Article – ‘Here We Go. The Chaos Is Starting’: An Oral History of Y2K

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Twenty years ago, we were all pretty sure the world was going to end on January 1, 2000—or, if not the world, then at least civilization.

It had something to do with how most computer programs used the last two digits to represent a four-digit year, and when the clock rolled over at the end of 1999, every computer would think it was 1900. When that happened, ATMs would stop working, the electrical grid would shut down, planes would fall out of the skies, and newborn babies would get hundred-year-old birth certificates.

Ah, the nostalgia. There really were people who drained their 401k’s and bought cinder block houses in the middle of the desert to ride it all out. If you were a journalist of any stripe back then, you were finding the most freaked out people you could find and putting them on camera to talk about the ‘extremes’ that they were going through to prepare.

Good times, good times. That was twenty years ago this Tuesday. My how time flies. The most interesting thing to come out of it all? John Titor. Well, that and some really interesting garage sales for the next few years. That Y2k legacy of garage sales still rears its head once in a while.

Link – Veteran shoots, kills robbery suspect at Kam’s Market in Bay Point

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Store clerk gets thumped by bad guy, retrieves gun, gives bad guy new belly button.


A happy ending, but… rather graphic evidence that having a gun nearby or at hand is no substitute for having a pistol on you. The guy manages to pull the gun out of the drawer next to the register and the bad guy promptly wrestles with the clerk for it and pistol whips the clerk harshly.

I’m guilty of this from time to time myself. I’ll have a gun in my bag, or under the seat, that sorta thing…. and it’s not nearly as effective as having it on my person.

Many people, myself included, stash a pistol or five around the house. I know people that actually have dedicated ‘bathroom guns’. I know a lot of folks who keep a pistol in the drawer by the entryway to the house. The idea being that the 3am knock on the door can be responded to with a pistol discreetly tucked behind your back. But, again, not a substitute for actually having it on your person or in hand.

After my appendix exploded back in ’16, it was painful to wear a belt for any period of time. I got out of the habit of carrying a gun everyday, everywhere. And….nothing bad happened. So I got lax. Some days I had a pistol on me, some days I did not. Then some event happened,, I can’t recall what it was, that reminded me that I needed to get back into the practice (not habit, a practice…because habit implies no conscious thought and I think you should always be conscious of anything involving a gun) of being armed whenever outside the confines of my abode.

Anyway, interesting video and worth discussing, I thought.

 

 

Christmas Reruns

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I’m taking the cheap way out and just reposting last Christmas’ post because I really liked it and I’m sure we’re all tired of the usual and predictable Christmas greetings. So, why come up with new stuff for something so pro forma?

I don’t do Christmas, but I know many of you do. And there’s nothing that says you have to be a Christmas person to enjoy Christmas music. So..one of my faves.

That Placido guy is pretty good…he should go pro.

A Festivus for the rest of us

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Whatever winter holiday you celebrate….Kwanzaa, Hanukah, Christmas, Festivus, Voodoo Day, whatever…..have a good one.

Oh, and I’d like to wish a seasonal greeting as theologically appropriate to some bloggers who have hung up their keyboards but, presumably, still swing by here once in a while…Harry, Ryan, Claire, Ticom, etc, etc. If you’re reading this, have a happy.

Article – Survival camps cater to new fear: America’s political unrest

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Ah, another ‘tactical timeshare’.

 

FORTITUDE RANCH, Colo., Dec 23 (Reuters) – Aiming an AR-15 rifle across a Colorado valley dotted with antelope and cattle, Drew Miller explains how members of his new survival ranch would ride out an apocalypse.

The former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer said his latest Fortitude Ranch community, under construction below mountain forests, will shelter Americans fleeing anything from a bioengineered pandemic to an attack on the electricity grid.

For an annual fee of around $1,000, members can vacation at the camps in good times, and use them as a refuge during a societal collapse.

“If you’ve got a lot of weapons, if you’ve got a lot of members at guard posts, defensive walls, we don’t think we’re going to need to fight,” said Miller, crouching on top of a fortified position on the camp perimeter.

The expansion of Miller’s camp chain underscores the growing mainstream appeal of the “prepper” movement long associated with anti-government survivalists.

I am all about entrepreneurship. But next time you’re in a crowded elevator imagine having to ride out Ragnarok with the people standing next to you. The notion of running off to some heavily fortified Holiday Inn has some appeal but, geez, even when it isn’t the end of the world your average co-op board is a pit of vipers. Now imagine that co-op board wearing multicam.

What makes a ‘survial group’ or ‘mutual aid group’ isn’t the gear, it’s the people. Twenty strangers in a fortified compound will be less effective and less efficient, I wager, than twenty close friends or close family members camped in a burned out WalMart. Community is about people, not buildings. We like to say that spending all the money in the world on super-high-speed gear will not make you an ‘expert’ (or whatever)….same story with people. You can’t really expect that just because you’ve built an awesome Führerbunker it means that throwing a random selection of people in it will create a close-knit group that is willing to take risks and look out for each other. When it’s the end of the world and I need someone to keep an eye on things while I catch some sleep, I’m going to feel a lot better knowing its my buddy I’ve known for twenty years and not some manager from a Kansas Best Buy I just met yesterday.

Your mileage may vary, but any ‘stronghold’ whose requirement for admission is the ability to have their check clear seems like a bad place to ride out a rough episode. I’d rather take my chances with a half-dozen longtime friends and family in the shattered remains of my house than share a communal bathroom with a hundred armed strangers whose main bond is a shared zip code.

 

Checking batteries

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As the year comes to a close, I’m wandering around the house checking batteries in various devices. About a year ago I had a MagLite self-destruct when the batteries crapped out. The usual scenario….flashlight doesn’t work, you unscrew the tailcap, and when you finally get it open the guts of the thing are full of the corroded guts of a battery. Freakin’ hate that.

So, I decided I’d keep a list of what devices I kept around in a state of readiness with batteries already in them, and I would periodically inspect those devices so that if the batteries started to go Tango Uniform I might catch them before the device was irrevocably damaged. As it turned out, thus far, no batteries have gone south this year. BUT….that doesn’t mean they won’t and it doesn’t mean that periodic inspections are a bad idea.

So, I’ll update the little sticker I have on the devices to reflect the periodic inspection and tuck the devices away in their usual spots.

My experience has been that I have had absolutely no problems with lithium batteries. I’ve yet to have one leak and ruin a device…for what those stupid things cost, I should hope they’d be more stable than the current crop of Duracells. It’s at the point where, for mission critical or expensive devices, I won’t use anything but lithiums. I’d rather ten bucks for a pack of lithium batteries than $175 for a new GPS unit, y’know?

So, while your swapping batteries for all the kids toys this holiday season go check your own toys and make sure the batteries didn’t crap the bed.

The demonic monkeys at ATFE have been busy

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In case you don’t follow the industry blogs, ATFE has been on a bit of tear lately ‘reclassifying’ certain guns. They seem to have a particular mean-on for a bunch of the ‘rulebeater’ guns that have been coming out. Most notable as of late, a ‘firearm’ shotgun with wrist brace and the bizarre-but-give-em-points-for-trying Reformation AR.

ATFE has finally, it appears, started to get it’s battle plan together on how to deal with the  not-a-shotguns and the whole ‘wrist brace’ issue. I’ve been predicting for a while that at some point ATFE would work up the cajones to address those things. They’ve waited long enough that there are so many of those things out there right now that if everyone decides to keep them and do a $200 transfer there’s going to be a bit of a surplus in ATFE’s budget. Maybe that was the plan all along.

Or maybe those two guns were just outliers and ATFE will stick with their current classification of the other guns. You know, kind of how they stuck with their classification of bump stocks and the like.

Or maybe ATFE is feeling cocky because they figure the net election will get some anti-freedom Democrat in the White House. (And while you might argue that being anti-gun is not the same as being anti-freedom, I would counter that being anti-gun is pretty much the textbook definition of anti-freedom.)

Either way, if ATFE is feeling their oats perhaps they’ll dust off some of their old wish-list items as well…remember that proposed ban on steel core .223?

Because of these sorst of maybe-I-do-maybe-I-dont inconsistencies from the fedgoons, the smart survivalist never stops stockpiling ammo and gun stuff things that can be regulated out of availability on a whim.

‘Tis the season

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It’s that special time at the end of the year that we’ve all been looking forward to…..

Long term capital gain distributions!

Must…not…buy….guns….

Not to brag or anything but, dang, the market was good this year.

Choosey? Uzi.

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,Rawles had an article on his website about the Uzi the other day. As you know, years ago I picked up an Uzi after carefully trying come up with a non-SBR solution to a rugged,proven, 9mm carbine that would take down into a package small enough to fit in your average ‘three day pack’. At the time, there were not a lot of choices…while there were guns on the market that fit most of the criteria, virtually all of them were new designs that did not have a proven and established track record in terms of performance and durability. When I lucked out and fell into an Uzi, it pretty much hit all the high points in terms of what I was looking for.

You have to keep in mind that, nowadays, a ‘wrist brace’ lets you create short-barrelled ‘not a carbine’ guns quite easily, but at the time I acquired the Uzi that was not an option. So, since we are in a new era of designs and rule-bender/beater gimmicks like the wrist brace, would I still go with the Uzi.

Honestly, probably not…for that purpose.

THe Uzi is a fine gun, no two ways about it. But like the M1 Garand, or the 1911, it was a fine gun for it’s time. And times change. The Uzi has a few things going against it as a semi-auto carbine…scant availability of accessories, not ambidextrous, very heavy, virtually no optics mounting options, etc, etc. Compare and contrast the Uzi against something more contemporary like, say, a CZ Evo or Sig MPX, and you can see that the design is pretty dated and doesn’t offer the features we’ve gotten used to in more recent designs.

What the Uzi does have, in spades, is a proven history. It’s been around long enough to have figured out what works and what doesnt work. Other guns like the MPX, Evo, etc, are too new to have decades of experience behind them.

The reason I wanted a takedown carbine was to have something compact enough to be extremely portable, but carry a goodly amount of firepower. If the world came crashing down and I had a need to have a high-capacity ‘long gun’, the Uzi would be the one tucked in the bag under my desk.

Nowadays though…I’d trade it out for the Ruger PC9 in an aftermarket sidefolding chasis, or a ‘wrist braced’ 9″ AR style gun. Why? It comes down to one big factor – logistics. A half dozen Glock magazines, 17- or 33-rd, can be interchanged between pistol and carbine, streamlining logistics considerably.

Some people will, of course, say that the issue of magazine interchangeability is overblown and that the tradeoff of stepping down to a pistol caliber, versus a rifle caliber, for the sake of magazine interchangeability is a bad tradeoff. Well, as it turns out, if I wrist braced a 9″ .223 AR pistol the reduction in ballistics performance drops me down to almost identical energy of a 9mm +p. In other words, the .223 out of a ‘wrist braced’ AR pistol fairly equals a 9mm out of a 16″ carbine. There’s more to it, of course… the .223, even at the lower velocity, will shoot flatter and probably penetrate a bit better but with the similar ballistics I’d rather have the option of not having to keep two different kinds of magazines in my bag and on my belt.

I’m not foolish enough to say that money isn’t a consideration when choosing gear that may someday be called upon to keep you hale and hearty, but it shouldn’t be an overriding consideration. AN original IMI Uzi, in semi-auto, is going to set you back somewhere in the $1200-2000 range depending on a few factors like caliber, condition, and accessories. For that money you could buy two or three CZ or Ruger guns, or one gun and a metric crapload of magazines and accessories. The acquisition of my Uzi was serendipitous so I got an exceptionally good deal on mine. Your mileage will vary.

Options? The CZ Evo is sweet and I do have one with a buncha mags. It does everything my Uzi does at half the weight and price. The Ruger, once I get it geared out, will probably cost as much as the Uzi but will have several features, described earlier, that the Uzi never had. Additionally, there are other guns out there these days that give you the traits and features I was looking but those are the two that immediately spring to mind.

The future of my Uzi? I’ll keep it, of course. It’s an excellent house gun, a good vehicle gun, and it has a certain visual impact that is pretty hard to get elsewhere. But I suspect I’ll be dumping some money into the Ruger PC9 to optimize it for my anticipated needs and purposes.