Tag Archives: guns

Observations on the panic

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

Local gunshop had one of those big cylindrical drink coolers on their floor..you know the kind, you see ‘em at 7-11 filled with ice and a few bottles of pop in ‘em…anyway, they had one that looked like a ginat shotgun shell and it was filled with AR mags. Guy walks in, bought the whole darn thing. Everyy one of ‘em. Go figure.

Other weirdness…one of my vendors emailed me today that they somehow have come up with 1000 Steyr AUG magazines. WTF???? How do you just magically discover a buncha AUG magazines in your warehouse? I suspect that almost anyone buying those will be buying them on speculation since the number of guns taking AUG mags is pretty low.

I’m getting tired of answering the phone here with people asking if I have any 5.56 ammo or ARs. Part of me wants to scream at them “You had eight years to buy them, dumbass!” The trickle down theory is in effect too….No guns? Get mags! No mags? Get ammo! No ammo? Get components! No components? Get primers! Expect primer availability to plunge as well.

I’ve seen this movie before, back in ’94, so I know what to expect. This is why when the ban sunsetted in ’04 I tried to get everything I could. On some things, I did really well (like the 500+ G3 mags I have for our PTR rifles) and some things I wish I had more of (never enough Glock 9mm’s.) But at least I’m not among the idiots who suddenly realized that there might really be an end to their availability of decent rifles.

Cheaper Than Dirt G3 mag price increase

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

Cheaper Than Dirt used to sell the surplus g3 mags for $0.97, then the bumped it up to $1.97. I just checked and although they are out of stock they somehow jumped to $4.97. Now, that’s still a deal for a 20-round .308 mag, bit it’s also a 250% price increase. Of course, as we’ve all heard by now, these guys also ran the Magpul PMAGs up to $59.95 each for a while.

Now, to be fair, I hadn’t checked the G3 prices at CTD in a few weeks. For all I know this price increase happened before last weeks drama. But……CTD does have a bit of a history about doing this sort of thing…….

I, of course, had been advocating that if you had a PTR or HK, and you hadn’t picked up at least a hundred of these magazines you were being extraordinarily foolish and short-sighted. As usual in these matters, I was right.

Sign of the times – Email from one of my vendors

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

One of my vendors for guns emailed this little gem to their customer list today:

Subject: shipping

There were over 2,300 internet orders that came through over the weekend. I would not guarantee any order getting to a customer by Christmas except for true air packages.

Yeah….there just might have been just a bit of an uptick in sales.

Article – Did paranoid, gun-crazed mother trigger son’s school killing spree? Friends sa

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

 

The mother of the loner who massacred 26 pupils and staff at a US primary school may have played a major part in his catastrophic mental breakdown, it emerged last night.

Friends and family portrayed Adam Lanza’s mother Nancy as a paranoid ‘survivalist’ who believed the world was on the verge of violent, economic collapse.

She is reported to have been struggling to hold herself together and had been stockpiling food, water and guns in the large home she shared with her 20-year-old son in Connecticut.

Mrs Lanza, 52, was a ‘prepper’ – so called because they are preparing for a breakdown in civilised society – who apparently became obsessed with guns and taught Adam and his older brother, Ryan, how to shoot, even taking them to local ranges.

That backfired horrifically on Friday when Adam Lanza began his killing spree by shooting his mother dead in bed.

 

Oy. This is not gonna go well.

Some of those behaviors that were ‘strange’ or ‘suspicious’? They’re SOP around here. We never let people who aren’t close friends into the house. We don’t let people know where we live. We stockpile all sortsa goodies. And yet…we haven’t shot up a school.

You watch….the survivalist/preparedness community, such as it is, is going to go from being regarded as that odd-but-harmless-cousin you shake your head about, to being regarded as a ticking timebomb.

For giggles, I went to a local gun shop Friday just to see if the panic buying had hit. Yup…mags were moving briskly and there were several people filling out the forms to pick up their new AKs. Ammo was walking out the door too.

I’m not going to say it’s a conspiracy, but lets look at this broadly: Obama gets re-elected, Fast N Furious spotlight those evil black guns, throw in a couple mass shootings, toss in some end-of-the-world drama, get out the usual pot-stirrers like Schumer, and you’ve got a recipe for something ungood coming down the pike shortly regarding your firearms. Magazine ban? Certainly thats the easiest thing to do since it doesn’t fly in the face of any Second Amendment issues. Bring back the AW ban? Maybe.

Regardless, I’m hoping this hits the end of the news cycle in about a week and we get back to our regular doom-n-gloom, but this story may have legs and wind up being the casus belli that this administration has been needing in order to ‘do something’ about the ‘easy access’ to ‘military style weapons that have no place on our streets’.

S&W tells me its the end of the world

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

Have a customer who ordered up a S&W M&P pistol from S&W a month or so back and it hasn’t shown up yet. He asked me to light a fire under ‘em. I emailed their LE rep and this is the exact reply I got:

No ETA, sorry bud.  Its the end of the world and all that right around the corner so we are backordered.

Nice. Self-fulfilling prophecy. Personally, if it’s the end of the world I would think the autopistols of choice will be Rugers and Glocks. The Ruger will edge out the Glock for durability, but the Glock will win the trophy hands-down for parts support.

Regardless, this is really a bad time to be trying to buy a particular gun. Oh, theres guns available, to be sure….but you may not get exactly what you want. Or, if you do, be prepared to part with some major cash.

ETA: Factor in the mass shooting in Connecticut today and it look’s like AR shipping times are gonna be pushed back another several weeks and lets not even think about what the magazine market is going to look like. Now that the election is over this might be the casus belli that The Usual Suspects need to enact their ‘sensible’ citizen gun control.

The Walking Dead 10/22

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

I’m a gun nut Ballistic-American and something of a nerd, so why am I not surprised that these two character traits/weaknesses/identities have conspired to hijack my subconscious as of late.

Where exactly has it shanghaied it to? (Yeah, that sentence probably could have been constructed…gooder.) For the life of me, I have spent the last week playing over in my mind what I would want out of a 10/22 if I were stuck in a world full of soft-skulled, slow-moving zombies. Seriously. I’m spending, like, an hour a day surfing the web for just the right barrel, just the right stock, just the right sights, just the right accessories…and then when I find them and think “Yeah, that’d be perfect” I rethink the requirements and have to start from scratch.

RIght off the bat, I was absolutely in love with this:

It’s a one-off from Nodak Spud. But…I loved the HK MP5 look. Compact, has provisions for an optic, has open sights, enough barrel to thread and suppress ahead of the sight, and a telestock. Oh..but that stock….mmmm…not so sure. I mean, the zombie apocalypse is going to require a good bit of running around and being light on your feet…so wouldn’t a folder make more sense? But then again, rimfires can be fussy…and if you pull the trigger and are rewarded with a ‘click’ you’re going to want a stock with some stoutness to it so you can drive the buttplate (need a metal buttplate now rather than the OEM plastic) through the skull of the zombie. And what about a suppressor? I can find threaded .22 barrels all day long but I cant find a threaded .22 barrel with iron sights. That shouldn’t surprise me…once you screw a suppressor onto the end of the barrel you wind up having the diameter of the supressor block the sights. But..I need iron sights in case the optics fail. And..and..and….

See, this has been running in my mind for the last week since I’ve been watching season three of The Walking Dead.

So, I figure what I’d want is a solid stock, wood or plastic, a threaded barrel, sights high enough to overlook a mounted suppressor, a rail for optics, maybe a better mag release, and some rail for mounting a light. Not much to ask for, right? Something that when it’s all done would like very much like this:

The flash suppressor is probably gilding the lily, but it protects the threads when you don’t have the suppressor on the end. I’d swap the barrel band for the side-mounted, rail equipped one from Pro-Mag (ProMag Barrel Band) and call it a day.

Not as compact as it would be with a folder, but I like having the ‘blunt force trauma’ option. True compact would look like this. But I think this would be a nice rig for capping the slow, shambling zombies at up to 100 yards. And, with a couple Butler Creek mags, a small group of ‘em could be knocked down by one person almost as fast as knocking down one.

See, this is what happens when you give a science-fiction/comic-book nerd an internet connection and a 10/22.

But, in the interest of stimulating dialog and catering to my mania, how would you set yours up? We’ve established that the skull of your average Walking Dead zombie is easily penetrated by simple hand tools, so a .22 offers plenty of penetration. The rule of law has quite obviously taken a holiday so SBR and suppress to your heart’s content. Bonus points for detailing parts and model numbers.

 

Fridays NCIC…’anomaly’….

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

Various outlets (Saw this at a few other places but this was the first one I linked to) are reporting that Black Friday Friday Of Color saw a tremendous surge in gun sales…so much so that the NCIC ‘instant background check’ system became a good bit less than instant. I was doing a check for a customer Friday and the drone on the end of the phone was completely flustered that her system wasnt responding. In fact, it was so chaotic that the ‘examiner’ deviated from their oh-so-carefully scripted interaction several times with exclamations of frustration.

Now, I’m not really a conspiracy guy, but I am a guy who is open to exploring all possibilities in the interest of being prepared. If transactions from a dealer require a background check, and that system is ‘down’ for some reason (or it is claimed to be down), then you effectively shut down new gun sales for at least the three-day wait. Of course, in states where having something like a carry permit preclude the need for the NCIC check you’ll still be able to purchase your new thundertoy, and, of course, private transactions will still be exactly that.

Additionally, ignoring the conspiracy angle, record-breaking gun purchases, even on a day known for heavy discounts, should still tell you something: the natives are restless. I always view gun sales as a highly cynical form of ‘consumer confidence’ and ‘leading economic indicator’. Right or wrong, when folks are feeling threatened..by their government, by the economy, by their neighbors…they want a gun. Record purchases, to me, mean record levels of uncertainty about the future. I’m sure that I’m reading too much into it, but when folks were relatively pleased with the government, gun bans weren’t whispering in the breeze, and the economy wasnt sucking wind, you didnt see near the amount of weapons stockpiling.

Not that there’s anything wrong with stockpiling, mind you. It’s just that this is a horrible, horrible time to be doing it….it shoulda been done years ago.

Guns – The AAI CAWS project

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

Military auto shotguns have been dabbled with for a while, and one of the more interesting projects was the CAWS project. Special shotgun rounds, special shotgun. It never really got off the ground but you can see some DNA was passed down to the Daewoo, USAS, Atchisson and a few others.

I loves me some auto shotgun action as much as the next guy, but I think the basic pumpgun is probably a better choice. On the other hand, I wouldnt turn down a USAS-12 if one came my way. (And, yeah, the fedgoons messed up my fun by making it a Destructive Device.)

2008 Redux

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

I have a would-be customer who wants me to hook him up with a Stag #2 (with the Plus Package) or a Rock River Entry AR. He asked me about this a day or two after the election and it was about all I could do to keep from laughing into the phone. You want to buy an AR a couple days after Carter The Second wins the presidential election? Why not try buying lifejackets once the iceberg hits the hull? Availability will be similar.

Stag Arms is not only not answering their phones but the voicemail option tersely says “we are not taking any messages at this time.” Rock River at least had a human answer the phone who told me the wait on an AR outta there is currently at four months.

I have been to this dance before and know all the steps. Put your left foot in, put your right foot out, reach for your wallet and wave it all about…..

Oh, and before I forget:

I told you so. I told you so. I told you so. I told you so. I told you so. I told you so. I told you so. I told you so. I told you so. I told you so. I told you so.

Now I feel better……