How To Not Get Reginald Denny’ed
Getting to your piece quickly is important. I would seriously look at the Universal Vehicle Handgun Mount. One of these is on my short list when we get back to the states. I wouldn’t store a gun in one of these as it is visible but putting it in the vehicle mounted holster for long drives and locking it up or putting it on your person when you leave the car is probably a darn good way to go.
For this very narrow scenario I am not convinced that kind of pistol really matters much. Especially if your concerns are somebody trying to hit you with an impact weapon or pull you out of the car it would almost be a contact shot. You probably don’t need that many bullets and the target is going to be aweful close. Even the uber common but rather unimpressive snubby .38 might just be fine for this job.
Beyond having a piece……
Pay attention to what is around you. You might not watch the local news in every place you could end up on a long drive and may miss the national news for a few days now and then. However you can look at what is going on in the area you are driving in. If there are large unhappy seeming groups of people on the sidewalks and in the street it is a sign that you need to consider another route. If there is an angry mob yelling and throwing stuff and burning things then haul butt to someplace else.
Lock your doors. Obviously this is not a cure all because cars have windows. Speaking of windows you might want to keep them rolled up in populated areas, admittedly a hard thing to do in a car without AC in the South during the summer. However it will prevent someone from just grabbing or hitting you. That split second will let you grab a piece or hit the gas or both.
Speed is security. I have never heard of somebody driving 40 miles an hour getting pulled out of their car and whooped on. DO NOT STOP. I certainly wouldn’t advise you to hit somebody with your vehicle or drive on the sidewalk under normal circumstance; however some circumstances are not normal and you will have to use your best judgement.
One might look at the kind of areas (Watts, Detroit, LA, etc) that had significant riots in the past and see some commonalities. You can look at these events as well as others and draw your own conclusions.
Anyway that pretty much sums up my thoughts on that.
Magpul- Reality Check
Saturday Ramblings: Food "Best By Dates", Premium Ammo in Storage and Other Great Stuff
It bears repeating that I am just some yahoo sitting at home eating expired food and writing about it on the internet. Just because something worked once for me does not mean it is necessarily so for all people under all circumstances. Do your own research, consult experts if necessary and use common sense before eating any food that is beyond the best by date or has been preserved/ stored questionably.
Commander Zero wrote an interesting post today on FMJ vs Premium JHP ammo as part of your Ballistic Wampum. As Zero notes premium defensive ammunition costs somewhere from about .75 cents to a buck or more a bullet. This stuff is seriously cost prohibitive. Like most folks I load my carry pistols with premium stuff like Federal Hydroshocks, Speer Gold Dot or Corbon JHP’s. Typically I have a few boxes per gun of this really good stuff.
I tend not to worry about it with rifles because centerfire rifles produce so much energy that all BS aside they do the job if you do yours. Though as Gabe Suarez noted if you have to shoot a goblin near a family member do you really want to be using ammo made in Russia 50 years ago? Probably not. It might be worthwhile to pick up a couple mags worth of something good that shoots comparably to whatever bulk ammo you use. For shotguns as long as shot is the right size for your task (birdshot for birds, whatever is appropriate for game and something that starts with “buck” for 2 legged predators) and patterns OK it is G2G. The idea of premium buckshot kind of escapes me.
So the premium stuff is great but cost prohibitive, on that we can all probably agree. Personally as a sort of stop gap between premium defensive ammo and FMJ I store more affordable JHP ammo in quantity.
I didn’t worry about the bullet type of my stored pistol ammo much when I mostly shot .40 and .45. Both are big, heavy bullets that do fine with FMJ’s. Since I shifted to 9mm this has been a bit more of a concern. The 9mm with modern JHP ammo is quite effective but ball ammo isn’t great. Thus I care more about having JHP ammo on hand than I used to. Initially I got some of the 100 round JHP packs from Wally World which calmed my immediate paranoia. Down the road I ordered a case of Federal Classic 115 grain JHP from the good folks at Lucky Gunner for a very reasonable price. With this purchase made I feel pretty secure about our 9mm defensive ammo situation. Somewhere between 30-50% of my 9mm ammunition is JHP.
When available at reasonable prices I have picked up JHP ammo in .38/.357mag, .223 and 7.62×39.
I have really been enjoying homemade bread. Wifey makes wheat bread that is soft, hearty and filling. Unlike some junk from the store where I can eat 3 sandwiches and still be hungry a sandwich with this stuff goes a long way. Add in a can of soup or some fruit and whatever is lying around and you have a solid lunch. Two sandwiches is a good dinner. Pretty regularly I have toast with strawberry jam for breakfast these days. Suprisingly this happens just after baking day.
Anyway that is about all that comes to mind. I think rambling posts may be a weekend feature here. That will leave short discrete topics for the week when I am busier.
Quote of the Day
Totally the wrong way to think for so many reasons but really funny because it is Homer.
The Zimmerman/ Martin Affair
My random thoughts on the matter in no particular order:
Hindsight is always 20/20.
I know next to nothing about neighborhood watch but if I ran one the first rule would be that nobody ever goes on watch alone. The second rule would be to always have a video camera. The third rule would be to be clearly marked. I would buy We would have road guard type vests or hoodies or t shirts that say Such and Such Street/ Lane/ Whatever Neighborhood Watch in huge bright letters. Had this neighborhood watch been 2 or 3 people clearly identified as neighborhood watch with a video camera this whole thing would have almost surelygone down very differently.
I don’t believe for a second that this was at all racially motivated. It sounds like Zimmerman was a pretty good guy and there are reports that he tutored some neighborhood kids who were black.
I believe Zimmerman was probably in fear of his life when he pulled the trigger. If just because there was a gun present and potentially they were fighting over it, or things were headed that way.
To paraphrase somebody over at Tam’s place “You can follow the law and be doing something really stupid.”
All goblins or potential goblins are not 28 year old weightlifting gang membercovered in prison tats, happen to be multiple felons on parol eand high on crack. All good guys are not cops or absolutely perfect beyond reproach pillars of the community who have never been arrested or made a mistake and are on the boards for the group promoting every racial or social agenda. Had Martin been a 28 year old gang banger out on parole for armed robbery and Zimmerman an off duty cop this would not have made it beyond a footnote in the local evening news.
Zimmerman was probably at fault in that he seems to have created a situation which lead to the confrontation that resulted in Martins death. This whole thing might have been entirely avoidable.
Martin is not an entirely innocent victim in all of this either. Of course we don’t know the whole story yet but he probably could have done a lot of things differently. If he had stepped into a coffee shop or corner store and said “some crazy man is following me, please call 911” or just plain ran like hell in the other direction things would have ended very differently. It doesn’t really matter that Martin was 17. He was adult sized and probably started got into a street fight with an adult man. It doesn’t get any more big boy rules than that. At 17 I was really stupid about a lot of things but I knew that if I got into a fight with a stranger in a dark alley that at least one person would likely be seriously hurt or even killed.
Once the fight got going Zimmerman did what a cop or pretty much anybody else who refused to be a victim would do. He fought back and well, you know the rest.
I don’t think Zimmerman had evil in his heart or meant for this to happen but this is definitely a cautionary tale. Again we do not know all the details and hindsight is 20/20.
Quote of the Day
“You go for a man hard enough and fast enough, he don’t have time to think about how many’s with him; he thinks about himself, and how he might get clear of that wrath that’s about to set down on him.”
-Roster Cogburn in True Grit (2010)
No Secrets
This one has been brewing in my head for awhile. Every once in awhile there is a post I really wish I would have written and this is one of those times. I am going to take a few selections from John Mosby’s original post (italicized for clarity). I suggest reading it if you somehow missed it awhile back.
“Many people believe that only “super-secret-squirrel” elite units of the military and law enforcement have access to the most effective secret techniques of interpersonal violence. They want to believe the ridiculous advertising of companies that claim you can learn their “super-secret-above-top-secret-Delta-SEAL-SWAT-Ninja fighting methods” for only $79.95 plus shipping and handling. The truth is far more simple…and demanding. Every single method, technique, and concept used by elite military units is available to the general public through non-classified, open-source, public venues.
They are available to “Joe Citizen” just like they are available to “Danny Delta” and “Sammy the SEAL.” The difference is that the legitimate Delta/SEAL/SWAT/Ninja is willing to sacrifice the effort to “do the work.” He is willing to practice any specific skill 100,000 times, or more, in every possible environment, until that skill becomes part of his neural programming.
There it is in plain and simple English. There are no secrets. No matter what some idiot tells you a $49.95 dvd will not turn you into a super Spetznas prison cage fighter. Regular training in a functional martial art coupled with regular weight training will make you a scary person to fight, not 6 easy moves you can learn in an afternoon.
You can get really good, like scary good with pistols and rifles if you choose. It will take some academic work, quality training, a lot of dry fire and some rounds downrange in a determined training fashion on a regular basis. The exact same could be said about wilderness survival skills, battle drills, fieldcraft, fitness or comunications or medical skills. It is all readily available if you will take the time, energy and expense to learn and internalize it.
I want to leave you off with another quote (from earlier in the post but it served my purposes better here) from the post that inspired this one. The professional, motivated war-fighter trains like the classic Type-A alpha male of his tribe. He seeks out the best training available and practices the skills he learns until he has mastered them…then he practices them some more. He lifts heavy weights and he runs fast. He boxes and wrestles in training to ensure that he can continue to bring the fight to the enemy, even if he loses his weapons. He attends training courses from companies like Magpul, CSAT, or VTAC, to ensure that he is learning combat shooting methods from experienced war-fighters. Then, he spends hours each week dry-firing his weapons so that he masters the physical skills he will need. Like some fabled Tier One JSOC Jedi, he trains to perfection…and then he trains some more.
It is all available to you if you are willing to do the work.
Concealed Weapons Permits
While I was home on leave Wifey and I went and got concealed weapons permits, a renewal for me and an initial for her. While we were in the county seat doing the paperwork the lady noted that we “were the last two people from Redacted to get a pistol license.” This really didn’t surprise me much because rural and small town folks tend to be armed at a pretty high rate. This isn’t surprising given the 45 minute response time to get a sheriff out there.
Having a pistol license/ CCW is a good thing. It means you can legally carry a concealed handgun which is a very good thing. The necessity of one varies by state. Some places have open carry, or allow you to have a loaded gun in the car, or carry one without a permit in rural areas/ while hunting or fishing or such. A few states have “constitution carry” where if you aren’t a crook (or a couple other narrow well defined things) you can carry legally without the need for a permit. This is really the gold standard.
Other places have very little “wiggle room” and unless you have a permit you are on the wrong side of the law. In some of these places it just means you need to get a permit. Permits vary between a mild administrative annoyance (fill out some forms, show up at a government building during working hours, etc) and a modest fee and almost impossible to get. In places like California unless you are somehow affiliated with law enforcement or are otherwise deemed by the totalitarian administrators to be special (which typically means .gov or .state) it isn’t going to happen. One could argue that there is at least an anecdotal relationship between how hard it is to get a pistol license (aka CCW) and how much the state sucks.
I think that it is important to have a concealed weapons permit, even if you have no intention to carry a handgun. Things may change in your life or region and with a license you can pack heat and still be on the right side of the law. There is nothing like a string of violent crimes in your area, a personal threat, a natural disaster or a riot to make you want to take a handgun on a trip to the gas station or corner store. Sure if nuclear bombs drop or zombies rise from the dead a permit doesn’t matter but in other situations it may very well matter.
Also in states with a waiting period for firearms purchases you can skip it. I always thought waiting periods were stupid anyway, especially so for people who already own guns. Personally I can’t see somebody who already has a decent collection like many of us, deciding they just have to go out and get a new pistol to shoot somebody and then being discouraged by needing to wait a few days to get it. “Well I was going to murder that no good SOB but I didn’t want to use any of the guns I already have and I can’t get a new one for a few days due to the waiting period so I will just forget the whole thing.” Stupid.
If you can get a concealed weapons permit then do so, you never know when it may come in handy.
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