Article – An AR-15 ammunition factory built to supply the military shifted to commercial sales and is now tied to more than a dozen mass shootings

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While The Times found that the “vast majority” of rounds sold from Lake City to retailers end up in the hands of law-abiding citizens, they have also shown up in a number of mass shootings.

Rounds from Lake City have been tied to at least a dozen mass shootings, including the 2012 Aurora, Colorado movie theater shooting, the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, and the 2017 Las Vegas Strip mass shooting, the deadliest in US history, the report says.

Gotta boil that water nice and slow so the frog doesn’t notice.

Its not enough to keep banging the drum about ‘assault weapons’ being bad. You have to keep that idea at the front of the public’s mind or you lose the narrative. So the media (or the people controlling them) keep the beat going….AR-15’s bad, AR-15 magazines bad, and now, AR-15 ammo bad. Do it long enough and hard enough and even the Fudds will start in with their ‘no one needs an AR15’ spiel. (Jim Zumbo has entered the chat.) [Sidenote: we now have .35 and .40 caliber rifle cartridges for using the AR as a hunting platform…so the notion of ‘not suitable for hunting’ has kinda evaporated. Although, honestly, an AR-10 has always been just fine for hunting.]

This is just more coordinated media manipulation to keep the fire burning that we need a 1994 Assault Weapons Ban: The Next Generation. As always, while you may not be able to prevent a ban you can be prepared for it. All it takes is resolute will and some money. Skip the jet skit, put off the new 72″ TV till next year, drive the clunker for another year…..take the money and buy what you need and what you think you’ll need.

Did LC ammo show up at ‘mass shootings’? Maybe. So what? LC probably cranks out millions and millions of rounds per year. The percentage of that ammo used in crimes? A fraction of a fraction of a percentage….just like ‘assault weapons’ themselves.

Go buy another AR. Go buy another dozen mags. Go buy another case of ammo. Even if they never ban them again you’ll still be ahead of the game just in terms of beating inflation and future price hikes.

El Paso Saddlery

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ETA article about El Paso Saddlery BBQ rigs.

Kydex is a great material for holsters and I have zero reservations about it (except I think sometimes it’s a bit hard on a guns finish). But, for some reason, I still like leather holsters for some applications. My usual go-to guys for gunleather are, first, DeSantis and then Bianchi. Between those two I can usually find the holster I want. There are, of course, some exceptions. For my BBQ gun I want something with a lot of style and eye-catchiness. For that, I wound up going to El Paso Saddlery. While I was there, I also picked up something I have always had a fondness for – a classic leather flap holster. You know, just like Indian Jones and every other adventurer. Since my running around in the woods gun is either a .44 revolver or a 10mm auto, I need a flap holster for those. The flap for the 10mm arrived today.

I must say, new gunleather has a pretty distinctive smell to it.

Nice, eh? Might take it to a saddlemaker in town and get my initials stamped in there or something.I also, by the way, have a tanker holster from these guys as well.

A tiny house, but not a Tiny House,

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From what I read, a ‘tiny house’ does not usually exceed about 400-500 sq ft. I was in a cottage this weekend that might be considered a ‘tiny house’. I was so curious, in fact, I measured the thing out. The main room was 14×17, which translates to around 238 sq. ft. But, it also had an upstairs loft with the same footprint ( although the sloping sides of the ceiling limited the amount of usable space.) To my surprise….it was quite livable. It had most of the amenities…real toilet, real shower, etc. Deficiencies were that there was no room in the bathroom for a sink, so the ‘kitchen’ sink doubled as a bathroom sink. But otherwise….surprisingly livalble for one person.

I wouldn’t want to live there for five years, but as a weekend or vacation kind of refuge it would be rather nice. What really caught my attention was that if I wanted a small, unnoticed, little ‘lifeboat’ to retreat to if I had to beat feet somewhere, it would actually be a very serviceable situation.

Of course, I’d deck it out in a more survivalist theme….heavy on storage options and off-grid resources. But I could very much see a smallish place like that working out quite well for a backup location.

As I said, it had an upstairs sleeping loft but it had no basement. If it had a basement, that would probably have made it pretty much ideal….plenty of storage while still maintaining a fairly small footprint.

At some point, I’m going to get my 20-40 acres of Montana and when I do, a small, well-equipped and well-appointed place like that might be just the thing while I set aside the greenbacks to build a more substantial palace at a later date.

It was interesting to look at such a small place with a survivalist’s critical eye and think ‘how could I better make this place fit my needs’.

Now, I will say that, as I see it, this was a tiny house but not a ‘Tiny House’ if you get my understanding. This was a stick-built-on-a-foundation sort of building (albeit looking like a gingerbread cottage) rather than the tiny-house-on-wheels that most tiny houses seem to be. And this had genuine grid power and water/sewage. No composting toilets, no water tanks. Real deal house. And the whole thing could have fit into the living room of my present day house.

Not my first choice of a place to live, but if I needed to go to a secondary location and spend a winter there or however much time until things calmed down, or I got back on my feet….well…it would actually be pretty nice.

So, maybe I’ll do some research and draw up some ideas for that day I finally get that acreage in the Middle O’ Nowhere.

Halloween

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Real life has been fairly exhausting as of late and it means that at the end of the day, when its a choice between blog posting or climbing into bed…well…bed is often the winner.

I normally don’t go too far out of my way for Halloween but I admire people who do. I as in CostCo today and this effort just made my day:

But what really makes it baller…what really sells it….is he went and had a CostCo badge made up that says WASHINGTON. That, sir, is icing on the cake. Well done!

I love costumes like these, but the problem is that they seem a rather high investment for something that, really, you can only wear once. Doing the same costume year after year seems very not in the spirit of things.

Enjoy the candy sales tomorrow!

Just another ‘beware the coming bans’ post

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Unless you’ve been under a rock the last week, you know some guy in Maine (of all places) went sideways and killed about twenty people before taking his own life. As usually happens after these events, the usual crowd wiped the blood onto their faces and began wailing about ‘commonsense’ and ‘reasonable’ restrictions on…well..whatever they think was at fault.

To be fair, the administration really has it’s hands full right now and is probably not interested in getting into a domestic policy quagmire while it’s in the midst of a couple foreign policy quagmires. But…I’ve been wrong before.

But if they do get some traction on their usual ban-dwagon, you don’t want to be caught unprepared. It’s been 19 years since the sunset of the much-despised ‘Assault Weapons Ban’.  If you bought on pistol magazine and one rifle magazine each month (a very easy goal) since then, you’d have about 228 pistol mags and 228 rifle mags…an amount that almost everyone would agree is a comfortable amount to have.

And if you bought one ‘evil’ rifle every year, again not an outrageous or difficult goal, you’d have 19 AR’s in the safe.

But some people just will not learn. It seems like every time some whackjob shoots up a 7-11 and the media starts their campaign about ‘high capacity magazines’ there are people who sudenly think they need to buy. Dude…you should have had your magazine issues settled shortly after the ban expired. I encounter way to many people who think that “Oh, I have a dozen mags for my AR. Thats plenty.” That is wildly shortsighted thinking that fails to account for what perils the future holds. I’m not going to elaborate about that because I’ve covered it elsewhere on this blog more times than I can recall.

TL;DR for todays post: one of these days, these gun/mag bans will come back and you don’t want to be caught with your pants down. Stack it deep. And if you really want a positive habit to develop, buy one pistol mag per month, and one rifle mag per month. They are money in the bank. (Not that keeping your money in the bank is a good idea, but you get my meaning.)

Winter arrives

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Well, after a lovely week of wonderful warm days and crisp fall nights, winter came in last night like the KoolAid man. Heavy blowing winds, light snow, and the thermometer making a run for the bottom.

Time to transfer the winter gear to the truck, make sure the winter module is in my Bag O’ Tricks, and drive much more carefully.

And, you know, part of driving carefully means knowing when not to drive at all. Is picking up a couple frozen pizzas at Winco when the roads are icy really worth a trip to the ER and buying a new truck? Probably not. Thats one of the reasons we stockpile food to begin with – to eliminate risk.

Not sure what this winter is going to look like. (And, really, no one does…the notion that you can forecast how severe a winter will be seems akin to telling the future by squeezing the goat’s scrotum or something.) But you usually can’t be too wrong with “cold and snowy”. Really, the only variable is the quantity.

With all the stuff going on (and about to go on) in the Middle East, perhaps stocking up on fuel for heating mightnot be a bad idea this winter.

Article – Man Buys Abandoned Doomsday Shelter, Discovers ’20 Tons’ Of Supplies Stashed From The 1980s

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Anderson says he found a “fixer-upper” he liked after taking a fishing trip from Atlanta to the Bozeman area five years ago. The bunker only had one hole leading to the surface.

But the man who sold him the house left Anderson something extra. A big extra.

The “nuclear bunker” 20 feet below the entrance was loaded with food and medical supplies. They apparently had been stored since the 1980s, in case the worst happened.

If you think thats cool, imagine what it must be like for the fella that bought the old CUT (Church Universal Triumphant) bunkers from the 80’s.

There’s alot of these kinds of places still out there.

Other article.

YouTube

A show about it.