For your perusal:
Maybe it’s time for our own holiday. That will get people’s bloody attention.
That’s right, kids….it’s been a whole year since the last Paratus holiday. The backpack is by the main egress point in the hopes that the elite Paratus Long-Range Recon Gift Squad will deliver goodies to deserving survivalists like myself.
It’s your holiday, guys….enjoy the heck out of it.
Picked up a thoroughly neglected P95DC Ruger off Gunbroker for $200, delivered.
There was , literally, not a drop of oil or lube anywhere on it. Just driving out the slide release to facilitate takedown took the use of a punch and hammer because everything was so tightly seized. But, got it all apart, smoothed everything with some steel wool, lubed it up like a nervous virgin on prom night, and now it seems to be doing well. I’ll take it to the range this weekend to function test it and then tuck it away for the Deep Sleep.
I’ve found these old P-series pistols to be quite the value. They can be had pretty cheaply and they are extremely durable. Although the P85/89 series are way, way, way overbuilt for a 9mm I have no doubt they’d survive just about any punishment that could be dished out at them. I have a bunch of the P89’s floating around, I prefer the P95DC out of the entire line of P-series guns.
The P95DC is decock (hence the DC designation) only…no manual safety. Just point and shoot. Single or double action. And it’s far less bulky than the P85/89. At only $50 more than what a HiPoint dealers at, it’s a far better choice. Cheap enough to be, basically, disposable but ‘real gun’ enough to trust in Katrinaville.
On the flip side, Ruger made some delightful 9mm carbines that shared mags with the P-series. The carbines never sold well and now when you can find them they command insane money. Still, I’d really like to have one.
Although I’m pretty vested in Glocks, I love the P95 for it’s suitability as a secondary or tertiary level of redundancy. It is the perfect gun for leaving under the floorboards at the cabin, tucked into the springs under the drivers seat, or stashing at an undisclosed location.
Someone was nice enough to email me this link to share:
I thought this sort of thing was proven to be an extremely bad PR move after the Katrina episode but some people don’t learn, I guess.
A couple questions worth asking: how do they know where the private guns are so they can seize them? Hmmmm.
Further reading:
It is unbearably smokey today. The winds picked up and it’s blowing out there pretty strongly. The Lolo fire, which is the one making things so fun to breathe around here, apparently flared back up and we are now in the smokiest air I have seen since the great fires of ’01. In short, it’s some really bad air out there. I’m hiding in my house with all the doors closed to try and mitigate the situation. My basement is the only place with relatively clean air since there’s no access to the outside down there.
There is virtually no vehicle traffic nor pedestrian traffic outside. Its like this place was neutron bombed or something.
=================
Reminder: Paratus is in about two weeks!
Took my DMR-style AR to the range today. Fired about 10 rounds through it and started having problems. Failure to extract/eject. In fact, in many cases the bolt didnt even unlock. Hmmm.
Ok, unload and let’s see whats going on. Pulled the bolt carrier and thought that, since it was new, I hadn’t really lubed it up. So, a quick couple of sprays of CLP and put it back in the gun. No joy.
Disassemble bolt. Aha! Gas rings!
Stagger them properly, re-assemble, no joy.
Alright, now I’m really curious. My buddy is shooting an AR that is also virtually new (less than 50 rounds) so we went ahead and swapped bolt carriers and bolts (yeah, yeah, I know….) Same result. My carrier/bolt worked fine in his gun. Ok, try the ammo. His ammo failed in my gun, my ammo worked fine in his.
Ok, clearly the issue is not in the receiver (upper or lower). It’s gotta be something in the gas system. Couldn’t really do much at the range without proper tools. Came back to the house and took off the forend. Please note this:
Those two screws keep the gas block in place. See how that one is backed out? The other one is also loose. How loose?
.That loose.
“Well there’s yer problem!”
:::sigh::: You know, I have been shooting AR rifles for over thirty years and this is the first time I have ever had anything like this happen. Solution? A dose of Loctite and some torque.
And, really, if I had the proper hex wrenches with me at the range I could have taken care of this right there…so, lesson learned. I’ll head to the range tomorrow to confirm that, indeed, was the problem.
I’m sure that by now you have read about this little jewel of disaster planning:
It’s a lovely little bit of dramatic hyperbole meant to terrify citizens into heading to the Superdome other locations. Rescuers, he implies, will discover your water-logged corpse and make the identification by the social security number you had the foresight to Sharpie onto your forearms. Which raises an interesting question: why wouldn’t you just write your damn name instead? Do they really think a grieving mom will come down to the makeshift morgue and wail “Where’s my baby? Where’s my sweet 409-52-2002?” Of course not. So, while not as famously stupid as the last southern hurricane mayor’s statement, this one is still pretty silly.
Or…is it?
Did you know that at the height of the Cold War, some school districts issued dogtags to children to make their identification easier in case of that big atomic war that we were all expecting? True story. The fine folks at the NYC Board of Edumacation spent $159,000 (in 1952 money) to tag kids like they were elk. But, apparently, dogtags weren’t the only option.
At some point, someone suggested tattooing as a means of providing identification for citizens (adult and child) who might get caught up in the blast zone. While dogtags were probably not an easy sell, you can imagine the howling that would have followed if a government actor suggested tattooing the population…especially since this was about ten years after a buncha people already tried that sort of thing. (Trivia: as a kid growing up in Brooklyn in the late 70’s it was not unheard of in the summer to see faded tattoos on the bare arms of older men of certain cultural/religious backgrounds. I specifically recall a barber I went to once who had what was clearly a number tattooed on his forearm.)
All the articles I found on the subject were aghast at the concept of issuing dogtags to kids for the purpose of identifying their bodies. Apparently the snowflakes at Slate and similar venues feel that a better choice is for a parent to be denied closure and the comfort of knowing the final disposition of their child.
Nowadays, people take the tattooing thing way too far. There was a point in my lifetime where only a certain kind of woman had a tattoo, and if a man had a tattoo he probably also had a military career behind it. Now kids get tattooed to the point of looking like a comic book.
Even a decade after Katrina, there were still a couple dozen bodies that were unidentified….a big improvement from the 1000 that they started with.
For me, the issue of identification is a non-starter. Even in my day-to-day life I refuse to carry ID. If I die, I’m sure there will be plenty of evidence laying around to let people know who I was (or am, i suppose). But, back in the Cold War days it was a different story, I suppose.
