Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

Interesting link here about how texting and ‘mobile devices’ saved the day for folks in Haiti. (By the way, according to the article, for a country of around 9 million folks theres about 4 million cellphones. Either cellphones are heavily subsidized or we’ve been misled about the poverty in the country.)

Unsurprisingly, phone networks get overwhelmed in disasters. Perfectly reasonable…everyone is calling their family and friends to check on them or say that theyre ok, right? What many folks don’t know, however, is that text messages use much less bandwidth than voice messages and, in some case, use different routing systems/protocols. The upshot of this is that when you cant get through by voice because ‘all circuits are busy’ you may be able to get through via text.

This isn’t necessarily news, though. During the 9/11 event many people came to discover this quirk. As the networks became overloaded (esp. since some carriers had their towers atop the World Trade Center and thus lost a chunk of their capacity when the buildings went down.) many people found that voice calls were impossible but, surpisingly, text got through.

So, the lesson here is that if you have a phone or device capable of text messaging and you find yourself in a position someday where you cant get through on voice you might be able to get your message out in text.
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Speaking of guns, I took delivery of a gun for a customer today. The gun in question was a Hi-Point pistol. I have heard mixed things about these guns, and everything I read says their carbines are actually quite good. The pistol however……meh. It has a magazine disconnect, which is a nice touch, because if I pull the trigger hard enough the safety lever will move to ‘fire’ and the striker will drop (or strike, or whatever..its really a linear motion rather than an arc.) The gun is strictly blowback. When you get above .380 caliber you don’t see a lot of blowback guns. The way they make it work is twofold – huge slide mass and a stout recoil spring. Dealer cost? $155 in .40 S&W. For all I know, this thing may actually be reliable and accurate but just between you and me I’m not counting on it. If it feeds ball ammo reliably I’d be surprised. It seems like a lovely gun for your average drive-by shooting before you drop it the Gowanus Canal. (Famously referred to as the only body of water in the world that’s 90% guns.)

My point is that if $155 is all you can swing for a pistol…well, keep sweeping those floors and delivering those pizzas because for another $200 you can get a used police trade-in Glock and know the thing will go ‘bang’ every time you pull the trigger.
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Speaking of guns, the fedgoons have determined that sometimes a shotgun just aint a shotgun. 18 USC 921(a)(5) says a shotgun is a weapon ‘designed or redesigned’ to be fired from the shoulder. Okay, sounds average enough. BUT…some shotguns come from the factory these days equipped with pistol grip stocks instead of shoulder stocks. Thus, according to the pointy-headed thugs at ATFE, a pistol-gripped shotgun is NOT a shotgun but “a firearm other than a rifle or shotgun”. So, according to these idiots if you wanna buy a pistol gripped shotgun you must be over 21 (instead of 18 for a regular shotgun) and must be resident of the state of purchase (unlike with a regular shotgun). In short, its treated like a handgun except that, as we all know, handgun shotguns are AOWs and already pretty restricted.

Your .gov at work folks. Is there a workaround? Probably. Throw a shoulderstock on it and – presto – its redesigned to be intended to be fired from the shoulder and is thus back in NormalLand. Have the customer bring the stock back the next day or something. At least…its seems like that would be keeping within the letter of the law.

Think I’m making this stuff up? Page 2 of November 2009 FFL newsletter…also available from www.atf.gov.

Speaking of bureaucracy, that November 2009 newsletter? Yeah, that showed up today. Three months after the fact.

And people wonder why I have such a low regard for these weasels…………

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

Wow. Long freakin’ day. Today was the one-day Glock armorers course at the police department. See, Glock will send a couple of their guys out with Pelican cases full of cool stuff to teach your class, at $150 a head, on how to fix the guns that dont need fixing. Trouble is, in a small department like this one, getting 20 guys together who are a) interested in the course and b) have a department willing to front the greenbacks is pretty tough. So, whats an agency to do? Why, you open it up to anyone who wants to come! As a result, it was 37 people including local PD, various sheriffs agencies, forest service, one treasury guy, one IRS guy (what the hell?), some IPSC folks and one low-profile preparedness freak – yours truly.

This class was nine hours. Let me put that into perspective. The average Glock has 36 parts. The course was nine hours. If you spent fifteen minutes covering every single individual part in the gun you could fill nine hours. It doesnt even take nine hours to make the gun! Much of the class was history and development and a huge amount of gun safety rules since the class was mostly law enforcement who had their guns with them. The safety lectures were punctuated with graphic photos of gunshot hands and limbs. Owie.

How was the course? Good. Learned a bunch of stuff I did not know. There were plenty of interesting anecdotes. (“Glock changed this part in 1997 because [agency] told us they kept breaking [part]“.) It reinforced my belief that the Glock is probably the only gun on the market right now that hits the high levels of reliability, durability, ubiquity, affordability and versatility that Im looking for in an autopistol. No, it isnt perfect, but it suits my needs better than anything on the market right now.

We completely, totally, and undeniably removed every single part (except the sights) from the slide and frame. We learned how to check the safeties, check for worn/broken parts, check recoil springs, check the firing pin, check…everything, where to lube/not lube, troubleshoot, etc, etc. The Glock really is pretty simple to detail strip and diagnose.

The practical upshot is that if I had a business card I could slap “Certified Glock Armorer” on it. Theres also the ability to order spare parts from Glock but, really, you can get almost all that stuff from the guys at Lone Wolf. The instructor admitted that “Glock Perfection” isnt always perfect and we talked about parts that seemed prone to breakage, parts that had to be redesigned, etc.

Two interesting things about the instructor: first, he never said anything bad about the competition. Secondly, he never, ever, ever used the word ‘plastic’. It is ‘polymer’. I genuinely believe that part of his training course at Glock to be an instructor probably included stern admonitions to never refer to the Glocks as ‘plastic’.

He mentioned that Glock has set up a factory in the US now to make slides and frames, so all Glocks in the US will be made in the US. This opens up interesting possibilities because some Glock stuff cannot be brought into the US because of import restrictions, such as their .380 automatic. If it is made in the US, however, it isnt an issue. I’m hoping this means at some point Glock will make a .22 caliber model or at least a conversion kit. The .380, by the by, while not available to us peons is available on special order on police letterhead. Go figure. The US plant also means Glock could do military contract stuff since the requirements for that sort of thing usually require the gun to be made in the country that is giving the contract. (Hence, Beretta USA.)

To be honest, the course was good but I dont think you really learned anything of substance that you would not learn from Lone Wolfs book about Glocks. The advantage here was that you had someone you could bounce questions off of and someone who could show you the correct way to do things when you hit a wall.

In addition to the instructor there was the regional Glock LE rep who brought along samples of the RTF Glocks and the new Gen 4 Glocks. The Gen 4 is nice, but other than the adjustable backstrap and new textured grip it wasnt anything special. What was important to note was that these 4th gen guns will incorporate some parts changes that will not necessarily be backwards-compatible with older guns. For example, the 4th gen recoil assemblies will not interchange with 3rd gen. The guy is going to email me a list of parts that will/wont be backwards compatible and I’ll post it when I get it.

All in all it was entertaining, although probably a lot longer than it needed to be.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

Haiti seems to have run through its scheduled news cycle and is back in the page-five category of ‘news events that continue, but are no longer interesting to the public’. Not surprising, major news stories are all the rage for a brief amount of time and then media focuses on newer, fresher issues. In the meantime, a month after the earthquake, Haitians live in squalor and grinding poverty, slowly starving and dying from disease and violence. The cynic in me wants to say “So, things have gotten back to normal then”.

Sucks to be in Haiti, no doubt about it. And as bad as conditions are there for those folks my primary concern is stuff closer to home. The economy continues to shed jobs, the hopey-changey administration continues to be an epic fail, more businesses seem to be shuttering up, and lotsa folks don’t know if theyre gonna be homeless in a year. Im supposed to, with that in mind, be concerned about a disaster in a Third World country? My plate is kinda full at the moment as I worry about this First World country. (And, yes, there is, technically, a such thing as a Second World country….Canada springs to mind.)

Im actually a little disappointed at the reduced coverage of Haiti. I was very interested in seeing how the various problems were overcome and what sort of methods were being used. Mass disaster planning and mitigation is mostly theory. You can have all the drills and mock events you want but in the final analysis you cant be sure a program works until you actually try it in a crisis. Haiti may wind up being a case study or laboratory in which these sorts of programs and policies will be proven (or disproven). Should be interesting to see what happens.
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The Mosin-Nagant rifles (and to a lesser degree, ammo) continue to be one of the best bargains around these days. Cheap enough to buy a few and stick ‘em away for a rainy day, the Mosin-Nagants are certainly better than no gun at all. Heres a link to a very nice tutorial on disassembly and , more importantnly, re-assembly. A nice touch is that theres some explanation on how to use those curious disassembly/takedown tools properly.

Im kind of a snob on surplus rifles. Theres plenty of good ones out there but I think its pretty hard to beat the classic 98 Mauser style action. Sure the Enfields are rugged beasts, and yes the Schmidt-Rubins are amazingly well-machined, and the 1903 Springfields make excellent sporters. But I just really like the old Mauser. I think thats one of the reasons the CZ rifles appeal to me….although to be fair, the current incarnations of the Ruger 77 rifles with their claw extractors and controlled round feeding are excellent derivatives.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

When I decided to get a .308 semi-auto rifle the choices were fairly limited – FAL-style, M1A-style, HK-style. Oh sure, there were a few offbeat models out there (.308 AK, Valmet, etc) but I wanted something with a good track record and, more importantly, excellent logistics support in terms of parts, accessories and magazines. My first choice would have been the FAL style rifles but I went with the Hk clone from JLD/PTR on the strength of a) the reputation of the HK system and b) the dirt cheap parts and magazines that flooded into the US as the G36 pushed the G3 into the history books.

The HK91 is a fine rifle, no doubt. Not my favorite, I find its ergonomics pretty lacking, but I have unwavering faith in it’s reliability and performance. What I was interested to discover was that Hk, at some point, made a 50-rd drum for the G3/HK91. Didja know that? I didnt. Very few, apparently, made it into this country and when found the bring a little under $2k. For a 50-rd mag… After the AW ban… I mean, yeah, its got the magic ‘HK’ stamped on it but still…..

I remember watching video of the North Hollywood Shootout and one of the bad guys was reported as having a drum for his HK. I recall thinking that must have been a typical error made by a gun-ignorant reporter – he must have meant a drum for his AK. But…on video I recalled seeing the HK91 with what appeared to be a drum. I thought maybe they had made the drum themselves or modified some other drum magazine…after all, there was no such thing as a HK drum, right? Wrong. I guess if you rob enough banks and armored cars you can afford to move up from the cheap guns and cheap accessories.

So, if youve got around $1800-$2000 laying around you can get yourself a 50-rd drum for your HK91. Be the first kid on your block to be the last kid on your block. If you have the money, right?

But this is America, dammit. Where there’s a will, a market, and some CAD software theres a way. Behold:

This is so mega-awesome it hurts. I’m sure somewhere, at some point, someone popped that 50-rd drum into their HK and half a continent away Chuck Schumer felt the beginnings of what he thought was a stroke.

MSRP? About $400.

Is there one in my future? Nope. But you’d think I’d be the first guy to jump on the bandwagon for one of these crowd-reducers, right? Simple math, amigo. I put two boxes in front of you. One box contains that lovely drum. Looks cool, is cool, will make you the envy of SWAT teams across the land. And will let you shoot 50 rounds. Sounds good, yes? Now lets crack open Box #2. Inside box #2 are 400 20-round magazines. Or, put another way, 8000 rounds worth of triggertime. it boils down to this: would you rather have one mag that holds 50-rounds or 400 mags that hold 20? Im preparing for the long haul, and that means not putting my eggs in one basket. That drum would be fun, no two ways about it, but it ain’t $400 worth of fun.

Now, before anyone (especially the guys that make and sell that drum) starts flaming the comments, lemme say that I think the fact someone went through the trouble of making a product like this available to the public is commendable. Youre doing Crom’s work, well done. I hope you sell a metric buttload of these things. However….I’m a poor survivalist with limited resources…while your product is darn nice, I gotta stick with what I can afford and one magazine vs. 400 magazines, no matter how you cut it, is what the final argument comes down to. For the price of that drum I can have enough mags for several PTR-91 rifles with plenty left over for practice mags, trading stock mags, cached mags, spare mags and even investment mags.

While we’re on the subject, I know the BetaMag folks have been working on a 100-rd mag for the M1A. If they could make the feed tower interchangeable so I could put an HK adapter on it and keep it priced fairly reasonably I might be interested in one. But only after Ive run out of other gun stuff to spend money on.

The question that most of use have no interest in asking about this is “what is it good for?” If I asked myself that question when I bought new gun toys I’d have a lot more space in my gun safe right now. Someone will say that its an excellent choice for a ’semi-auto SAW’ but, really, unless you have a quick-change barrel on your rifle I dont think dumping a hundred rounds of .308 in a hurry is gonna be a healthy thing for your firearm. I suppose if you have to make some sort of ‘Omega Man’-esque flight from a large population center it could come in handy but it still seems like a solution looking for a problem. Why did HK make it? It was for a project they had using a modifed G3 as a machine gun (HK11E, apparently). The variant did have a barrel change feature, so in that regard it made sense.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

Someone elsewhere linked to yet another article about a fella who has decided to take a swing at making a former missile silo his home. And while on the subject, here are two more here and here.

I must admit, I love the idea of a missile silo home. Pretty darn hard to live in a place much more secure than that. The obvious drawbacks are the lack of daylight and the weak link of having to pump your sewage uphill. Many of the bases are flooded and there may be some environmental issues from the missile fuel. However, the low profile aspect sure is attractive. Unless someone knew there used to be a missile base there, folks are just going to walk right by you. On the other hand, missile base locations are pretty well documented and the locals will surely know about it. My fantasy would be to have one of these silos and build a house right on top of it. 2500 sq. foot house with a 25000 sq. foot basement. How awesome would that be?

Missile silos aren’t the only ‘secret’ hardened facilities that come up for sale though. When we think about government-built doomsday-bunkers we usually think of the missile silos because they get all the press. However, there are other facilities that although not as big are just as hard. More importantly, the public are less aware of them. Everyone knows about the old Atlas missle base three miles off county road six. But almost no one knows about the satellite control center three miles out of Podunkville, or the hardened communications switching facility near Dead Moose Junction. Also, hardened facilities aren’t just limited to .gov. Back in the old days, Ma Bell built many critical switching centers and other buildings with an eye towards survivability… probably with the quiet encouragement of the Cold War era government. (Head over to cryptome.org sometime and look at their maps of some of these hardened facilities.)

Every so often facilities like this turn up on ebay. Years ago me and the missus looked at a wonderful microwave relay station that had 8” concrete walls, blast shutters, and a host of other features that made it a lovely example of what im talking about. (if youre curious) These things are still on the market from time to time and are a lot more affordable than a missile silo. (Of course, their square footage is much much less as well.)

You and I might think something like this is uber-cool but the majority of people will look at you like you’ve got two heads. Why, they might ask, would anyone want to live in a concrete tomb? I suppose it depends on what youre after. I’d love to have a missle silo as a personal bunker but I probably wouldn’t want to live in it full time. It wold be nice, though, to have as a fallback position for when things get weird.

If youre interested in more about this sort of thing, this looks like a good place to start.
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Thanks to everyone who kicked in a few bucks for operating costs. Enough was generously forked over to cover things for the next year and a half. Some folks kicked in a buck, some kicked in a good bit more. Average was around $15 or so. I thank you muchly and I’ll try to provide good value for your infotainment dollar. Very kind of you, and I thank you.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

The dreariest part of having an online blog is paying for bandwidth. Fortunately, I’m not popular enough to go through the huge amounts of bandwidth that some folks do…so, in effect, I’m a cheap date. (More like a cheap date with disaster, but anyway….)

But, still, gotta keep the lights on somehow. Quite candidly, my costs are a simple $14 a month for bandwidth. Usually its not a big deal to do that outta pocket, but this economy, man…..

If anyone wants to throw a few bucks into the tip jar, I’d sure appreciate it.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

He was lucky.

How many things can you find in this very brief article that this young man did wrong?

#1 is probably taking a ’shortcut’ that was unfamiliar to him. (Shades of James Kim.)

You can pick up the rest, I’m sure.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

Apparently the eastern portion of the US is getting a unusually large amount of snow. Me, I love snow. It makes everything quiet, pretty and just plain peaceful. Right up until you have to drive in it.

Remember the first rule of surviving a disaster? Yeah, well theres alwyas going to be someone who ignores the weather advisories. The National Weather Service has this advice:

3. IF YOU ABSOLUTELY NEED TO TRAVEL IN AN EMERGENCY…DO NOT TRAVEL
ALONE. LET SOMEONE KNOW YOUR TIMETABLE AND YOUR PRIMARY AND
ALTERNATE ROUTES. CARRY WITH YOU A WINTER STORM SURVIVAL KIT WHICH
INCLUDES A MOBILE PHONE…BLANKETS… FLASHLIGHT WITH EXTRA
BATTERIES…HIGH CALORIE NON-PERISHABLE FOOD AND WATER…AND A
SHOVEL.

4. IF YOU GET STRANDED IN YOUR VEHICLE…DO NOT LEAVE YOUR CAR TO
TRY TO WALK FOR ASSISTANCE…YOU CAN QUICKLY BECOME DISORIENTED IN
WIND DRIVEN SNOW AND COLD. THIS STORM WILL SUBSIDE EARLY THIS
EVENING…SO WAIT IN YOUR CAR FOR EMERGENCY HELP TO ARRIVE.
PERIODICALLY RUN YOUR ENGINE FOR ABOUT 10 MINUTES EACH HOUR FOR
HEAT. ENSURE YOUR EXHAUST PIPE IS CLEARED OF SNOW AND ICE. CRACK
YOUR WINDOWS TO AVOID CARBON MONOXIDE POISONING. TIE A COLORED CLOTH
TO YOUR CARS ANTENNA TO BE VISIBLE TO RESCUERS. FROM
TIME-TO-TIME…MOVE YOUR ARMS…LEGS…FINGERS…AND TOES TO KEEP
BLOOD CIRCULATING.

“Emergency”. Lets think about that. Out of milk? Not an emergency. Wife going into labor? Emergency. Internet is out so you’ll blog from a friends house? Not an emergency. Roof collapsed and you need a place to stay for the night? Emergency.

First rule, man….the very first rule – don’t be there. But I guarantee you we’re gonna read stories in the paper that go something like this “Susie Homemaker and her daughter, Susie II, 9, were stranded for nine hours yesterday when their minivan became stuck on I-2. ‘Susie Junior had a birthday party to go to and we just got stuck!’, said Homemaker.” Or something equally stupid will be in the paper.. someone flipping their car when they were on the way to get wings for their Super bowl party, etc, etc. Once they get pulled out of their wreck someone should ask them if it was worth the Chinese food they picked up or the movie they just had to go rent.

If I said to you “you can either stay home and not have pizza or you can give me $3500″ what would you do? Youd figure that going out for pizza isnt worth $3500, right? So who in their right mind sees nine inches of snow on the ground, high winds, crappo visibility and thinks “Ah, I’ll just drive down to Pizza Hut and pick up a few”? Next thing you know theres a tree where your front headlight used to be and youre $3500 in the hole to get a new radiator, quarterpanel, bumper, lights, etc, etc.

I stopped being a hero long ago. If its 1 am on a Saturday night and the roads are icy Im gonna take a pass on going out for a burger. Why deal with drunks and icy roads over a $5 combo meal? Screw that.

If youre really serious about being prepared then you should probably have a similar attitude. Sometimes the game just isnt worth the candle.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

Signs of the times. I spent a year swinging freight at a terminal for a trucking company and some trailers were just useless crap, some were with huge bucks (cigarettes were several thousand dollars per case and we’d get a hundred cases at a time), and some were just a mix. Sometimes we even got pallet loads of bullets and ammo from Speer and Hornady. I remember moving 55 gallon drums full of bullets, weighing them on my forklift, doing the math, and thinking “Wow, theres 125,000 bullets there”.

No surprise that if someone who knows how to hook/unhook a trailer and can drive a truck might find easy pickin’s…esp. in this economy when youc an probably flip the contents of the truck pretty easily what with everyone looking for a bargain. I suppose the very savvy criminals with an eye on the long term would steal stuff they know they can use and keep.

I suppose its not too far a stretch until we see similar things happening to rail freight. A train sits in a yard overnight and the next day all the choice freight is missing. A bit harder in a secured yard, but out here you sometimes see trains just sit overnight on the rails in the middle of nowhere.

Not sure if this is evidence of a slide into a bigger catastrophe but it certainly is interesting nonetheless.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

A useful link someone posted.
Self Powered (Shakelights, Dynamo, Solar) from Flashlightreviews.com.

For what its worth, I’ve always stuck with the Baygen/Freeplay branded stuff and when i’ve had occasion to use them or test them out I’ve always been pretty pleased.