Storage project

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I have a lot of guns. I normally dont give out an exact number, but in terms of put-together-and-not-parts guns we’re looking at somewhere between 100-200. That takes up a bit of space. A good chunk of those guns, though, are packed for storage and the Deep Sleep. Packed away like this or this. But there’s also a certain amount of guns I don’t pack away because a) I want to shoot them every so often and b) I need to keep a certain amount of certain firearms in a ‘ready’ condition just in case Red Dawn kicks off.

So, whats a survivalist to do? Well, after staring at their link in my bookmarks toolbar for years, and drooling over their offerings, I emailed the guys at Gallowtech. I said, look, I’ve got this much wall to work with…here’s the dimensions. What sort of combination of hangars, trim, and panels will give me the most coverage? They were nice enough to calculate it out and even do a mock up for me. The end result is that I’m finally getting some serious weapons rack put in. I just can’t go on with rifles leaning up in corners everywhere, handguns scattered about, and magazines underfoot everywhere.

Details and progress reports as we go along. Tagging this one under the HHG (Harder Homes and Garden) tag.

The stuff that dreams are made of

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My big boss here at work (he of P365SAS fame) came into my office the other day and in a low voice asked me “Where can I sell some gold and silver?”

Well……

The Metals Pimp is somewhat semi-retired so I gave my boss the card for my buddy at the local coin shop. How much are we talking about, I asked, trying not sound terribly nosey. “Somewhere around $75,000 to $100,000”, he replied. That’s not a lightweight amount, but it’s not earth-shaking either. But there’s an opportunity in there.

Whenever you buy PM’s (precious metals) there’s a ‘premium’. The premium is what you pay on top of ‘spot’ price. Spot is what the markets say current price is. For example: Gold is $2500/oz. so my guy is selling 1 oz. at “$100 over spot”. This means he’s selling it for spot price ($2500) plus another $100. Thus, your one ounce of gold will cost you $2600.

Now, what if you want to buy a smaller amount of gold? Maybe just a 1/10 oz? Interestingly, the premiums are higher the smaller the piece of gold. For example, a 1/10th oz. gold Eagle  may be “10% over spot”. Well 1/10th of $2500 is $250 (because you’re not buying an ounce…your buying 1/10th of an ounce), and 10% of $250 is $25. So that 1/10th Eagle is, to you, $275.

Obviously the best thing you can hope for is to buy gold at spot, or even below spot. How do you buy gold at spot, you ask? Easy(ish): if the dealer buys it below spot, he can sell it at spot (or slightly above) and still make his money. The difference between what the dealer paid for it and what he sells it for is the spread….thats his profit. Gold is $2500/oz. He buys an Eagle over the counter for, say, “$20 below spot” and he sells it for “$25 over spot”…his profit is $45. Thats how this works.

Why would anyone sell their gold at below spot? For the same reason anyone sells anything – they want /need the money. But, also, some forms of gold are more desirable than others. If you walk into a coin shop with, say, some 1/10 Eagles or 1/4 oz. gold you’ll probably get a better price than if you walked in with a 10 oz. bar of gold. Why is that? Well, among other things, risk. It’s a lot easier for our guy to sell a 1/10th Eagle or similar small gold unit than it  is to sell a 10 oz. bar. And every day he has to hold onto that 10 oz. bar is another day of risking a swing in the market. So, the bigger gold doesn’t get you as much when you sell it as the smaller gold does.

Usually what happens is when the dealer takes in a large quantity of gold, say a tube of 20 gold Eagles (thats $50,000 at current pricing), he just immediately calls a wholesaler and sells it to them that day so he doesnt get caught with it if the price craps the bed the next day.

So, if you want a good deal (gold at spot with no premium) you have to be willing to take gold in a form you may not ideally want. I told my guy that if he ever gets any gold in that he wants to sell at spot, let me know. And, once in a while, that happens. He’ll take in something that is in a form that makes it unlikely to sell quickly (foreign coin, commemorative, odd metric weight, etc.) so he just wants to get it sold and take his profit. Thats where I step in. I just want the gold…I dont care if its a French Rooster, British Sovereign, or Credit Suisse bar. In fact, I just got three British Sovereigns the other day at spot.

So, anyway, I called my guy and said that I was sending him someone that might have a bunch of gold he wants to unload. He said that if it worked out, he could give me a bit of a finders fee. I countered and told him that this was what I wanted as my finders fee: I get the opportunity to buy up to two ounces of gold at his price. I know he’s not going to pay more than spot, so I’m hoping there’s some fractionals (1/10, 1/4, 1/2, etc) in there. If I could get 20 1/10ths at spot I’d be supermegahappy.

Why don’t I just buy them straight from my boss, you might ask. I don’t want to create the awkwardness of hemming and hawing a deal out with the guy who signs my paycheck. Let the other guy do that and then just buy from him.

So, I’m hoping that when my boss returns from his trip next week he’ll have a nice stash of metals to take to my buddy and that I’ll wind up getting some good stuff at cost. I mean, I can live with two 1oz. Krugs at spot, but I’d much much rather have 20 1/10th Eagles at spot.

We shall see.

Paratus approaches! Ten years of Paratus

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Just a reminder, guys….Paratus is four weeks out. This year, Paratus, the holiday of survivalists, falls on September 20.

I’ve got the gifts and cards for this year all ready, and at this point I’m just double checking addresses. If you got a card/gift from me last year, and your address has changed, then you need to email me and let me know the new address. Soon!

From the FAQ:

How do I get on the Paratus card list?

It’s pretty simple and blatantly selfish. If you’ve signed up at Patreon, sent me a gift of any kind, are someone I know ‘in real life’, are an ‘internet friend’ with whom I’ve exchanged many emails, or otherwise have interacted with me on more than a casual basis…and you’ve provided an address…you’ll get on the list.

Simply emailing or commenting with your address and “Please send me a Paratus card” will not work.

The original idea for Paratus was over twenty years ago. But I never really codified it and got into it until ten years ago.

I guess this means this is officially the tenth Paratus. Although, to be fair, its only in the last five years I’ve actually gone through the expense of having cards made up and sent.

Two .22’s

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Do you know what my favorite 9mm? It’s the HiPower. But I carry a Glock, and stockpile Glock handguns. Is the Glock my favorite? Nope, not even close. So, you might ask, why would I commit to the Glock platform when my favorite is the HiPower? Well, because what gun is my favorite has absolutely nothing to with what I think is the best gun for the ugly future.

I have a nice 6″ K-22 Smith and Wesson that is a lovely handgun. It is well made, accurate, and pleasant to shoot. It’s a classic in every sense of the word. BUT…in Mad Max world its got some drawbacks…it’s blued finish will wear and the exposed metal will suffer, some parts are a bit delicate for the apocalyptic lifestyle, the capacity of six rounds is a bit limiting, and the sights don’t give you many options. But, merciful Crom, it’s a fine, fine handgun.

So when it’s time to stow a .22 pistol in the backpack for that frantic evacuation to the beta site will the K-22 make the cut. Not if I’ve only got room for one. I’ll probably go with todays acquisition:

Stainless, replaceable front sight, built like a tank, and holds ten rounds….a 66% increase over the K-22. Is it as pretty? Does it handle as nicely in the hand? Nope. But I can drop it in the snow and mud, rinse it off in a creek, and be good to go. Technically, I could do that with the K22 but I’d fell pretty bad about it…its a nice pistol.

I’d been wanting a durable .22 revolver for field use for a while. Although I have a couple .22 Ruger autos, I still like the revolver for its utility…CB’s, shorts, longs, shot, etc….the revolver will shoot it all. Ten rounds puts it on the same level as the Mk IV in terms of capacity, and I don’t have to worry about magazines. On the other hand, when something goes wrong on a revolver youre pretty much stuck going to a gunsmith, whereas when something goes wrong on an auto its usually just a matter of swapping parts.

I’ll take this thing out this weekend and play with it. I rather enjoy shooting .22’s because I can actually shoot off a couple hundred rounds and not break the bank like I would with .223 or 9mm.

As for the utility of this thing….I doubt anyone could really swing a convincing argument that it’s not got a place in a survivalists armory. Plinking, pest control, small game hunting, sentry removal, etc….kind of a multitakser.

National debt

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Do you know what the current national debt is? It’s around $35 trillion dollars. A trillion dollars is a big number so let me give you a way to relate: if you took  $35 trillion dollars in $1 bills and laid them end to end they would reach to the sun and back….eighteen times*.

You know that enormous loop around the sun that this planet makes in twelve months? Those dollar bills, end to end, would cover that orbit…almost six times.

Want more to relate to? If you took all the US currency thats out there right now it would add up to…..around $2 billion dollars. Put another way, we owe, as a nation, around 17,500 times more money than actually physically exists.

Let’s keep rolling. The US population is around 330,000,000 people. Your share of that national debt is about $106,000,

Wanna seize all the privately owned land and use it to pay the debt down? Good luck with that…that won’t even cover half the debt since all the privately held land in the US is only worth about $14.488 trillion dollars.

What does a high national debt mean? People are less likely to lend to you if youre already maxed out on your cards. Who is going to lend you money when all your available cash is going to pay back previous lenders? So..you gotta sweeten the deal…and thats where those 30% interest rates on predatory credit cards come in. Now imagine that on a national level.

So..you’ve maxed out your credit cards to the point where you owe 17,500 times more money than you have in the bank. How do you get out of this mess? Well, you can try to pay it back but you literally will not live long enough to do so even if you lived several lifetimes. You can file for bankruptcy. Or you can shrug and just keep spending knowing that it is impossible to pay off the debt so you may as well go full kamikaze and spend like there’s no tomorrow.

Whats it look like if the US did that? Well, we coulud simply refuse to pay Japan and China, our two biggest creditors, and we’d probably be in an economic cold war with them for the next forseeable future. Or, we could renegotiate the deal which just kicks the can down the road and makes it more expensive later. We could just print the money, physically or electronically, to pay it off thereby devaluing our currency.

(/:Zimbabwe has entered the chat)
(/:Weimar Republic has entered the chat)

Or, more likely, we will just pay lip service to debt reduction and continue to spend because apparently austerity measures and budget cuts just aint gonna happen. And at some point there is only going to be two choices:  monetization or renunciation. Either one spells economic chaos on a global level.

On the other hand, we surpassed the level at which debt couuld be mitigated a long time ago and we are still here, still borrowing, still being loaned to, and still spending without cutting…although at this point cutting anything will have a virtually zero effect on things.

I bring this all up because I was curious about where the national debt was today and fell down a math rabbit hole. But, honestly, I’m hoping I’m simply being naive, unlearned, and grossly ignorant about economics, because everything I just wrote pretty much concerns  me greatly.

For a literary treatment about a US renunciation of the debt and the apocalypse that follows, I highly recommend this book.

To the sun and back, eighteen times……geez.

* = Math: one dollar is 6.14 inches long. 35t of them is 214,900,000,000,000 inches. That is the same as 17,908,333,333,333.33 feet, or 3,391,729,797.97 miles. The distance to the sun is about 93,000,000 miles. 3,391,729,797.97 divided by 93,000,000 is 36.4. Since its a round trip we cut that in half = 18.2 times the length distance to the sun and back.

Smaller

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ALthough I know it looks like my interest in preparedness begins and ends with guns, that’s actually not so.

I have desperately needed a gun far, far, far fewer times than I’ve needed to eat. And, having actually been hungry at some point, I’ve no desire to ever be in a situation where ‘theres nothing to eat’ literally means there’s nothing to eat.

A segue: Did you know that the United States is pretty much the only real country on the planet where ‘theres nothing to eat’ actually usually means ‘theres nothing I want to eat’? People will have a cupboard full of food, look at it disdainfully, and say ‘theres nothing to eat’ as they order up DoorDash. Everywhere else on the planet, ‘theres nothing to eat’ means that…literally. But the US, praise Crom, has always been the land of plenty to the point that we actually turned eating into a competitive sport. There are people on the this planet somewhere eating grass and feeding cooked rats to their kids while we have a guy in Coney Island jamming hot dogs down his gullet so fast they need a digital stopwatch. I love this country!

Back to topic: on the weekends, I like to wander the aisles at various supermarkets in town to see if there are any items that fit into the particular niche of what Im looking for – tastes good, stores well, fills a need, is versatile, durably packaged, room temperature.  Thats how I discovered the WalMart on Brooks St. was selling Keystone meats in 28 oz cans. Since Keystone has such a good reputation in the preparedness community, I went ahead and started picking up a few cans every time I was in WallyWorld. But….all thats available wer the #2.5 (28 oz.) cans. Until today when I saw that our other Walmart (Reserve St) had the Keystone beef in the #303 (15 oz.) cans.

By the way, various can sizes have actual designations. Here’s a cheat graphic for you:

For my anticipated needs, I usually prefer the smaller cans. Why? Well, for one reason, the circumstance under which I’m going to be digging into my canned food supply is also a circumstance where electricity for things like refrigeration might not be available. And if there’s leftovers….well, you’re not gonna have many options. And if you leave it sitting around to the next meal you risk some other unpleasantness.

So…I have another option now at the local WalMart. I have a couple cases of the larger cans, but going forward I think I’ll purchase just the smaller cases as they become available.

So, if you’re in Missoula and you want the smaller cans….WalMart on Reserve.

Unbridled lack of discipline

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In my defense, I was left unsupervised with an internet connection, an FFL/SOT, and a browser tab opened to Reddit /gundeals.

First off, I didn’t need some Beretta APX’s, but hear me out….at auction back in June I bought scads of magazines for various guns at bargain prices…about $4-$6 per mag. Well, since I have a stack of Beretta-made 21-round APX 9mm mags it wouldn’t be the worst thing if I picked up a few guns at discount, right?

[Handgun] Unissued LEO Trade-In Brazilian Police Beretta APX 17+1rd Black w/ 2 Magazines $299.95

Oh look…the Brazillians are selling a bunch of NIB APX’s they ordered. Brand new, but the manuals are in Portuguese. I can work with that:

I’ll keep one gun for myself and sell the other two off. Hmmm…what esle is out there looking for a home? Well, I’ve got the SOT so something being NFA restricted isn’t really a problem these days. Hmmm….14″ 870’s with receiver peeps and front sights. Better price if I order two or more….

[NFA] Remington 870 Police Magnum 12 Gauge Police Trade-In Pump Action Shotguns with Ghost Sights and 14 Inch Barrel $404.99 each when you buy two or more Plus Free Ship & Tax

Well, everyone wants to save money, right? In for two.

Holidays are coming up and I need gift ideas. This is the cheapest price I’ve ever seen Rugers MPR at.

[RIFLE] RUGER AR-556 MPR 5.56 AR-15 RIFLE 18″, BLACK 8535 -$599.99

The price was actually $50 cheaper when I ordered than what is listed now. The MPR is a good choice for an out-of-the-box gun with features that you’d normally pay extra for. I guess my Christmas gift shopping is done.

And….one more little jewel that is strictly for me. All these other guns are for resale or gifts, but there’s been something on my list for a while now and the vendor finally has them back in stock. Soooo…..

And that’s how I wound up buying eight guns in the space of a week. It also how I eventually wind up having to move into a storage unit because my house is full of guns.

Hobbies, man.

 

Article – US judge tosses machine gun possession case, calls ban unconstitutional

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I suppose this had to come up sooner or later…

(Reuters) – A federal judge has dismissed charges against a Kansas man for possessing a machine gun, saying prosecutors failed to establish that a federal ban on owning such weapons is constitutional.

The decision by U.S. District Judge John Broomes in Wichita on Wednesday appeared to mark the first time a court has held that banning machine guns is unconstitutional after the conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 issued a landmark ruling that expanded gun rights.

In that ruling, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the Supreme Court established a new test for assessing firearms laws, saying restrictions must be “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

The Supreme Court clarified that standard in June as it upheld a ban on people subject to domestic violence restraining orders having guns, saying a modern firearms restriction needs only a “historical analogue,” not a “historical twin,” to be valid.

Broomes, an appointee of Republican then-President Donald Trump, said prosecutors in Tamori Morgan’s case failed to identify such a historical analogue to support charging him with violating the machine gun ban.

The U.S. Department of Justice can appeal the decision, which the gun safety group Everytown Law in a statement called “extreme and reckless.” Prosecutors did not respond to a request for comment. Morgan’s lawyer declined to comment.

I’m not going to say that I have no use for a machine gun. A little fun switch on my Uzi, and a Negev for my future fortified home, could come in handy someday. But ‘need’ is never a determining factor when it comes to this sort of thing.

Do I think this is the opening burst in a long slog towards repealing the NFA? No, I do not. Why? Because no matter what the legal status of something is, there’s just too much of an uphill battle with the non-gun public. It’s nice to think public opinion doesn’t matter in these issues and only the legal merits are whats important….but the minute a serious challenge is mounted, the media will be full of nonstop chatter about ‘silencers’ and machine guns becoming ‘readily available’. Never mind that anyone with a machine gun will tell you that theyre an expensive beast to feed.

However, I will follow this episode with some interest to see how far it gets, and what reasoning is bandied about, before it gets cut down by other courts.

Bargain meat musing

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Sometimes I’ll swing by the supermarket after work to pick up some last-minute stuff. But, I always take a swing through the meat department to check for bargains. While I always appreciate 30% off the sticker price, its more than just frugality that makes me walk the aisle when I’d much rather be kicking my shoes off after work and relaxing.

There have been times when money was tight and if I did have any cash in my pockets, it was needed for other stuff. By not having to worry about things like having to buy groceries, I’m able to free up cash for more important things in my desperate state…fuel to get to job interviews, etc, etc.

You prepare in the good times against the bad times. Right now, I have a job, money in the bank, virtually no debt, a paid for house, and a few other advantages that give me a safe and secure life. But I’ve been on the other side of that coin. I can remember a time when I had just enough money for the next three months rent, no job, and the only thing in the fridge as some baking soda and ketchup. Eating every other day…that sort of thing. And…I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything. It is experiences like those that give you the grit and determination to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Sure, you don’t need to have gone hungry to realize that having stored food is a good idea, but I absolutely guarantee you that the person who has gone hungry, or been around hungry people, will take it much more seriously than someone for whom ‘going hungry’ is just a theory.

So, even though I’m tired, and I don’t feel like spending 20 minutes after work shuffling through a supermarket when I’d rather be flopped in a chair at my house with a cold Coke, I’ll suck it up and hit the aisle. And when I do, pretty much all I think about is what could go wrong in my life and how someday, maybe years from now, I’ll pull this steak or roast out of the freezer and be grateful I had the foresight to take a lousy twenty minutes to give myself some breathing room at a future date.

Of course, this isn’t exclusive to remaindered meat. Canned goods, toiletries, clothes, fuel, medicine, cash, gold, silver, ammo…..these are all things that at some point I sacrifice something in the present..a dinner out, some ice cream, a trip to the movies…in order to have that moment in the future where I thank myself for having some foresight.

Thats it. Twenty minutes and taking a pass on a half gallon of Breyers against the day when, for whatever reason, I don’t have the resources to spare for a decent meal. Could be a bout of unemployment, illness, sudden responsibility to others, but there’s no shortage of darn good reasons to have some extra food tucked away…in the freezer, in the cupboard, in a buckets, on the shelf.

So even though after work today I was ten different types of tired, I didnt begrudge my future self too much when I picked up some flank steaks and 85/15 at 30% off. Vacuum sealed and in the freezer, or canned in jars, my hungry future-me will thank past-me.

So next time youre tired, or you’d rather spend on a luxury, or you just don’t feel like doing anything productive…..think of that time your back was against the wall and how much better things would have been if you had set something back for just such a situation.