Tag Archives: link

Video – Should I Buy A Used Ruger P95

Posted on by

An interesting video:

I’ve made no secret that I rather like the P95, but I like it for one very simple reason: for about $200 it’s the best gun you can buy. Thats not to say its the best gun out there, or that its even a ‘very good’ gun. Rather it means that if you have $200 in your pocket, unless you get extraordinarily lucky, the Ruger P95 will be the best gun you can afford.

But…there’s some other things to think about.

On the police trade-in market these days there are tons of Glock and S&W .40 caliber pistols. For about $250 you can have a S&W M&P or a Glock 22/23. And, honestly, both of those guns are better than the P95.

Why don’t I get a stack of those pistols if theyre better than the P95 and only a few bucks more? Well, first off, I already filled my need for some cheap disposable pistols…I already have a dozen of the P-series so there’s really nothing to be gained by picking up the other ones. Additionally, I’m not a .40 guy. I prefer the 9mm.

However, if you’re looking for something that is ‘affordable’ and far better than a HiPoint, Bersa, or Taurus, head over to Kings and check the used pistols. Or, you can cruise Gunbroker and try your luck at scoring some $200 P95’s. They don’t usually go that cheap, but there’s always plenty to bid on and if you bid often enough you’ll get one at that price.

Guns like these are not really my first choice for carrying around everyday (although you could), but rather they are ‘loaners’ or ‘expendable’ handguns. Guns that you don’t mind loaning or giving to a friend who needs a gun, that you can leave in a truck or cabin and not be heartbroken if it gets stolen, or that you can abuse by getting wet and banged up as you rough-n-tumble your way through some disaster. They are like Bic lighters…they work quite reliably but they are basically disposable and cheap enough that you can have several.

I’ve ordered up a few of the police trade-in M&Ps for a friend and I have to say, I really like the gun. We got a .45 ACP version with three magazines for, I believe, $270 which is a smoking deal for a .45 with spare mags. What amazed me was how narrow and comfortable the grip was for that double stack mag. Very impressive.

Anyway, I was perusing YouTube and saw that video and thought I’d pass it along since I’ve mentioned my penchant for cheap, uber-stout handguns more than a few times.

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.

Link – https://intershelter.com/

Posted on by

These look very interesting. A couple things jump out at me. First, these seem like they’d be an interesting way to dump a small, easily concealed ‘cabin’ on a piece of remote property. Additionally, since they’re pretty much a ‘kit house’ I’d imagine you can knock it down and transport it if you needed to.

Not sure how much stress the design can handle, but it’d be interesting to use it as a ‘form’ and shotcrete over it or something similar. Byrying it seems unwiae but it looks like it wouldn’t take much to build up some railroad tie berms around three sides of it to make it all but invisible.

Pricing seems reasonable…for about seven grand you can get something that beats being homeless. If a fella had a piece of undeveloped property out in the sticks, this might make a nice weekend cabin sort of thing to hunker down in while you build the primary residence.

Also might make for an interesting ‘dual purpose’ building…plant int on your property as a shed or storage building that can be refitted as temporary housing in a crisis.

As I said, very interesting. I’d like to see one up close.

Article – The Gun Guru of YouTube

Posted on by

And, interstingly, it isn’t Ian.

Someday John Correia will meet Jesus. As an ordained pastor, he has thought about how their first conversation will go. That is why he keeps his Heckler & Koch VP9 loaded with a 9-mm magazine in pristine condition. “You’re only going to draw a gun on the worst day of your life,” Correia told me. “You want to make sure the equipment works. I treat these mags like babies.” If he drops one and dents it, he never carries it again. “I don’t want Jesus to look at me and go, ‘How come you didn’t test your equipment, dummy?’ ” Better to be shot dead in a fair fight. “At the very least I want him to say, ‘He smoked you! He was better than you!’ And I’ll say, ‘Yes, Lord, I got smoked.’ ”

Nothing terribly noteworthy, in my opinion, here except that it’s not the usual my-side-or-their-side article about guns and people.

Not my owie, but an owie nonetheless

Posted on by

Fellow blogger and Friend Of The Blog, Tam, over at View From The Porch had a little mishap that resulted in some structural damage to her bonework. If you’re the generous type she’s got a Patreon page as well as a PayPal link on her blog in case anyone wants to help defray costs. (Further detail)

If you haven’t read her stuff, Tam does a pretty good job of reviewing guns with a perspective you don’t often see in a lot of mainstream gun mags. And her 2,000 round test firings are always informative. And snark….the woman has some great snark-fu.

Check her out.

Article – Living in a steel box: are shipping containers really the future of housing?

Posted on by

It takes time to adjust to living inside a steel box. Timothy Ader did not, initially, like the idea of staying at Wenckehof, a student village in Amsterdam made up of 1,000 recycled shipping containers. But three years after moving in, he has no regrets.

“My first impression of the containers was, ‘It’s ghetto stuff – I’m not living there,’” recalls the 24-year-old. “But I started visiting a friend of mine living here and started to like the place. Then I moved in and I realised how good it was. I’m really comfortable in my container and I have a lot of space of my own. I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else in the world right now.”

The notion of living in a converted (or unconverted) storage container is nothing new…you drop into various preparedness forums and you’ll see posts that go way back on the topic. You’ll also see posts from folks who have made their own habitable/storage spaces out of used shipping containers.

The biggest contention on the issue of shipping containers as survivalist retreats is that it seems lotsa folks want to bury them, a’la Terminator 2, and they just ain’t built for that sort of thing. Sure, they stack, but thats because they sit on the corners which are built for just that sort of thing.

I live in a somewhat cold envrion…by the time you pad a shipping container with insulation and the other goodies necessary to handle -20 weather you’re probably better of building a ‘real’ structure. But…I think that fo their original purpose they are ideal. I could see dropping one on a couple concrete piers, and then building up a concrete or forced earth berm on three sides to conceal it and using it as storage at a retreat location. I often wonder if it would make sense to just crib it with lumber and encase the whole thing in a few inches of concrete and rebar, using the container, basically, as a form.

There’s a place down the road from here that sells ‘retired’ containers. They also have the short 20′ ones and those look terribly useful. A fella could probably, with the help of his buddies and a few jacks/winches, manhandle one of those wherever he needs it on his property..in the barn under the hay, in the falling-apart garage under a tarp, or even out in the thick brush, concealed by netting, paint, and timber.

Someday, if I ever get a place in the stick, I’ll probably have a container or two tucked away in some hidden location where I can keep gear, a vehicle, etc. But, in the meantime, the developments in the ‘normal’ communities regarding the development of container-housing construction will come in handy later on. ‘Zon has no shortage of material on the subject….



But by the time you finish framing, cutting out metal, etc, etc, you’re pretty much where you would have been if you had started with a regular cabin built from scratch. Why re-invent the wheel? Check out the military CHU if you want to see what mass-production can do to make a container livable. As expected, Wikipedia has some info on the subject as well. As I read it, the huge amount of containers available is because we import more crap from overseas than we send out…so there are plenty of containers to go around. Since I don’t see that changing any time soon, it makes sense to think of them as a handy resource. If nothing else, they can build a hellaciously cool perimeter wall if you backfill them.

Link – Rental Range endurance of ARs

Posted on by

Forget about any military endurance testing of the AR/M16 platform, a rental range in Las Vegas has some extremely interesting findings when it comes to large round counts, sometimes in excess of 200,000 rounds through commercially available and full auto ARs. Granted, none of the grueling testing procedures in place from a military standpoint are there, but for sheer round count alone, it really tells a lot about what some companies can take and what others can’t when it comes to their rifles and products in general.

I love articles like these. Real-world numbers and experiences. It is interesting to note that the article does not look favorably at the piston ARs. I guess it makes a bit of sense that the direct impingement versions, which are going to have no reciprocating parts on the barrel (and less parts overall) are going to be a bit more durable than a piston version. On the other other hand, I’d be very curious to see the failure numbers on a designed-from-the-ground-up piston .223 like the Min-14 or AR-180.

In a similar vein, they had a similar article about the AK family as well.

Article – Selling Survival

Posted on by

Broker Theresa Mondale and her client stand in a clearing on the patch of mountain forest he wants to sell, making small talk about whether society is going to collapse. The topic, weighty in any context, might be anathema to other agents, whose business trades on the promise of better days. In real estate, amenities always mingle with aspiration: The house has space to grow into, the yard is big enough for a dog or the patio will entice neighbors to come by for barbecue.

But Mondale’s big, cheerful voice doesn’t waver. This is her bread and butter. She has been following the latest buzz online predicting a “global reset” in September and wants to know if the client is worried.

“If something like that were coming I would feel it, because I’m a pretty intuitive person,” says Seth Pogue, a bald man with weathered skin, strong arms and an intense manner that seems to contradict his tie-dye shirt.

The local lefty fishwrapper has an article about a local real estate seler who is quietly specializing in properties that would appeal to those of us who share our rarefied interest. I’d heard some of the commercials, and seen some of the print ads, that were put out for this gal and I recall thinking that she might be on the same page as me.

The article, which isn’t too terrible for a lefty publication, goes on to mention Friend Of The Blog ,Rawles  and his coining of the ‘redoubt’ moniker as an appelation for the region.

In my years here I’ve seen more than a few properties that had odd little quirks and features that could not be explained away as anything other than ‘survivalist’-themed. But out here, those features are not necessarily considered to be odd or strange.

If I had the money, I’d be getting myself a nice acreage out in the middle of nowhere to build my quiet little concrete home and ride out what’s left of my life in quiet and security.

Anyway…interesting article and worth the read. I’d be curious to know if her business takes off or suffers because of the spotlight being shined on her particular niche.

Article – How to Survive Societal Collapse in Suburbia

Posted on by

Came across this article from a few years ago and tohught I’d link to it since I don’t think too many people saw it. It’s interestingbecause while there is a bit in there about preparedness there is a bit more information on the preparedness industry/market.

On a clear morning in May, Ron Douglas left his home in exurban Denver, eased into his Toyota pickup truck and drove to a business meeting at a Starbucks. Douglas, a bearded bear of a man, ordered a venti double-chocolate-chip Frappuccino — “the girliest drink ever,” he called it — and then sat down to discuss the future of the growing survivalist industry.

Many so-called survivalists would take pride in keeping far away from places that sell espresso drinks. But Douglas, a 38-year-old entrepreneur and founder of one of the largest preparedness expos in the country, isn’t your typical prepper.

At that morning’s meeting, a strategy session with two new colleagues, Douglas made it clear that he doesn’t even like the word “survivalist.” He believes the word is ruined, evoking “the nut job who lives out in the mountains by himself on the retreat.” Instead, he prefers “self-reliance.”

When prompted by his colleagues to define the term, Douglas leaned forward in his chair. “I’m glad you asked,” he replied. “Take notes. This is good.”

An interesting sidebar to the article: Let’s Put Hundreds of Things on Your Front Lawn, O.K.? A spectacular example of privacy-fail.

The guy is ‘in the industry’ so it’s worth it, from a business standpoint, to get all the PR hits but he’s gonna be on someone’s list somewhere now. Of course, I suppose its possible the house and supplies were all a decoy and his real house, with his real stash, is elsewhere…but I doubt it.