Monthly Archives: February 2013

CTD

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

Cheaper Than Dirt, Home of the $99 PMag, has jumped on the bandwagon of businesses that are refusing to deal with those who stomp on gun rights. This is akin to the guy who just let go with the ‘ol one-cheek-sneak looking around and innocently asking “Hey, who farted?”

I have some issues about prices. I don’t believe in ‘price gouging’..I believe in charging what the market will bear. The guy you bought his full-auto Uzi for $400 in 1985 decideds to sell it in 1987 for $4000. Is that price gouging? Well, the law changed and his Uzi bullethose is no longer available except only to LE/Mil/dealers….so I thin we’d argue that since the scarcity of his merchandise went up, so did the price. Heck, thats just good business.

So CTD buys a couple pallets of PMags back in October for about $7 a mag in bulk. Suddenly the market explodes with demand and theres a risk that all those PMags may be all that CTD will ever have. So…they raise prices. Fine.

Here’s where me and the laws od supply-n-demand part ways. There’s the old saying about how you can eat a sheep once but you can shear it a bunch of times. CTD pissed off scads of folks and many of those folks have long memories. I know people who still won’t touch a Ruger product even after Billy Ruger finally hit room temperature.

CTD, realizing that they may have accidentally screwed the pooch, in terms of public relations, is now saying “Hey, we’re just like you guys!” in an attempt to distract from what some might characterize as unreasonably high price increases.

Again, I’m not going to tell anyone what to charge for something. If I dont like a price, I dont buy it. That simple. I’m free to do that. I think price controls are absurd and do nothing beneficial. But…with great power comes great responsibility, as we were told by Stan Lee. You can charge $100 for a nice PMag that everyone knows you were selling for $19.95 two weeks ago, and that’s your decision….but you need to really think about the consequences of that sorta thing. One consequence is that guys like me are gonna make fun of you for quite a while.

On the bright side, as gun control gets pushed further and further down the news cycle it looks like prices (but not availability) are slowly sinking from the stratosphere. Saw a new RRA basic AR carbine for $1150 at the show this weekend, so thats an improvement. And mag prices has stabilized around $20-$30 for AR mags.

Regardless, this is just a good example of why you shoulda stocked up on this stuff years ago.

 

More casting calls

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I get about five or eight of these every year:

Hi there-
My name is Shannon Powers and Im the Casting Director at Firecracker Films, the same company that produced Zombie Apocalypse on the Discovery Channel and we think you could be great for our project…
The Goal of our show is to educate the public of the reality of prepping and how much more prevelent the need for survival has become. We want to show the tools that will be needed to survive a number of potential catastrophes. We aim to highlight experts in different survivalist fields with scientific data to back up these “SHTF” ideals. Our focus will be on “What if these certain “events” would occur and how we “The World” would look like after this?? We want to legitamize these ideals because the time for concern has never been greater and the population needs to learn how to prepare themselves NOW! Any interest? I have read your site and kept up with you on the social media accounts and truly believe yall could be a great voice for our show…
If you have any interest at all we would love to have a quick 10-15 min phone conversation further discussing the show:)
Thanks so much!
-Shannon Powers
Shannon Powers <firecrackerpreppers@gmail.com>;
The Casting Team
These things are NEVER a good idea.

Zombies, MTM ‘Survivor’ and MonoVault burial/cache tubes

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

So I watched the new mid-season premiere episode of The Walking Dead. On a day when a Montana news alert said the dead were rising to prey upon the living. Before bed. I guess it’s no surprise that my dreams involved zombies.

On the bright side, remember this post where I was wargaming the best 10/22 for that sort of situation? Well, I had it with me in this particular zombie dream and it did a great job against the undead and the evil, predatory survivors.

Of course, goofy nerd-dreams mean very little in real life. I do need to pick up some accessories to tweak out the Rugers, most notably I need a good suppressor, but I’ll wait until the current hysteria dies down.

Cool dream, though.

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I might have mentioned in the past about an outfit in Idaho making burial vaults for guns. A little more purpose-built than your average DIY sewer-pipe project, I’ve been meaning to get one of these things to evaluate. One feature I very much like about them is that theyre made to take the GammaSeal lids that I’, so fond of.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and MTM/Case-Gard appears to be flattering the MonoVault guys. No sign of it on their website, but CTD (home of the $60 P-Mag) has a little piece up about it on their interesting blog. According to CTD, the MTM product is about 12″ deep and 7″ wide. Enough for a handgun and some small essentials. I think I’d rather spend the bucks and get the MonoVault and be able to tuck and 870, 10/22 and AR in there. For those of us truly on a budget, theres still probably a few of the sonobuoy cases still out there somewhere.

Im not really much of a ‘bury your guns’ kind of guy. If I need to hide a gun somewhere I think I can do a little better than a gun-destroying, moisture-laden hole in the ground. But…products like these are nice for keeping a stash of gear at secondary and tertiary locations, or for travel needs.

And they laughed at me when I use the term ‘zombie apocalypse’……….

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

The Chair Is Against The Wall

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

This showed up in the mail the other day:

IMG_0619For those of you who don’t get the joke, maybe this’ll help:

It’s 11:59 on Radio Free America; this is Uncle Sam, with music, and the truth until dawn. Right now I’ve got a few words for some of our brothers and sisters in the occupied zone: “the chair is against the wall, the chair is against the wall”, “john has a long mustache, john has a long mustache”. It’s twelve o’clock, American, another day closer to victory. And for all of you out there, on, or behind the line, this is your song.

Yeah, my geekdom knows no bounds. Oh, and before anyone asks: source.

As an aside, I’m rather intrigued that OCTactical gives you  options on what camouflage patterns you want on your gear…and that they actually include my beloved flecktarn. Now if they’d just get the PenCott Snowdrift or the Dansih snow camo then I’d be really happy.

 

Gun show acquisition

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

So…gun show today. Stumbled acorss, of all things, a 1911 carbine conversion. Now, these things used to be available through Gun Parts and a few other mail order catalogs. What is interesting is that this is the first one I have ever seen with a folding stock. The stock is very well designed and well made from aluminum. Theres a little bit of wiggle in the lockup but when I took it out to the range this evening it shot very well and cycled flawlessly.

TPIWWP, so…………..

carbine1

The stock must have been made during the ban years…I say this because theres an ugly hole drilled/gouged where a pin must have been put in to lock it in the open position.

Now, I took this thing out tonight and shot it. Works great, accurate, and a lot of fun. Also totally freakin’ useless, in my opinion. Now, if you SBR the gun you could use the stock with the regular barrel and thats only slightly less practical. But…I bought it for resale and novelty value. If anyone wants to look cool at the range with it, here it is up on eBay.

Video – Man builds $65 thousand doomsday bunker

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

Man, I love seeing other peoples bunkers. I’ve never cared for the buried-culvert style of shelter but they do seem to be a popular choice. I rather prefer above-ground shelters, preferably of hardy concrete construction.

As we all know, the #1 rule of Survival Club is that you don’t go around showing your gear off on national TV. I suppose some folks just can’t help bragging, and others figure “if it convinces one person to prepare, then it’s worth it”, but showing off to a big audience is just asking for trouble.

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.