It was one of those deals where you had to buy a significant amount of product in order to make the deal and get the good price. But…it worked out.
$0.15/round. Delivered. Farctory FMJ 115 Ball. And it’s off to the Deep Sleep.
I do a lot of reloading, but for end-of-the-world purposes I try to stock factory ammo. Why? Because if all the fiction novels and zombie movies are correct, and we are trading ammo like currency, no one wants a ziploc baggie of reloads from some yahoos garage that may or may not be loaded with fireworks powder. Factory ammo in factory packaging will be, IMHO, more desirable than mixed reloads from someone who may not know the difference between Bullseye and IMR4350.
I sincerely doubt there is anyone here reading this blog who doesn’t know the story of the Finnish version of Hathcock. But, it’s a good article, since many are written from the perspective of gun boffins and military buffs…this one, it seems, is written more objectively.
For those of you out there with Mosin’s sitting in the closet, there’s a few sentences about a drill where 16 shots at 500 feet on a target in one minute is mentioned. Possible? Not possible? Grassy-knoll level of expertise required? You decide.
TL;DR version: ATF’s definnition of a ‘receiver’ includes parts that are not present in just an AR lower, thus an AR lower is not a receiver. QED.
Historically, ATF has never let little things like legal definitions stand in the way of them doing what they want. I suppose the only way for this to get resolved is to redefine what a receiver is, which seems likely. The AR is certainly an inconvenient rifle for the anti-gun crowd…it’s ubiquitous, easily modified to skirt ‘assault weapon’ bans, modular AF, and, it seems, defies legal definitions that never anticipated such guns. Everyone should own at least three or five.
It’s easy to Monday morning quarterback this sort of thing, but if you live in the middle of nowhere and something like losing your cabin might be a death sentence, wouldn’t you keep a ‘lifeboat’ of some kind far away enough to be there for you if you needed it?
Even here in Montana its pretty easy to just check into a Motel 6 if you’re willing to drive an hour. Although, to be fair, there are parts of Montana where if you are suddenly without a house, and the nearest neighbor is several miles way, you might be in trouble.
I’m curious how a chunk of burning cardboard set his roof on fire what with all the snow. And the dripping, burning plastic part? Makes me think this was some sorta shack with a couple tarps over the top to make it waterproof.
Regardless, interesting story. Gotta give the guy points for keeping it together long enough to get rescued.
It occurred to me today that when youve been a survivalist long enough, its easy to lose track of whats available out there to improve your situation. Let me give you an example: Twenty years ago you decided to go deep and stock on high quality flashlights. You figured you’d buy the best, tuck ’em away, and then you’d be done with the flashlight component of your preps. Seems reasonable, right? So you go out and spend your money on a dozen top of the line MagLights with the bright Krypton bulbs (and spares). You tuck them away and figure “Thats that. I’m done.”
Here’s where the problem comes in. Because you think you’ve sewed up the flashlight side of things you now stop even thinking about them. After all, you have a dozen of the best flashlights available tucked away…so why bother thinking about them anymore? Fast forward twenty years to today…and whats the standard in flashlights? LEDs. Flashlights that give three times the brightness, for 2/3 the cost, and 10x the battery life. And, because you stopped thinking about flashlights twenty years ago, you have no idea such things even exist. So, while you were cutting edge for 1999, you are now hopelessly fourth-tier for 2019.
Other examples might include newer and better magazines, optics, radio gear, battery management devices, knife sharpeners, etc, etc. The trap is in thinking that because you are all squared away with ‘X’ that you don’t have to keep track of changes and improvements in ‘X’ developments. It’s like tucking away your old-school XM177 CAR-15 in 1985 and never discovering it had evolved to the M4.
I’m guilty of this sort of lack of thinking from time to time. For example, I’ve a Leatherman Wave that I’ve had for over ten years now and I’ve been pleased with it. So pleased, in fact, that in never occurred to me to see if they had come out with better, more useful, versions since then. And, of course, they have. So while I was happy with what I had, I was lacking the the efficiency of the newer tool. You might ask, since you were happy with the older one, and you were unaware of the newer one, were you not then, in fact, not really missing anything? You are correct, I was not aware of what I was missing. But that doesn’t mean I may not have been better served with the newer tool.
Survivalism is about being able to improve your chances and lower your risks (threats) in a bad situation. You don’t necessarily need the ‘latest and greatest’ to do that, but many times the latest and greatest are improvements over the older. There will be no award after the apocalypse for the guy who achieved the most using the least amount of gear. If you want to ride out the apocalypse in travel trailer on a piece of junk land, eating beans and rice stored in 2-liter pop bottles, and shooting jackrabbits with your HiPoint carbine…..have at it. But given a choice, I’ll go for the higher end of the price charts… not beause I’m a snob, but because ‘good enough’ is not the adjective I want for crap that might someday have to be relied on to keep me safe and alive.
So, moral of the story: even if you think you have so many of something that you don’t need to think about them anymore…..think about them.
The intellectual part of me recognizes that it is a 16% increase in ammo capacity, but I refuse to accept the notion of a 7-shot .357. The idea that, when picking up a revolver, I have to remind myself “no, no…you have one MORE” as I shoot seems to fly in the face of the last 85 years of .357.
And yet, I am wildly excited about the notion of 8-shot .357’s.
I am a conflicted beast.
(As an aside, I think that for someone who fancies the revolver [which does have much to recommend to it] for personal defense the .357 is pretty much perfect. Fur and claws deserve a .44, but a six-shot k- or L-frame size gun in .357 seems ideal in weight and size for maintaining civil discourse. Although I like S&W, my .357 of choice these days is the GP100. However, I do trot out my Speed-Six and Highway Patrolman from time to time.)
Give a buncha rodents all the food, bedding, water, and stress-free living you can give them and they should breed like..well..rats. And have a population boom, right? Maybe not.
Some fascinating parallels to be had in just that one paragraph. To quote Judge Dredd “You put that many rats in one cage and something’s gonna happen.” The apparent message is that mammals ain’t cut out for being put into large metropolises. Even when you give them all the welfare food and shelter they want, they’ll still go bad.
But, men are not rodents. Yet look at any major city and you’ll see that the segments of the population that have everything handed to them seem to be the most troubled and troublesome.
Moral of the story? Stay out of enormous cities. Having just returned from a week in one of the biggest i can tell you with utter sincerity that nothing reinvigorated my mind and spirit more than being able to have room to stretch both physically and metaphorically. Away from the restricting confines of mandatory recycling, absurd gun laws, high sales taxes, etc, I felt I could breathe easier again and feel in control of my life.
Big cities, in my experience, are superior in providing only three things: money, women, and food. High paying jobs, endless varieties of women, and a dizzying array of types of food…thats about all I can recommend for the big cities. But what do I get out of smaller venues, such as where I live? Relatively high levels of freedom, or, at least, qualities that I equate with freedom.
Men or mice…put too many in one place and bad stuff happens. Don’t be there.
Im on the road again. The more I travel, especially in an easterly direction, the more I am made uneasy. Wandering through airports, killing time, I can’t help but feel at a tremendous disadvantage…completely unarmed, a carry on of clothes, a few bucks in my pocket….that’s not a lot to get me through a crisis if something unpleasant happens. Not necessarily something ‘Die Hard 2’-ish (that was the airport one, right?), but rather a having-to-sleep-on-the-floor-at-the-airport episode. In situations like that, the ultimate survival kit is simply a pocket full of cash and credit cards…sadly, those sorts of resources are always scarce.
And then there’s the grepos at the TSA security theater. Some high school dropout, given a blue shirt and a pretty badge, can validate his existence by stripsearching grandmothers and seizing toenail scissors. I have a long-standing hatred for the TSA that goes back almost to it’s founding, and in the intervening years they have done nothing to diminish the sentiment. When the revolution gets here, among the first groups put up against the wall, will be the brigade of blue-gloved scrotum-grabbers.
Anyway, I’m traveling for a few days and will be back to somehwat regular posting around the middle of next week. Assuming I can keep my temper in check next time some idiot in a blue shirt asks me to take my belt off.
Another year come and gone and…no apocalypse. Well, no apocalypse in the sense of some great run-for-your-lives-we’re-all-gonna-die sort of thing. As individuals, we all have plenty of horrific catastrophes that hit us. But, as a group, no….no big apocalypse this year. But you never know. No boom today, but tomorrow…boom.
2019 was, sadly, another gun-heavy year. Just off the top of my head I can think of at least three shotguns, two or three ARs, at least a half dozen pistols, etc, etc. It really seems to be getting out of hand. However, I still resolutely believe that at some point things will hit a stage where the ability to purchase an ‘evil features’ gun with a ‘high capacity feeding device’ will be curtailed…at which point I will sit back on my armored butt and smile to myself.
Broadly 2019 was a quiet year, which is how I like it. As I get older my goal is security, predictability, and routine. I want to wake up every morning to a warm house, running water, food in the fridge, money in the bank, and all my organs functioning at acceptable level (and one organ in particular operating at its normal superhuman level). This is not to say I dislike new things or excitement, but I want those things because I wanted them..not because Fate decided to throw me a curve ball. I’ve been told, more than once, that I am a person who hates change. Not true. I hate unwanted change. Let me give you an example: someone gets cancer and they complain about it. Would you accuse them of hating change? After all, having cancer is a change for them, isn’t it? No, you would sympathize with them. Cancer is an unwanted change. However, short-sighted narcissists who lack self-awareness will only look at the broad strokes and say ‘you hate change’. Well, duh…find me someone who doesn’t hate change that hurts them. And before you get all Nietzsche on me, yes, that which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger…but usually it just kills you.
2020, unfortunately, will be a year full of change…mostly because it’s an election year. Yes, I voted for him. And I’ll do it again. But I cannot say whether his re-election or loss is a sure thing. And because there is that level of uncertainty, I foresee 2020 being a bit of a chaotic year in terms of markets, legislation, and a few other things. Every year, it seems, I keep beating the drum of ‘buy guns and mags’. And, thus far, every year nothing substantial occurs that prevents our ownership of those things. But…just because something hasn’t happened doesn’t mean it won’t. Make of that what you will.
I hope 2020 is as peaceful and relatively quiet as 2019 was. I hope I’m sitting down at my desk a year from now writing a very similar post about how it was a somewhat uneventful year, and we all grew older and a bit wealthier. But despite the motto of failed Democrats, hope is not a plan. Hoping for a positive result is not how you get that positive result. So, while I hope 2020 is quiet and does me no harm, I will continue to take steps to mitigate the damage just in case.
It’s easy to slack off on being a good survivalist when the lights are on and your job is steady. But thats exactly the time you want to be in high gear getting stuff done and making plans. Learn to swim before the boat sinks.
So, enjoy the New Years holiday, relax and reflect on whats gone past and what is to come. And then cowboy up, grit your teeth, get out there, and make stuff happen for you.
Interesting contrast… two houses of worship have someone attack worshippers. The folks in NY are helpless until the bad guy flees the scene. The folks in TX open up on the bad guy and put an end to the situation. Some interesting lessons in there, hm? The difference wasn’t the religions, the difference was the prevailing attitudes of the locale.
Texas is a place where “I killed him, but he needed killin'” is a legal defense.
Video of the incident can be found online. It appears one armed congregant got shot as he was trying to present his pistol. There’s a lesson to be learned there, I think.
