Category Archives: Uncategorized

Mag musings

Posted on by

Real life intrudes. I got a couple things in my civilian life that I need to get on top of so it’s going to be thin postings for a couple days.

Meanwhile….

Various reports say that between one and five million magazines made their way into California during that little window of opportunity a few weeks ago. Everything I read, which may or may not be true, says that wholesalers, retailers, vendors, and pretty much everyone in the business made it a point to prioritize getting the California orders expedited. I would imagine its the first time in history so many have done so much for a state that they normally disdain.

It should be very interesting to see how this shake out in the courts (as well as seeinghow far it gets). Getting this sort of thing bumped up to the Supremes, could be very interesting and the stakes could be higher than some states are willing to risk.

My own magazine needs are pretty well met, but mags are a consumable. And, theyre a very portable commodity that can be sold or traded for rather easily. So, really, unless you’re running for your life or trying to swim, you can’t have too many.

And speaking of mags, this looked interesting: CDNN has ‘OE’ 20-rd straight Mini-14 mags for $15

Details

RUGER® MINI-14® 223 20RD MAGAZINE ORIGINAL EQUIPMENT

This magazine is original equipment; which means it’s manufactured in the same factory using the same process as the magazines that shipped with the gun originally.

Hmm. Aftermarket mags are always a crapshoot with the Mini-14 but these might not be bad. For $15 they might be worth a risk. If anyone tries them, let me know.

 

Blasts from the past

Posted on by

Here’s why my Roth is underfunded:

But, with most .223 running around $0.32/@ it seemed like a nice way to get some blasting ammo. For you young bucks who are too young to remember, back before Slick Willy was flavoring his cigars with brunettes we could buy cheap Chinese guns and ammo. How cheap? You could get an SKS and a case of 7.62×39 for about $125-150. Seriously. My UPS guy hated me. Quality-wise it was…interesting. At one point even Chinese gunpowder (hey, they invented the stuff, right?) was on the market very briefly until it turned out that it was basically fireworks powder..it had a burn rate measured in Planck time. Their ammo was a mixed bag…always dirty, often underpowered, but always cheap. Kinda made Wolf look like Federal. All those SKS rifles you see these days were purchased because ammo was nine cents per round.

But, if you were just going to the range to break rocks and make noise…well, it was a pretty good deal. I know a lot of people who salted away cases and cases of this stuff. Not my first choice for Der Tag, but some ammo is (usually) better than no ammo.

This stuff? I’ll probably just use it for playing around with the Mini-14’s.Box says brass case but believe it when I see it. As Uncle Duke says…

Dreams and gear

Posted on by

I cant recall all the details, but the dream was in some sort of new ice age scenario. Me and a group of people were trying to navigate these dark, narrow passageways under a building looking for supplies. Of course, no one had a flashlight. And then, in the dream, I remembered I had one in my pocket.

I really hate using trendy terms like ‘EDC’ but this little guy has been rolling around in my pocket for a couple years now and the more I carry it around the more I really like it. I’ve given away a handful to friends and every single one of them has commented on what a good light it is. I won’t bore you with details like lumens, weight, runtime, etc. You can look those up yourself. I’ll simply say that I have three of these sitting on the shelf as spares and there is always one in my pocket and one lanyarded to my Bag O’ Tricks…and I’m a tough customer on flashlights.

For about twenty-five bucks this thing does everything I need in a ‘non tactical’ flashlight. But its most important and most redeeming feature is that it is always there…so much a part of my everyday routing that even my subconscious knew that I’d have it with me in the dream.

I’ve mentioned these little Fenix E-series lights before, but I’ve found them to be an excellent light for toting around in a pocket every day and figured it was worth a bump.

Propane and propane accessories

Posted on by

Wanna start a nice little flamewar in a discussion group? .45 vs 9mm, AR vs AK, etc, etc. One that I’m curious about is, if you were going to build your middle-of-nowhere bolthole how would you power it? Gas? Propane? Oil? Turbines?

I really like the idea of propane since its shelf life is the same as the tank that holds it. It heats, runs generators, and can even fuel a vehicle. But, as someone pointed out to me, you can’t walk down the road with a five-gallon bucket and borrow/barter some propane from a neighbor like you can diesel or gasoline.

And, as Friend Of The Blog Harry would tell you…there’s that little matter of the guy with the propane truck navigating the jeep trail up to your place. I wonder if a fella could just mount the tank on a trailer and bring it to town once a year to get filled.

I suppose the smart survivalist would go with the whole Rule Of Three and set things up for propane, diesel, and some other third energy source.

What got me thinking about this? I was up at CostCo yesterday and as I was tooling around through the spring-is-here section of outdoor furniture and whatnot they had 20# barbecue bombs on sale. Hmm. I have two that I use for rotating on my BBQ but it’s never a bad idea to have more. So, in the cart they went.

I have only a few items that run on propane…a Volcano grill, the usual heater, and a little geegaw to let me fill 1# bottles.

Still, propane seems a convenient way to fuel a household without worrying about fuel degradation, algae, the caprices of wind and sun,  and that sort of thing. On the other hand, the ability to easily transport and redistribute liquid fuel has a lot going for it as well. Hmmm.

When I finally get Rancho Ballistica (aka Commander Zero’s Post-Nuclear Bunker O’ Love and Lingerie Proving Ground) up and running I’ll have to make some choices. I’ll have to decide on things by then. Opinions?

Bunker strength, log cabin looks

Posted on by

I’d made a reference a few weeks ago to the ‘concrete log’ manufacturer out here who sells some very convincing concrete logs to use as building material. They have a cutaway display at the airport that never fails to catch my attention. I was killing time out there the other day waiting for a flight to arrive and took some pics.

Slick, huh? Tell you what, that’d be some primo building material for the deep woods up here. Rain forest or dry forest, it’d be pretty much impervious to rot and flame. And most small arms fire, I’d imagine.

Article – Judge blocks California’s ban on high-capacity magazines over 2nd Amendment concerns

Posted on by

If you want to buy a ‘hi cap’ magazine these days, you might notice that prices are a bit higher in many places. Reason?

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — High-capacity gun magazines will remain legal in California under a ruling Friday by a federal judge who cited home invasions where a woman used the extra bullets in her weapon to kill an attacker while in two other cases women without additional ammunition ran out of bullets.

“Individual liberty and freedom are not outmoded concepts,” San Diego-based U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez wrote as he declared unconstitutional the law that would have banned possessing any magazines holding more than 10 bullets.

The market for magazines just suddenly grew by several million customers who are going to ‘panic buy’ as many freedom sticks as they can ‘while the gettins good’. Supply and demand.

It is a tremendously un-9th-Circuit decision. Historically the 9th Circus has been pretty far to the left in terms of it’s decisions. It’ll be interesting to see if this one sticks.

Does any of this affect the average survivalist? Well, yes. First, if youre a survivalist in California you are probably maxxing out your credit cards at this very moment. Secondly, if you were planning on a large purchase of magazines in preparation for next years election…you might want to double check availability and pricing.

I’m sure the folks in California are besides themselves with disbelief. I wonder what this bodes for other states with similar laws.

Article – Air Force veteran worried about EMPs takes us into his doomsday bunker

Posted on by

On Thursday, President Trump signed an executive order to protect against a electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that “has the potential to disrupt, degrade, and damage technology and critical infrastructure systems.”

The order added that man-made or naturally-occurring EMPs “can affect large geographic areas, disrupting elements critical to the Nation’s security and economic prosperity, and could adversely affect global commerce and stability. The Federal Government must foster sustainable, efficient, and cost-effective approaches to improving the Nation’s resilience to the effects of EMPs.”

TJ Gray, a Vietnam veteran and self-sufficienist, recently told us that EMPs are perhaps what worries him most in terms of a catastrophe that society would not be able to handle.

Interesting article. Not sure of the point of it, but still entertaining.

Strange bedfellows

Posted on by

There’s that old expression about the ‘enemy of my enemy is my friend’. It sounds nice, but in practice the enemy of your enemy is your friend up until your enemy is defeated…then the odds are pretty good that new friend will be your next enemy. (cough*WW2 and the Soviets*cough).

Here’s an article about how the trend towards being a ‘cashless society’ will be racist, classist, and a host of other -ists because poor people and people of color somehow are unable to get a debit card. (“Retailers want to go cashless. But opponents say that’s discriminatory“) So, what these self-appointed guardians of equality are proposing is that it be legislatively mandated that a business must take cash.

Hold that thought a minute, and go read this article. (“New York Times Wants To Have Credit Card Companies Monitor Sales of Guns and Ammo. What Could Ever Go Wrong?“) Here, the NY Times, a bastion of journalistic…uhm…well, something…, feels that consumer credit companies (and I would imagine, by extension, bank debit card holders) flag transactions for ‘the authorities” when a customer purchases certain quantities of guns/ammo.

Many credit card companies already have positions on what sort of transactions they will not partake in. It’s not hard to imagine that with the ‘do it for the children’ crowd leaning on them , that they’d cave and prohibit the use of their services on ‘forbidden’ services/transactions.

So, it isn’t a stretch to imagine the day when many stores are cashless and your only recourse for payment is to use your debit/credit card. Except that when you try to buy a rifle or magazine or ammo….-DECLINED-. And since the vendor is cashless, you’re choices are now pretty severely limited. It’s a tidy end run around that pesky right to bear arms thing. There’s no right to purchase arms…so they’ll simply make the transaction as onerous and difficult as possible: make it so you can only pay with a card, and make the terms of the card such that you can’t buy guns.

Thus, strangely, I’m in the camp of those folks saying that businesses should take cash (although I disagree about forcing them to). Not because I care about some meth tweaker or welfare queen who can’t get a checking account, but because cash gives me a degree of anonymity and privacy that I demand. Politics does indeed make strange bedfellows.

As a businessman, I recognize that cash presents a bunch of challenges…miscounting, theft, attractive nuisance, disease vector, time sink,  etc, etc. And people paying by card are far more likely to spend more money and do it more often than those who use greenbacks. (Which is why Vegas gives you chips to bet with instead of real money.) But as a survivalist and lover of liberty and privacy, cash possesses some very handy qualities that I desire, not the least of which are privacy.

Its interesting how seemingly unrelated ideas or events – ‘going cashless’ and turning credit card companies into watchdogs of the public welfare – can combine to present such hazards to folks like you and I.

 

589 and counting

Posted on by

It’s hard to believe, but next year is a Presidential election year. It really flew by fast, didn’t it?

Election day is…mm….well, hell, let’s let the internet do the math:



So 589 days until election. What can you do between now and then? Well, if you can promise to pay back $1 a day until the election you could pick up a midrange AR. Or about five dozen Pmags. Or, if you’re a careful shopper, three cases of 9mm. If you’re willing to save $1 a day until then.

But, what if you’re a tad more industrious than that? Maybe you’re willing to give up Starbucks or something. Pay yourself five bucks a day between now and then and you could have five AR’s, or a couple M1A’a, or four or five Glocks, or about 325 shiny new AR mags. Or a really nice set of body armour with room leftover for ammo.

It’s been 15 years since the sunset of the Clinton Assault Weapons Ban…thats four Presidential election cycles where we bit our nails every fourth November. And .22LR is still not anywhere near its old prices, although it is available.

Am I advocating panic buying? Of course not. Panic buying is waiting until a week before election day. I’m advocating that you get off your butt and finally get it done and out of the way so you can move onto other things in your life.

The reality is that every so often, for political expediency, someone gets thrown out of the sled to the wolves. Next week the ‘bump stock’ fiasco takes effect. That was the short-straw that was drawn to appease the clamoring anti-gunners. But…next time…it might be something else, something more important, something more useful. Thats the political reality. And, as Rand said, while you can ignore reality you cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality. And for the last 15 years there have been quite a few people ignoring the reality that there is never a ‘safe period’ for your AR and magazines.

Me, I’ve got enough to take care of me and those I care about. At this point I’m just buying extras to sell to the head-in-the-sand ostriches at “Get the Kentucky jelly” prices.

It’s 589 days to the election. Why take chances? If you can keep a promise to yourself to set $1 a day aside until then, you can have at least one AR and/or a buncha mags to set back.

This reminder of the Bad Ol’ Days has been brought to you by this blast from the past: