Author Archives: Commander Zero

Thank you for smoking

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Johnny Trochmann,, he of Militia Of Montana fame, puts in an appearance at the larger gun shows in these parts. He has about a dozen tables covered with what could best be desscribed a ‘survivalist’ gear…potassium iodide pills, surgical kits, QuickClot, books on everything, specialty ammo, and that sort of thing. At some point he must have found an in with someone in the cruise line industry or a subsidiary thereof because he always has parachute flares, hand flares, and smoke generating devices for sale that clearly came from someone’s lifeboat emergency kits. These items are usually a couple years ‘out of date’ but that doesn’t really mean much in materiel like this.

Invariably, I pick up a buncha parachute flares and smoke cans. Why not? Both can come in handy if something goes wrong in the boonies and you need to indicate your position to the ‘copter people, and, honestly, there are some tactical applications as well.

Despite having a pretty large store of these items squirreled away, I’ve never actually gotten around to trying the smoke devices. The reason was simple…I can’t very well touch one off in town without attracting a  large amount of attention (thats what the dang things are designed for, after all) and I never seem to have the time to head to anywhere remote to try them. Until today.

I was scouting out some hunting areas that I have not been to for many, many years and since they were hell-and-gone from prying eyes I figured I’d try one of those smoke cannisters. Pop the top, pull the igniter, and toss it for distance. It sputtered and then started spitting out a rather impressive cloud of smoke for a good three minutes. I didn’t take any pictures or video because YouTube has plenty of them showing this exact version, but it lived up to the expectations. Does it have, shall we say, ‘non-rescue applications’? Well, just from what I observed, you throw three of these down a stairwell or hallway and you’re pretty much going to reduce visibility to zero in a hurry. Maybe you have a use for that sort of thing, maybe not. But…like many tools, it’s a multitasker when you have the right mindset.

Johnny T. sells these at the gun shows for about $4 ea although if you buy enough he usually cuts you a deal. I’ve got a couple dozen in storage and I keep a few in the vehicle at all times ‘just in case’.

Buy them new? Man, I’d hate to have to…but, maybe I wouldn’t have to:

When I was a kid, my high school science teacher whipped up a sugar smoke bomb for a class movie project they were doing. He rather…underestimated…the amount of smoke his little device would generate and the fire department rolled up to the school thinking the roof was going up like Dresden. (Protip: instead of a coloring agent, mix in fine ground red pepper or cayenne to create an irritant effect.)

Anyway…if you’re in Montana and happen to run across Johnny Trochmann and his Tables Of Fun, be sure to grab a dozen or so of those things. And tell him Commander Zero sent you.

Gearing up for winter

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October means really nice days and crisp nights here in Montana. But it also means that winter is around the corner and it can often come a tad early, or at least give us some sneak previews. So…time to start getting ready.

For me, it’s mostly two things: put the Winter Module into the Bag O’ Tricks, and get the winter gear in the vehicle. As for the abode, it pretty much takes care of itself…take the air conditioner out of the window and put it away, make sure the snow blower is ready, lay in some salt for the sidewalk.

But, being a good survivalist, there’s also a few other things – make sure the kerosene heater is filled and ready in case the power goes out. Same for the generator. Power outages in winter have a bit more drama to them than outages in the summer. Most notably the little issue of the house dropping to a temperature where pipe freezing becomes an issue. Fortunately, I know from previous experience that the kerosene heaters can keep the house above freezing for a while.

It’s also time to pull the wool outta storage. I’ve got my wonderful Filson coat and a goodly selection of hats and gloves to keep me warm, and I have snowshoes as well.

I’ve lived in the same house for a long time now and gone through a couple dozen winters with no power outage lasting more than a 24 hours or so. Not to say it won’t happen, just that it hasn’t so far. But…if it does, it’s nice to know that sitting huddled in the cold and dark will not be part of the program.

 

No boogaloo today

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For years, there’s been the notion that we have a ‘culture war’ going on. You know the one I’m talking about…the red state vs. blue state, gunnies vs antigun, city vs. rural, etc, etc. There’s a Balkanization going on, it’s just that no one can agree on what the dividing issues are.

Nowadays? It’s the Wuhan Flu polarization. On the one hand you have the people who mask up, disinfect everything, call the cops if the neighbors have a barbecue in their yard, demand that ‘outsiders’ self quarantine, and that anyone not wearing a mask is probably also an anti-vaxxing illiterate redneck who votes for Trump…on the other hand you have the people who don’t wear masks, think the othe side is a bunch of nervous Nellies who are quick toe the line whenever the CDC says something, and thing anyone wearing a mask is some sort of Democratic drone who can’t think for themselves and wants a nanny state.

And, according to the media, they’re both buying guns at rates previously unheard of.

I’ve seen more than one person blogging about how there’s going to be a civil war or balkanization and that various enclaves will form and we need to be at this location with our like-minded fellow citizens and..and..and…

Not gonna happen. The US is comprised of fifty individual political lab experiments…if you don’t like something in one state, there’s probably another state that does things the opposite way. You like .gov controls and regulations? You have states that have it in spades. Want .gov that pretty much lets you run amok (comparatively speaking)? Got those too. Want lotsa .gov services? Got just the state for ya…. Want a .gov that offers as little as possible and YOYO? There’s a couple of them too. It’s a fact of life that turns out to be something of a safety valve. Tired of high taxes and bureaucracy? You leave California and New York. Tired of lack of .gov services and oversight? You leave…pretty much everywhere else. But..there’s always someplace else to go that might be more to your liking.

“But..what about Kenosha? Or [location of rioting and shooting]?”, you may ask. Those aren’t revolutions. Those aren’t civil wars. They probably don’t even count as insurrections as much as they are simply ‘a riot’. A civil war where you have armband wearing groups taking over radio stations, airports, roadblocks, and military bases? Not a chance.

We just don’t do political gun-battles-in-the-street like some sort of Third World country. We’re too lazy. We’re too complacent. We’re fans of revolutions-without-the-work. The closest thing you’ll get to a revolution or civil war in this country is some group finally getting it’s political act together enough as a unified bloc to swing an election in their favor. A bloodless coup would probably be about all that could be worked up.

Heck, can you think of any First World country that actually had a shooting-in-the-streets political revolution in the last 75 years? Some First World country with the same level of development as the US? Hmm….some former Soviet state might come to mind but that’s not First World.

Anyway, my point is that as ugly as the upcoming political season is going to be, it isn’t going to be a civil war. It’s going to be stupidly violent in places….riots, arson, that sort of thing. Maybe even a targeted killing or two. But a civil war? Nope. Not a chance.

Lotsa little localized boogaloos, maybe. But no big national boogaloo.

 

 

 

Article – UK supermarkets … are rationing toilet paper and hand sanitizer as fears of panic buying return.

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British grocery chains Tesco and Morrisons have started rationing essential items over fears that stricter lockdown measures will send shoppers into a panic. 

Supermarkets limited sales of certain goods earlier in the pandemic, and Morrisons became the first major grocer to reintroduce these measures when it said on Thursday that customers could only buy three of certain products. These included pasta, soup, hand wash, and hand sanitizer, as well as multipacks of toilet paper and kitchen roll.

I’m a bit perplexed that anyone could have had the experience of standing in line for rationed toilet paper (in the classic Soviet model) and not learned a lesson that would preclude them from getting caught up in another round of rationing. But, people are idiots. There’s such a strong normalcy bias that “oh, that’ll never happen” even though it just freakin’ happened. Thats not willful ignorance, it’s just genuine shorsightedness (which is a polite term for ‘stupidity’). I can’t say that I’ve accounted for 100% of my anticipated needs but I’m so far ahead of the general population that if some sort of rationing did kick in, or anothe shortage reared its head, I’d probably not even notice.

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About five weeks until the election. Part of me has that same morbid, detached fascination that exists when you watch a horrific car accident on video…you know something terrible is about to occur, is occurring, but you kinda want to see it happen.

I used to have a friend who believed that we should vote Communists into office so we could just skip the foreplay and get the war started.Definitely an interesting outlook.

I disagree. I’m the most optimistic survivalist that youre ever going to meet. I mean that in the sense that my ‘perfect apocalypse’ is the one that doesn’t happen. If I die peacefully, warm, and well fed with a basement full of food,ammo, and fuel that was never needed…..I call it a triumph.  If you really have a secret desire to live out the Mad Max lifestyle with your gear and your buddies go live in Somalia, Afghanistan, or Detroit. You can LARP Mad Max all day long in those environs and you may find that it isn’t the glorious rugged-individualist fantasy camp that you thought it was.

Why would I want to spend a single day having to crap into a plastic bucket, eat freeze drieds, shoot looters, sleep under a poncho, and drink bleach-flavored water if I didn’t have to?

But just because you don’t want to do something doesn’t mean you’re not going to have to. So…big basement of goodies.

Not an expert

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When it comes to guns, I’m not ashamed to say that I think of myself as a bit of an expert on most things…history, function, disassembly, etc. Oh, sure, you bring out something esoteric enough like a Gewehr41 or a Rast-Gasser and you’ll probably stump me on something like disassembly, but by and large I’d say I’m pretty darn good.

At least, that’s what I thought until working on the rather plebian Beretta 92. As a good survivalist, I figured I should have at least a couple 92’s laying around since the military uses/used them and therefore there’d be surplus (or ‘liberated’) parts and mags aplenty. But, I don’t like manual safeties on a double-action gun. There’s no need, since the gun is DA and usually carried with the hammer down.

Beretta eventually recognized this and has a variant, designated as ‘G’, where the safety acts as a decocker only. (Much like my dear Ruger P95DC pistols.) Beretta makes the conversion available as a kit for about $55. So..I ordered one. Step one was to disassemble the existing safety from the slide. I did so and as I looked at the back of the slide I saw this:

Well, bloody hell….the slide is cracked. And I kicked myself for not inspecting the gun more closely when I bought it years ago. Alright, let’s go to Beretta’s customer service and see if we can wheedle a new slide from them since this one clearly is broken. Their reply:

It’s supposed to look like that. I have to give kudos to Beretta CS for a) replying within 48 hrs and b) not calling me a dumbass.

I’ve taken apart a lot of pistols in my years of gun fondling. You look at the back of a 1911, Glock, Sig, HiPower, Ruger, etc, etc, and that hole for the firing pin is always solid. I’ve never seen a relief cut in that area of a pistol. But..I’m not a machinist, not a mechanical engineer, and not a metals stress expert. So, if the guys at Beretta, who have been making boomtoys for several hundred years, say “No, no, dude….it’s supposed to look like that”, well, I guess that’ll have to do.

But….it sure looked like a stress fracture to me.

Clearly I need more time tinkering with Berettas. But it was a bit sobering to realize that, maybe I don’t know it all after all. Maybe I should have read the warning printed on the slide:

By the way, the G conversion was a breeze if you ignore Beretta’s incredibly complicated online instructions and just YouTube your way through it. (ProTip: watch video, watch video again.) Took me about ten minutes to get it installed and it works like a champ. A lot of folks carry guns like this with the hammer down and safety off, which is reasonably safe. However, those same people are usually concerned about the safety accidentally becoming engaged as the gun is bumped around or brushed up against things…last thing you want is to grab your gun, bring it up, pull the trigger and have nothing happen because the safety you left in the off position has somehow engaged itself. This G conversion prevents that.

GP-100 stuff

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About two weeks ago I took one of my GP-100’s out to the range to sight it in with the ammo I made using my windfall 158 gr. JHPs. This particular GP-100 is pretty stock, and not nearly as smooth as the other one. But, yknow what?, it shot just as nicely with a nice tight group that actually made me say “Wow, I like these guns.”

What happens after that sighting in process? Pretty simple, actually, The cleaned pistol goes into a pelican case with a holster, a half dozen speedloaders, as much ammo as I can fit in there, and a note saying it was sighted in at X distance on mm/yy for a load of [loading data]. Thus when I crack it open on that dark, stormy, loud night in the future I have everything I need right there and the certainty that the thing is good to go.

Since this load shot so well out of my two GP-100’s, it’ll probably be my ”go to” loading which means that when I want to load a five gallon bucket full of .357 to tuck away for Der Tag, that’ll be the load I use. Need to sight in the Marlin .357 for it as well as my Smith 28.

Speaking of pistol caliber carbines. If you don’t follow Gun Jesus over at Forgotten Weapons you might have missed a little blurb from the guys at Calico about how they are working on carbines in calibers other than 9mm and .22…. including rimmed cartridges. Could a 50-round semi-auto .357 carbine be in the future? That would be….interesting.

Paratus gifting

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I received a Paratus gift in the mail the other day from someone and I figured I’d recognize their generosity here. In keeping with the demographic that show up in this blog, they chose to remain anonymous but wherever they’re “stuck” they have my grattitude. Thank you, sir! Best wishes for a productive apocalypse.

 

Right place, right time

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SNSTIW, minding my own business at a local shop, and I stumbled into this:

6x 40-round boxes of Wolf 7.62×39, a buncha loose 7.62×39, 1x box of 20 7.62×39, and two Magpul AK mags.

$75 out the door. Put another way, knock off $20 for the mags and the ammo clocks in at around $0.14@.  In the current market, that’s, like, eleventy jillion dollars worth of 7.62×39.

Right place, right time. Unlike my usual modus operandi.

The Cautious Season

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I’ve been involved, in one degree or another, with the various facets of survivalism (or preparedness) for over thirty years now. (Actually forty years, come to think of it…I distinctly recall reading ‘Alas Babylon’ around junior high school age.) I’ve seen a lot of ‘this is it! hunker down!’ moments come through that never amounted (to me) to anything more than a hiccup. Y2k, 9/11, Katrina, assorted ‘asteroid/comet may collide with Earth’, threats of war with Iran/Iraq/China/Russia/NorK/Cartels, Bird Flu, SARS, Ebola, Peak Oil, etc, have all come and gone and at no point have I had to shutter myself in the house, pull the blinds, load the 870, and pray no one comes to the door. .Not once.

But…that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

So here comes the statement that I’m sure you all saw coming: And then 2020 came along…….

This year has proven to be a chimera of several flavors of apocalypse rolled into one. I won’t go into the constituent components of it because any idiot can go to Drudge Report and find at least three of them on the front page. Will 2020 turn out to be another nothingburger in terms of generating the awaited Mad Max scenario that we all anticipate eventually occurring? The famed ‘Without rule of law’? In my opinion, no. Even with the swirling miasma of various dooms pervading the land, I am still 99.999% certain that at this time next year the lights will still be on, the trucks will still be running, and water will still flow from the tap.

“If you’re that certain, than why are you still roaming WalMart clutching a printed spreadsheet of things to stockpile?”, you may ask. Valid question.

In ‘Starship Troopers’, theres a scene where the recruits have to mud crawl through obstacles as a belt-fed gun fires just over their prostrate forms…even though only one round out of a hundred, or maybe a thousand,  in the belt is live that one round out of a hundred is enough to make you hug the dirt. Same reasoning.

But over all the time I’ve been at this, it never seemed like there needed to be as much ..deliberateness… in what I was doing as there seems to be a need for now. Now it seems like every task, every trip to the store, every usage of an item out of storage, every gun oiled, every round loaded, is done with the same all-consuming care as if you were packing your own parachute. (Which, really, you are.) It’s a time of careful considerations, deliberate actions, strategic movements, and heavily-weighed options…in short, its a season of caution.

As I say, I’m not necessarily doing anything different these days…it’s just that I’m doing them with a level of focus, intensity, urgency, and pace that, over the years, has been a lot less. The curtain hasn’t risen on the worst of 2020 yet, but I think I hear the band warming up.

I have a terrible history of forecasting the future. (Although, on some aspects of precognition I’m freakishly astute.) When I predict what the future holds it may as well be a coin toss. But, while I don’t think that a year from now we’re going to be fighting over canned vegetables and eating our pets, I think there’s going to be some economic turmoil, regardless of the election, and that it will be an economic turmoil worse than what 2020 has turned up so far. I suppose that, also, regardless of the election youre going to see continued ‘peaceful protests’ but those won’t affect me as directly as the economic events. (actually, come to think of it, all things being equal, I’d forecast worse economic turmoil under Biden than Trump given any set of circumstances.)

So, to sum it up, for me it is a time of caution and purposeful movement. My level of certainty that this time next year won’t be Max Max-ville is about the same level of certainty as me believing the sun will rise tomorrow. But, as the man says, Doveryay, no proveryay. I trust the ship not sink, but I look to see where the lifeboats are anyway.

 

 

 

Hamilton Gun Show

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I would be ashamed..I mean unwilling-to-show-my-face level of ashamed….to have a table where I’m selling CCI pistol primers at $95/brick.

Yet there they were.

AR’s were reasonable. Nothing else was.

I feel so, so, so validated for the things I have purchased in the past.

Of course, a year from now things may be ‘normal’-ish and primers are back to $25-30 a brick and used police trade-in Glocks are $350. But, somehow, I doubt it. Look how long it took for .22 ammo to become available again (not that it ever came back to earth in terms of pricing).

I’m all for capitalism, and the price of a thing is whatever the market will bear, but, wow, I would still feel pretty dickish asking a guy for a c-note for some primers. Not my place (or yours) to tell someone what to charge for an item…but talk about chutzpah.