Addiction

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So this happened today…….

I know, I know.

And before some well-meaning person posts it in the comments, No, I wouldn’t offer this to the neighbor girl. DA/SA autos arent really a beginners gun. If I were interested in offering her a boomtoy, which Im not, it’d be a Glock, M&P40, or an XD.. basically, a reliable point-n-shoot. The notion that revolvers are the best choice for the I-just-want-a-gun-to-keep-on-the-nightstand crowds (especially chicks) is just silly. Someone who has no interest in becoming a ‘gun person’ isn’t going to do terribly well with a DA revolver (the classic .38) with its long heavy trigger pull. Good, solid, DA revolver shooting takes practice. A good bit of practice.

And to stem the inevitable “My wife/girlfriend/daughter shoots a Beretta 92 and thats a DA/SA and she shoots it quite well!”, yeah, but Im talking generalizations here.

This is Ruger 9mm pistol number..ah.well…its up there in the double digits. But..$200 including shipping. Came without a magazine but thats not a problem these days.

The plot thickens

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Things are not always as they appear. I was awoken at 2:06 am by the sound of someone trying to open the gate to my neighbors back yard. By the time I got my pants, shoes, and 870 on, whomever it was had left the yard. I looked down the sidewalk and saw a gal staggering down the sidewalk and naively assumed it was her.

It was not.

I reeled back the video surveillance this morning and a few things started clicking into place. When I went outside to investigate (2:10 am) , I found one of my garbage cans, open end down, on the sidewalk by my neighbors front fenced yard. Hmmmm.

I talked to my neighbor this morning, she said that when she went outside to let her dog out into the yard at 3am, there was one of my garbage cans in her yard, open end down. She moved it to its proper place in the alley.

And something in the back of my brain started itching. I found that garbage can, open end down, on the sidewalk by her yard at 2:12am. And put it back in the alley. She found it in her yard, open end down, at 3am and put it back in the alley.

Scenario: Guy on video took the can from the alley, set it on the sidewalk to use to climb over the fence into her yard. But got interrupted. I come along and put the can back in the alley. He comes back later, uses the can to climb the fence, pulls the can over into the yard with him, and then leaves it behind in her yard when he uses it again to climb over the fence to leave her yard. She lets her dog out, finds the can in her yard, and replaces it in the alley.

So this guy creeped around her house, tried the doors, came back within an hour and climbed the fence into her yard, and tried the other doors. Thats more than a bit creepy.

Still assessing the situation. I passed the footage along to the neighbor who was a bit shook up. I suspect it might be a guy from the creepy crazy-people house down the block. But…it’s going to be  gun-intensive next couple days, I suspect.

My neighbor didn’t understand what she could possibly have that she thought this guy would think was worth coming back and trying to break in over. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that people who want to steal aren’t going to try to break into a house that they reasonably expect is occupied at 2am. They break into a place they know is occupied because what they want is the occupant.

I don’t know if my neighbor is a gun person but I’m betting not, nor is she likely to be. I told her to set out motion lights and keep a report with the cops so that if we see this guy we can have a record of what happened. Not much else I can do, although I did get permission to rearrange the security cams to cover more of her property. Also gave her my number and told her I’m just one panicked scream away if she has problems.

A siege of Sieges

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Hmmm. Was bopping around Amazon looking for holiday gifts and encountered that age-old problem that occurs when shopping for other people: the gift you’re looking at is so cool you decide you want it for yourself.

It happens, right?

So, the people I was going to send a buncha Siege lanterns to will have to get something else. In the meantime, I have several of them showing up Monday.

Actually, if youre stuck with what to get that survivalist-type person on your wish list, I strongly recommend these things. They’re handy, pretty affordable, and they do exactly what you need them to do. Three levels of brightness, a blinky strobe function, and a red’save your night vision’ mode. I really can’t say enough good things about them. Of course, when you come up with a cool product, there are imitators. Everready and Rayovac make some similar produccts but for a lousy $27 I see no reason to go with an imitator. I mean, if Rayovac made a weaponlight that was a knockoff of the Streamlight you’d have some doubts about that, right? Same thing.

I’d been meaning to pick up a few extra of these for a while now, but I just never got around to it. Now that winter is here, and we had, what, an earthquake two years ago and a couple power outages in the last year, it seemed a good time to move some money out of one budget category and into another.

I’ll head up to CostCo this weekend and stock up on D-batts to load these things up when they get here Monday.

Pick up three or four for the LMI on your gift-giving holiday list.

Link – Pistol Grip Only shotguns video

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So those new pistol grip 12 ga. firearms (which, technically, are not shotguns) are kind of the rage these days. I first became aware of them when I saw one on Gunbroker. A little later, I saw that Mossberg was going to introduce them. And then finally I got to shoot one. My ardor was cooled a bit after shooting one.

Unless your plans include spending a lot of time in hallways and elevators, it seems that a shoulder stock would be a better option. Really, a ‘wrist brace’ on one of these 14″ wonders would be the way to go. But, surely at the usual 7-yard distance the advantage of a stock versus stockless shotgun isn’t that great right?

Well, Gun Jesus explores that with some really interesting results:


TL;DR is that unless you’re someone who practices a lot with your pistol-grip-only shotgun, you are going to get better (and faster) results with a stocked gun.

Personally, I keep an 18″ 870 laying around for repelling boarders, but thats only because I don’t want the paperwork hassle of a 14″ or 16″ barreled gun. If barrel length legalities weren’t a thing, a 14″ stocked gun would be my first choice for operating in the confines of my humble abode.

This isnt to say that there is not a situation where something like the Shockwave would be exactly what the doctor ordered. But nine times out of ten, you’d probably be better served with the stocked gun.

This mean I won’t get a Shockwave or two? Nope. Because I love ‘rulebeater’ stuff. And, like wrist braces, I suspect there’ll come a time in the not too far future where ATF will get serious and tinker with their regulations and rulings. (“They can’t make laws! They can only enforce them!” is what I can already hear people typing in the comments. Dude, they’ve already proven they can classify/declassify/reclassify whatever they want. No one wants to be the test case.)

So…the 18″ full-stocked gun remains on night duty. But, an interesting video to watch for those who think about the efficacy of new goodies like the Shockwave.

 

Linj – Do you have a magic “keep you safe” talisman?

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From TUAK:

Neither do I. The older I get, the more I have to fight the urge to ridicule keyboard kommandos who think “prepping” is all about guns and gear and a case of MREs. I try to suppress the urge because I despise hypocrisy in all its forms and especially when I’m the hypocrite. And the truth is I was a proto-keyboard kommando: I was into “guns and gear” prepping long before keyboards – and preppers – became so ubiquitous. Yes! I was a faithful follower of Father Mel Tappan. I wore out my copy of Survival Guns in a way that would have made a Christian quite proud if it were his Bible. I was … a dumbass. And I kept it up for far longer than was wise.

Outstanding post and I suggest reading the whole thing more than once. My own impressions to follow.

Butter

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Well, I suppose that unless I take a sudden interest in French cooking, 20# of butter should last a year, right? I mean, thats a quarter stick of butter every 5 days. Seems like plenty.

In my experience, freezing butter, as is, from the store with no special packaging other than what it comes with is fine. But…better safe than sorry, y’know? I’ll vacuum seal each 1# brick just to err on the side of overcautiousness.

Yeah, there’s canned butter out there. Good stuff to have, no doubt, in a prolonged emergency but for my day-to-day needs, the stuff I buy at CostCo will do fine. Of course, if I was stocking some remote cabin or somesuch it would be a different story.

Anyway, this stuff will go off to the deep freeze and we’ll see if it lasts to next December. I suspect it will.

Forecast: There’ll be a little nip in the air

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Pearl Harbor Day… an excellent reminder that a) stuff can happen when you least expect it, and b) nuclear fission can be air delivered.

FDR gets credit for ‘getting us out of the Depression’, but if you look at the numbers he presided over a Depression economy and a war economy. The only way ‘he got us out’ is if you believe he let Pearl Harbor happen so as to get us into WW2. And, of course, once the war was declared that pesky Depression was gone faster than you can say “Well take five million Garands and all the bombers you can build.”

This was also the catalyst for the forced internment of American citizens into concentration camps. Another lesson there.

And, of course, the end of the war brought about massive changes to American life and culture as everyone came back from the war.

But, for America, it all started on that December 7 day. Years ago I met a guy who was at Pearl Harbor when it all went down. Like an idiot, the only question I could think of was “What was it like?”. “Terrifying”, was the response.

[yop_poll id=”16″]

Money v. Goods II

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I had mentioned that next paycheck I was going to work an item or two off my proposed Go Heavy list. As it turns out, I woke to a mailbox with a paystub from a former employer paying me for…I have no idea what. I’m guessing a payroll error somewhere got caught in an audit and this is what happens. Regardless, it means that I can go ahead and start my little experiment.

The format is actually pretty simple. Whatever I buy a huge quantity of will be marked with the date, place of purchase, and price. At the end of the year, there are two possible outcomes (well, really an infinite number of possible outcomes, but liet’s not split metaphysical hairs…) – either I am out of the item, in which case that means the amount purchased was, in fact, not a years supply (QED), or there is some product left which indicates that I overestimated. At the end of the year I’ll see if the prices have changed and figure what that change was, and I’ll have my percentage (+/-) of what purchasing en masse at the beginning of the year saved me.

Of course, this doesn’t have to take place at the beginning of the year, it can take place whenever you want as long as you faithfully track 12-months from the starting point.

My list of items to store has actually gotten fairly long. Food, housewares, etc. Since some of the items on my list are actually on sale now at Albertsons, I’ll probably start with those and work from there. Should be interesting.