Tag Archives: cautionary tale

When PerSec fails in a big way

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So, you have a very expensive but lovely home with a hidden doomsday bunker. And…you list it on online brokerages. What could possibly go wrong? Well, someone might think they want your bunker and they want it now.

Detective Allen testified that in the interview, Gilday confirmed that the bunker in the family’s home was his target, and that he had surveilled the property multiple times, even trying to access the bunker from a tunnel, prior to February 22nd.

So this guy thinks that WW3 is about to cut loose and decides he needs this bunker and doesn’t want to deal with realtors fees, I guess. So, he goes in, guns blazing, and decides to just…take the place.

We talk about PerSec all the time in the sense that when things get ‘spicy’ the people who know about your goodies might come a-calling and they may be less than polite. Heck, its the foundation of one of the Twilight Zone’s most famous episodes.

Moral of the story: the first rule of bunker club………….

I know better…I really, really do…..

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It never fails. Every time I leave the house to run an errand and forget to take a pistol I always wind up getting some whiskey-for-breakfast-brushed-his-teeth-with-a-hammer homeless wretch approaching me and asking/demanding something. Every time.

This message brought to you by the sinking feeling when you casually move your hand to your hip and realize your holster is empty because you were ‘only going to be gone five minutes’.

Stupid, stupid.

Dumbest AR ever

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I came across the worst AR in the world today and…almost bought it.

I’ll skip the backstory…lets jump to the point where the guy says “I have an AR I wanna sell”. And what an AR it was… Steiner DBAL up front, a Hera CQR stock, BAD Lever, QD sling, etc, etc. Very cool looking gun.

And, like the super hot looking chick who turns out to be a dud in the sack, that’s all this gun was…all sizzle, no steak.

First off, the Hera stock? Looks cool as hell. And..thats about it. My biggest gripe was that the detent and spring for the selector switch is held in the AR receiver, normally, by the pistol grip. On the Hera, you take the spring, tuck it into a little rubber sleeve, and stuff that sleeve into an open slot on the side of the gun. Seriously. Its held in place by friction. WTF?

Next up, that Steiner DBAL? Well, I had to look closer…it was some knockoff that had absolutely no IR value whatsoever. Just a flashlight and a green laser in a butch looking housing to make you look like a operationally operating operator.

Next up? Side charging AR upper. No lie. While you might think thats pretty cool, here’s why it isnt – the AR is a pretty well sealed receiver. Put a magazine in, close the dust cover, and crap pretty much has only one or two small ingress points. On a side charger, though, theres no dust cover and you have to have a long slot cut in the side of the receiver and thats gonna allow ingress of dirt and other stoppage fodder.

And the real death stroke to this whole deal…which I should have noticed Immediately…was that there was no serial number on the receiver. Or any other marking than SAFE and FIRE. Curious, I opend the receiver and beheld lots of chattered aluminum that had been milled away with an angry beaver. Yes, it was the dreaded 80% lower. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that except…while the feds are cool with you building your own gun, they are very uncool with you selling your own gun. You gotta stamp some names and numbers on that thing if youre gonna sell it.

Now, I have a bucket of Anderson $39 stripped lowers here so it might have been worth it to buy the thing, throw away the lower, and put on a Poverty Pony lower with a serial number and all the other fedgoon-required goodness…but I am not buying a kitchen table AR. With a gimmick stock. And an airsoft-grade laser/light.

But…from a distance and without looking closely, it looked sooooo sweet.

Moral of the story: much like hot chicks that are lacking in the boudoir, don’t fall in love with appearances. Check out that gun closely. Especially check to make sure its got a serial number.

The guy that has that thing is kinda stuck with it unless he gets a serial number stamped on it, or he finds someone who doesnt care about it’s status. Caveat emptor, kids.

PSA – A reminder about range safety

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Why do newbies at the gun range flinch? I mean, we tell them what to expect, we warm them up with .22’s, we show them how to properly hold their gun….and when they pull the trigger..:::flinch:::.

Well,, there’s a really good reason. We’re used to it so we often don’t even think about it, but for a new shooter the biggest thing on their mind is that an enormous explosion is about to take place in the hands right in front of their face.

A lifetime of shooting kinda makes you forget that. At least, until you get an unpleasant reminder that, yes, there’s a metric buttload of kinetic violence happening right in front of your nose:

I hate wearing safety glasses at the range, but you can bloody well  believe that I’m going to do it anyway. This guy is alive only because he had someone at the range to haul his bleeding ass to a hospital while he pinched his own severed artery shut. I usually shoot by myself..I’d have been found a few miles down the road, bled out all over the steering wheel.

Moral of the story: safety gear sucks but what happens when you don’t wear it is infinitely worse.  The apocalypse is gonna be difficult enough with two working eyes and a skull without additional holes in it….why make it harder than has to be?

I suppose another moral of the story is: don’t shoot ammo of unknown pedigree…especially if such ammo is some monstrous high-pressure number like a .50BMG.

There are a lot of guys on YouTube with gun channels who engage in somewhat…..questionably reckless…..gunplay ‘for the views’. Usually its somewhat harmless….but there’s always someone who has to buy 250# of Tannerite, or make a stack of engine blocks to shoot, or decide to see if a lathe turned bullet made out of [unicorn horn/titanium/polystyrene/granite] ‘will shoot’. This guy does a bit of that but it looks like the ammo is at fault here rather than the shooter. But the point remains: your detonating a grenade-equivalent a foot in front of your face. Take precautions.

H/T to the thoughtful Friend Of The Blog(tm) who sent me the link.

Fall guy

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I’m not super-extensively well-travelled. I’ve been to portions of Europe several times, but in a touristy capacity. I’ve never been to the ‘stans or that region. But..I can say that I’ve seen varied living conditions to give me a pretty broad base of experience.

So, I ask with all sincerity, why…why…WHY,,would anyone live in Texas? I just spent a couple days in the Houston area and I have never, ever, EVER!!11!11111 seen a climate less hospitable to human life. There was heat, humidity, fire ants, scorpions, and unrelenting sun baking everything. People say “So what? You just go from one air-conditioned building to another.” Dude, if you want to live in an artificial environment because the natural one outside your door will freakin’ kill you then you may as well be living on Mars. SpaceX needs volunteers to colonize Mars? Send the Texans…theyre already living in a climate that will kill you just as soon as look at you. They actually went to war with Mexico for that place? You know that saying, “All my exes live in Texas?”…well, yeah..because most people tell their exes “go to hell”. Well, there you go!

So..why was I there? I was helping someone move. I volunteered. And since I had to fly, I mailed a Glock and S&W 642 to myself ‘just in case’. What I did not mail ahead, and I should have, was one of my IFAKs. I didn’t want to take one in my luggage because I didn’t feel like having the grepos at TSA rummaging through my QuickClot and Dermabond. Bad move. Why?

Well, after several hours of unloading a storage unit into a rental truck in 103 degree heat, being covered in dirt, bruises, scrapes, and sweating faster than I could powerload on Gatorade, it was time to wrestle a ginormous fridge up the ramp to the truck. And….at the top of the ramp, it went sideways. I jumped clear to avoid ‘death by Frigidaire’ and I rolled up to my feet. The fridge missed me but I was a tad bruised.

  • Them: are you okay?
  • Me: Yeah. The only thing that can kill me is me.
  • Them: are you sure you’re okay?
    Me: Yeah, my heel feels a bit weird though.

And I took off my shoe and beheld this:

A close look showed a hole in the bottom of my shoe. When I leapt clear of the ramp, one foot landed in a bin of tools. Something drove right through my shoe and tore a hole in the bottom of my foot.

So, NSTIW, sitting on the curb by the storage unit wondering why I stupidly sent ahead my pistols and not my first aid kit. I had to scrounge through the storage unit…found some ancient Bactine, an elastic bandage, and a clean paper towel. Well, you do what you can, where youre at, with what you have.

SO..bandaged it up as best I could and carried on until I could send someone into a Walgreens and, like some scene in a gangster movie, have them go to the checkout clerk while carrying an armload of gauze, pads, tape etc, and trying not to be suspicious.

After that, it was..better. But it needs to be..ah..trimmed..in a few places. Hence, the doc in the box. (also some tetanus shot and keflex.)

So, other than wearing a more resilient pair of shoes, what could I have done differently? I should have been smart enough to realize that doing something like loading/unloading a truck could lead to this sort of thing and I should have mailed one of my first aid kits ahead. Failing that, I should have gone to Walgreens before I started the job and purchased materials to be prepared ‘just in case’. Honestly, I shoulda sucked up the $60 to ship and just mailed my Bag O’ Tricks to myself. That woulda covered me for bloody near anything that might go wrong.

Moral of the story: ‘remote’ preps don’t start and stop at guns.

And I shoulda just swung by Home Depot and grabbed a few Mexicans to unload /load the stupid truck.

Also, Texas might as well be the surface of Mars.

Signs of the times

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I don’t really need anything but, like the idiots that head to the beach after an earthquake to see the tsunami, I decided to go look and see what was available.

Two and a half years ago I posted about this place opening up and I took a picture of their rice and bean aisle:

And here is what it looks like today:

Whats interesting is that there’s even a bit of a run on…canning supplies. I stopped by WalMart to snag a dozen half-pint for making relish and……:

I already have hundreds of jars and lids, but I was curious to see how far the panic buying had gone. Answer: pretty far.

Shelf-stable Parmalat whole and 2% milk bricks? Yeah…gone.

I returned back to my abode and, to calm my nerves, took a walk through my stockpiles of LDS canned rice, oats, and macaroni…my 5-gallon buckets of rice, corn, sugar, and salt….my plastic bins of pasta….and my wall of Mountain House…..my 15-gallon drums of rice..and I am calm once more.

 

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.

 

 

Pearl Harbor Day

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A quiet Sunday morning…you’re listening to the radio, maybe getting ready for church, and you woke up in a world where your biggest worry was the oil leak in your car. And by the end of that same day the nation is marching to war and no one’s lives are untouched. Imagine what that must have been like…you woke up to orange juice and eggs and went to bed with a global war. The lesson there is that your whole life can change in just a moment. So..we prepare.

Tying one on

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As I’d mentioned last year, it seems like tourniquets are sort of a ‘newest and coolest’ sorta thing for the ‘serious’ first aid kit. I’ve been into survivalism for a long time and any references in fiction and non-fiction to tourniquets was almost always of the ‘loop a belt around it’ sort of variety. There were no ‘dedicated’ or purpose-built tourniquets that were readily available for Joe Sixpack survivalist…or if there were, you seldom read about them or came across them.

Cut to today’s episode. I’m talking with a fella I know and ask what’s up in his world. Turns out, his adult son had to go to the emergency room last night. Why? He was home, had a deer hung up and was cutting it up when he came to a frozen part of it. He put some extra oomph into his cut to get through it and the knife went into his wrist and severed a radial artery. Being alone and not precisely sure of how much damage he’d just inflicted on himself, he wrapped a towel around it and applied pressure. And applied. And applied. And the puddle at his feet just grew larger. So, he walks over to his neighbors house where the neighbor takes one look at him and calls 911. Medics arrive and….they apply a tourniquet …since at this point he’s about a quart low. They hustle him to the hospital and stitch up the leak. How close was he to cashing in his chips? Hard to say, I wasn’t there. But I am told that the amount of blood loss was rather significant and without something stopping it he probably would have been in some big trouble.

So, apparently there is a reasonable chance of need for a tourniquet outside of the apocalypse. Its not something I ever really thought to add to the first aid gear I keep around here because…well…it never seemed terribly likely to be needed. That mindset has now, of course, been kicked to the wayside. I’ll be finding a reputable vendor (to avoid Chinese fakes) and ordering a couple up for myself and one for a friend.

In talking to a few other people, it seems that severe cutting injuries resulting from deer processing/skinning/butchering are not that uncommon. Makes sense. Some guy standing alone in his garage with a hanged deer or elk slips and cuts himself deeply…I can totally see finding him the next day or two later laying DRT on the floor. Never thought about it before, but I can see it happening.

This is how you learn.

Leaking money

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You know how sometimes when your car is acting up and you take it to the mechanic you consider yourself ‘lucky’ if you get out of there without spending $xxx? Yeah. Another adventure in plumbing today.

I was going down to the basement to put away some ammo and right off the bat I knew something was wrong. I could smell water. Sure enough, theres a puddle on the floor. I hate plumbing problems. Hate them. An ancient gate valve had decided now was a good time to go ahead and give up the ghost. Trouble is, it could never be in an easy-to-access area. Nope. There’s ductwork hanging from the ceiling and, of course, the valve in question is right behind the duct. And, not just any duct. A duct that has another duct coming into it form the side. So thats a three-point F.U. to deal with.

Now, it wasn’t all bad. I managed to find a plumber who could show up today, rather than next Tuesday (looking at you Garden City Plumbing & Heating), and the kid did the job pretty well it appears, and so far everythign seems to be holding together. Replaced the ancient valve with a nice new ball valve (why, oh why, would anyone use anything else???) and now life can go on. I was expecting to drop between $500-$1000 because there’s always something that keeps it from being a straightforward and simple fix. But, knock on wood, it looks like escaped with only $175 left behind.

Fortunately, part of my preps include an emergency fund. So, it was just a matter of paying the man and life goes back to somewhat normal. Except…I have to try and put the ductwork back together.

The emergency fund, however, turned a potential Big Deal into an inconvenience. I deprive myself of some luxuries in life… new car, fancy clothes, latest electronics, basic medical care…just so I can have something in the bank for when these sorts of events happen. For those keeping track, this was another case where the crisis required greenbacks and not an AR and plates. Oh, someday the crisis will happen that does require M855 and that sort of thing, but by the time that happens there will have been a hundred crises that required the greenbacks.

So…prepare for The End Of The World, but also prepare for the smaller, more mundane and localized end-of-the-worlds…and that is almost always remedied with cash.

ETA: I was right. Complications. :::sigh::: Plumber is on his way back.