count it as 350 miles range because I foresee a lot of time in traffic if we ever do have to evacuate. Whenever you see pictures of people leaving wildfires in California, or hurricanes in Florida, theres always long lines of stalled traffic and even at idle you can still go through fuel pretty quick. So…I figure a fifty percent safety margin to account for stalled traffic. In reality, once we got on the interstate I think we’d have pretty smooth sailing until we got near any major population centers. Also, I like to think we might be able to, if we had to, steal a few gallons out of the city agencie’s gas supply if we had to. Regardless, 350 miles of range is enough to get us out of harms way, I think.

Of course, if we ever wind up getting an emergency generator for the house that’ll wind up needing its own dedicated fuel supply. The more I think about it, a propane generator would be nice. I could get a fairly decent size tank for it in the yard and not worry about it. On the other hand, a gas generator has the advantage of fuel compatibility with the vehicle.

I used to think that propane would be a perfect fuel to run a house on..could run a generator, water heater, furnace, etc. Then someone pointed out to me that oil would be a better choice…you cant exactly walk down the road and borrow five gallons of propane in a bucket whereas you can borrow/scrounge/steal oil in any clean container. There’s some merit to that and I need to think about it more. Someday we will have a nice little place out in the sticks and it almost certainly won’t be tied into an electrical grid so theres gonna have to be some sort of compromise in there somewhere.

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

I actually had a “WTF” moment the other day with a customer. Sometimes, I get some people who arent really stupid, just ignorant. Whats the difference? Ignorance is a lack of knowledge or information. It can be fixed. Stupid is having all the answers and still getting it wrong.

A customer, whom I know owns an AR-15, a Mini-14, A Glock, and a buncha other politically ‘incorrect’ guns comes in and asks why are prices so high and availability so low? Folks are stocking up against anything the Obama administration may pull, I reply. His response: “They cant take away our ammo. Obama isnt going to take our guns away. Biden said that the Assault Weapons ban wasnt a high prioirty.”

And my jaw hit the floor like a sack of hammers.

“You..do..You…”, and it took a minute for the gears in my brain fully engage after that amazing cerebral gear-strip. “Do you believe the Democrats?”, I asked trying not to make it sound like “Are you stupid enough to believe the Democrats?”.
“The Supreme Court said we have a right bear arms, so they cant take our guns or ammo away.”
My brain is reeling like prizefighter who just had his bell rung. Theres a hundred responses beating each other into submission to be the first one out of my mouth.
“Uhm..The Heller decision? That says nothing about ammo, man. And that didnt say they couldn’t ….”
“The Supreme Court upheld the second amendment, that we have a right bear arms. So Obama cant take our guns away even if he wanted to.”, he says with conviction.
“Where in the second amendment does it say anything about ammo?”
“Arms. Ammo. Same thing!”
“So you genuinely believe that Obama and Biden, even after their attorney general said he wanted to reinstate the assault weapons ban, are just going to ignore the gun issues?”
“They said they don’t have the votes even if they wanted to.”
And Im looking at this man like Im looking at someone who just told me with all the sincerity and conviction of a true believer that the earth was flat. But…he’s a customer. Gotta be diplomatic.
“Well, I disagree. Im going to play it safe and keep stockpiling anyway.”, I said as he left the store, apparently feeling he may have agitated me a little too much.

In my mind, I had visions of a grandfatherly old Jewish man standing at the station next to a cattle car, saying everything is fine and they would never hurt us.

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

Saw this product the other day. It describes itself as ‘modular water storage’. Well, anything is modular with enough connection points. This product moves a few paces beyond the usual blue water barrels in that its got a very small footprint and is manufactured to be daisy-chained together. I like the small footprint, color and possible use as thermal mass. Whats turning me off in a major way is the price – several hundred dollars each. Ouch.

I suppose with a hole saw, the proper plumbing connectors, enough torque and a good dose of pipe dope you could daisy-chain the classic blue barrels to perform a similar function but the whole attraction of this product is its shape and the versatility that shape provides. Might have to hunt around and see if theres a better pricing schedule somewhere.

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

Didja see that this bout of Mexican swine flu is being renamed so as not to cause undue negative perceptions of pigs? True story. This is re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. There’s actually people in .gov somewhere being paid to come up with memos urging officials to refer to the swine flu by a non-pork identifier. Amazing, isn’t it?

Personally, Im not doing much differently except being more of a Nazi about handwashing. Oh, I did pick up a couple extra bottles of hand sanitizer to keep in our packs and vehicle. Other than that, Im just gonna keep a close eye on the news and see how things develop.
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Was in my local gunshop yesterday. They had a couple used Glock 17’s for sale…a 2nd gen. with 2 mags for $400 and a 3rd gen. in the box w/ 2 mags for $459. While I certainly don’t need more pistols right now I would like to have more. I have a figure in my head of how many I can reasonably expect to get me through the rest of my life and I haven’t gotten to that figure yet. Close, but not there.

On the bright side, my order from Stag that I placed in December is going to, I think, ship this month. When I placed the order I added two carbines at the last moment. I figured that by the time they showed up Id have figured out a way to pay for them and that theyd be worth a lot more by that time. I was right on both counts. I could turn them around for $1200+ ea. But I’m not going to do that. They’ll get test fired, zeroed in, accessorized, and then packed away for long term storage. Again, because I have a figure in my head about how many AR’s I can reasonably expect to get me through the rest of my life and I’m just not quite there yet.
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One of my vendors finally got in some more fired brass… I picked up several thousand .38, 9mm, .40 and .223. When it shows up I’ll load up a few thousand rounds on the big Dillon and tuck ‘em away for that upcoming rainy decade. Bullets have been trickier, but everything is available if youre willing to pay the prices. I’m cheap, so I hold out for better deals. But sometimes you gotta bite the bullet, so to speak, and pay if you want something. I do, though, derive great satisfaction from our stash of ammo. Here’s something to think about – imagine that it wasn’t ammo that was so hard to get these days, imagine it was something more critical like food or fuel. How would that change your life?

“Ammo will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no ammo.”..saw that elsewhere and thought how apropos it might be.
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On the personal side, this is my fourth week of going to CrossFit. No its not some christian-based workout program…although I suppose theres some bible-thumpers somewhere that have a workout regime based on ‘biblical teachings’. No, CrossFit is simply an exercise workout developed using techniques from former Nazi’s, Bataan death march coordinators, and ancient texts from the Inquisition. I can’t say my attendance rate has been 100% but its pretty close to five days a week. I’ve gone from an intense dislike of going to more of a mid-range burning hatred. It does, however, seem to work. The scale says my actual weight isn’t very different than it was before but my general shape and structure seems to have improved. I bring it up because if I ever do have to start hauling five-gallon fuel cans on an ALICE frame, quickly load/unload cases of food and ammo, or carry a pack and rifle for a good distance it would be nice to be able to actually be able to do so without having a heart attack or failing miserably. (Although having a heart attack in such a situation would probably de facto count as a miserable failure.)