Friend Of The Blog (TM), Tam, over at View From The Porch, has a post up noting that today is the anniversary of the much maligned “Duck And Cover” program from those crazy days of the Atomic/Cold War age.

When I was a kid in grade school we had two kinds of drills – fire drills and shelter drills. Any idiot knows what a fire drill is for, but as a kid it never occurred to me to ask what a shelter drill was for. All I knew is that we pulled the blinds in the classroom, filed into the hallways, and sat along the interior hallways with our backs to the wall. It never occurred to me that this was some sort of program to protect ourselves in case of nuclear attack. Same way it never occurred to me what those pink and blue ‘occupancy certificates’ in each classroom with the CD logo were about.

As the years rolled by, the nattering nabobs of negativism loudly proclaimed that anyone even remotely thinking a nuclear attack was survivable was some sort of stooge or idiot. There will be no survivors, they proclaimed. Never mind that there were quite a few survivors at both cities that were nuked last time someone opened up a can of sunshine. In fact, there were a couple folks who rolled snake eyes twice and got bombed at Hiroshima, transported to Nagasaki for medical treatment, and got nuked again. And lived.

Part of this mindset, I think, comes from the semantic problem of people conflating a fallout shelter and a blast shelter. Would the crowded citydwellers be safe from the devastation of their cities by cowering in the basement of the local fallout shelter? Maybe. Maybe not. But then again, a fallout shelter is for sheltering from…fallout. Whereas a blast or bomb shelter is to protect you from……

If youre sitting at ground zero when someone airbursts a new sun over your head, yeah, its not looking good…although, again, people have survived that. But if you survive the blast, which is likelier the further you are from the center of it, then something like a fallout shelter does make a difference. Which means it in, in fact, survivable.

However, the Soviet-backed and -funded ‘nuclear disarmament’ groups, who interestingly never seemed to bother the Soviets too much about disarming, were quick to hammer home the idea that there simply was no surviving a nuclear exchange and we should pack up those Minuteman silos and trust that the nobler heads will refrain from pushing any buttons.

Dude, I live about three hours from a bed of nuclear missile silos. I have zero interest in being around when an old SS-18 with out-of-date targeting data lands in Great Falls and sends a cloud of debris in my direction. But…I also know its not an ‘On The Beach’ scenario where all you can do is wait for the sunrise and your horrible death.

The ‘Duck And Cover’ drills are laughable in some ways, but in others they were a good idea. They kept people aware of the risks and problems of the Cold War, and certainly lent an air of credibility and purpose to the various local Civil Defense programs and organizations.

Nuclear war is no walk through a meadow…..understatement of the year, there. But it isn’t necessarily the death knell for the entire planet either. No more than Dresden or Hiroshima was.

Picked up a new AR today. I’d been wanting a slightly ‘upper tier’ AR for a while now. I’ve a stack of Palmettos, Stags, Bushmasters, Rugers, etc. but I kinda wanted something with a little more high-end quality. You can spend a lot in the AR world for a Noveske or an LMT or some other top-tier brand and I wouldn’t mind having one. But…I’m not quite there yet. I did want to get something, though, a bit better than what I have. One of my vendors was having a sale and I decided that the folks at FN have been stamping out guns for the better part of over 100 years…let’s get one of their AR’s.

Nothing terribly fancy. Its an FN TAC3 which is what the pattern for most AR carbines seems to be these days – M-lok handguard, telestock, no front sight tower, lotsa pic rail. I’m throwing an Eotech on there, some BUIS, swapping out the muzzle device for a quick mount for a suppressor, adding a light, and calling it a day.

I’ve been shooting AR’s since…mmm…the late 80’s. I think I’ve owned every brand that was extant back then and have seen some weird ones come and go. Back in the day, you didn’t have M4geries…they were called CAR-15’s. If you had an AR you most likely had a full size 20″ rifle. Back then it was Colt, Bushmaster, Olympic, and DPMS. There might have been a few outliers but those were the main brands.

Pic rail wasn’t a thing yet, and attaching a flashlight to your gun never really occurred to us. Flattops were definitely not a thing….AR’s all had carry handles. If you were tacticool you might have the Colt carry-handle scope or an Armson OEG on there. If it was a CAR-15, odds are good you had about 4″ of flash suppressor hanging off the front of your gun to make it legal length,

Mags were aluminum from Okay, Adventureline, Colt, Sierra, and a handful of other makers. If you wanted a drum there was a massive plastic 90-round monstrosity you could buy. If you wanted to really go off the deep end, the guys at LL Baston made mounts to mount an underbarrel shotgun like it was an M203. … an idea that is yet to die. I have never seen one in real life.

As time went on, the ‘rankings’ of manufacturers waxed and waned. The “ABC’s” (Armalite, Bushmaster, Colt) were the highly regarded top-tier guns (mind you this was damn near 40 years ago), and things like Olympic and DPMS were the ‘budget’ guns…much like Anderson/Palmetto today.

Also, way back then (late 80’s), Vietnam was still a relatively fresh memory. You could have a guy who had seen the elephant over there who was still less than 40 years old. The stories about the reliability issues of early M16’s were still being loudly preached. In fact, I know a guy here in town, former crew chief on a Chinook, who has nothing but venomous spite for the gun.

Calibers were strictly .223 and the flavor of the day was 55 gr. ball. Maybe 52 in some batches. Ar’s in other calibers wouldn’t be a readily available thing for a number of years.

Accessories were limited…you could buy surplus USGI 3-mag ALICE pouches and that was pretty much it.  You had a GI cleaning kit in the buttstock. A GI sling finished the ensemble.

Nowadays, of course, its a different story. The AR is a ubiquitous platform with dozens of manufacturers, hundreds of third-party accessory manufacturers, a dozen calibers, and the modualr aspect of the rifle has been amplified and improved over the sixty years this thing has been around.

Which brings me to my new FN. It’s as far a cry from one of my early CAR-15’s as you can imagine. It’s more adaptable to things like lights and optics, is probably more reliable, has a freefloated barrel, and is probably more accurate with its heavier profile.

So, long story to simply say that I’m getting to be an old dude who can say “I remember when…”.

But..new toy, so yay!

‘Tis the anniversary of that unique subset of Americans – the Roof Korean.

For those who don’t recall, or, like me, never get tired of hearing the story, the Roof Korean was the name given to the Korean shopkeepers who grabbed their thundertoys, climbed up on the roof of their business, and persuaded would-be trouble makers to go elsewhere.

It’s a fascinating and inspiring story. The moral of that story is that sometimes things go sideways to the point that an AR, plate carrier, and a half dozen of your best friends with AR’s and plate carriers is exactly what the doctor ordered.

I missed it, but yesterday was the anniversary of the 1992 LA Loot-n-Scoot Championships… aka The LA Riots. This was the event that gave us the legendary Roof Koreans.

This was before the 1994 Assault Weapons ban, so there was a decent amount of non-neutered hardware around but there wasn’t the emphasis on tactical gear and accoutrements that we see nowadays. What would ‘Roof Korea 2022’ look like?

Well, first off, there’d be, IMHO, a metric crap-ton more AR-15s than were seen back in ’92. I also think youd see a lot more tactical vests, plate carriers, communications, and that sort of thing. I suspect there’d also have been a lot more small-unit activity than just a buncha guys lined up like Alamo defenders.

Although the Roof Koreans did a fabulous job, I maintain that the championship award for Defending His Business Against All Comers should go to gun dealer Harry Beckwith who used an M16, S&W76, shotgun, and revolver in a 105-round bullet party that turned a crash-n-grab gun store burglary into a statistical outlier.

But, thirty years ago the Roof Koreans created a name for themselves and,. I suspect, might have created enough of a legned to temper would-be rioters even today.