Only dead fish follow the stream -old Scandinavian expresion
It has been a while since my last post but I have been pretty distracted, I must admit. In this post I focus on some psychological lessons I have learned watching the past couple of weeks. This are lessons I already knew but the past few weeks have really been a reminder of them.
Many, maybe most, people have a very counterproductive threat assessment and response process. Initially, they fail to see a threat coming, then flip a switch and react in a rigidly doctrinaire manner (in a sense, overcorrection) and become increasingly rattled at anyone suggesting threats or costs emerging from that reaction.
I have a public health background, with a particular focus on the statistical measurement of health risk. I had experience with the fight against SARS. So I have to confess that I might have had a leg up on many folks in terms recognizing the Covid-19 threat early.
Nonetheless, it was stunning to witness how reluctantly folks recognized and admitted the Covid-19 threat. It was basically the flu, they insistently explained, and any suggestion of adjustment or modification of behavior was ridiculous. It was as if they were at the waters edge on the beach, noticed the water receding from the shore a moment ago, and now stare at a tsunami coming at them and think “what a pretty wave”.
Now many of those same folks have become lockdown zealots. The lockdown has become this kind of safety blanket for them, and they react with anger at any suggestion of costs, sustainability or growing cracks. To hell with civil liberties. You cannot criticize what has been obvious overrreach by a bunch of local petty tyrant officials. And if you are concerned about the loss of your job and how you will feed your family, you are selfish. This is taken from a recent post on my NextDoor network:
The worst part of this pandemic is seeing how many of my neighbors will happily sacrifice people they don’t know, because they lack basic empathy unless a situation impacts them directly. It’s disgusting and horrifying. They see no problem with sending all medical staff through a meat grinder of endless months of viral load and lack of PPE, as long as it’s not their spouse or family member. It’s totally cool to let old people, diabetics, asthmatics, and cancer patients die as long as they’re total strangers. I mean, as long as they can wander freely around Target, what’s wrong 2-3% of the US population dead, right?
Clearly fear is pulsating through this. But at the same time it hints at an inability to think simultaneously about multiple threats. This person is clinging desperately to the lockdown as a kind of safety blanket. The problem is this could end up being quite unsafe, including for health care workers (how much PPE do you think we’ll have when the economy collapses?).
And her fear has rapidly translated into anger. We can simultaneously have compassion for people who are scared like her and realize that they are a threat. But compassion should never allow us to look past threat.
Another element of this angry post is an implicit appeal to collectivism. You should be ashamed for worrying about yourself or your needs. And to prove it, here are your needs in shameful straw man terms.
We have seen this as well in the face of massive Covid-19 buying. If you don’t buy what the mob regards as a reasonable or appropriate amount of groceries, toilet paper, etc. you are “hoarding” and selfishly “taking from those who need it”. When reasonably challenged about the logic of this accusation, emotional hysterics quickly follow.
This is society as suicide pact. We face intense emotional pressure from angry and scared people who are trying to form coalitions to strip of us of our most basic human sovereignty: to do what we need to take care of ourselves. This is the peril of collectivism.
These people are dangerous. Some of them are our neighbors. Which means that in a crisis some of our neighbors are downright dangerous to us. In a bad situation, you need to learn how to say “no” even at the cost of a local relationship. Your family and their needs come first, and you need to careful, focused, calculating and frankly ruthless about this. Your child is your first priority, not your emotionally hysterical virtue signalling angry neighbor.
And you really cannot form useful allegiances with these folks. Burrowed in their angry den, they also now cannot see (or maybe insist in being denial about?) the inbound economic tsunami. These are people who are forever scared, emotional and behind the curve. You can’t work with them to identify threats and respond. Regardless of how many talks you enjoyed with them in the cul de sac on trash night before this all began.
Naturally, one implication of this anger is that folks are retreating into familiar trenches. Half of the discussants on NextDoor these days speak of “MAGA maggots who love money but hate other people’s lives” (literal quote) and “libtard assholes who want to destroy the economy probably to help vegetable Joe Biden in November” (another literal quote). In other words, this is devolving into the normal and expected channels of our national dialogue.
Which I think hints at something else I have seen in this. Despite all of the talk of how “everything has changed” and “the world will never be the same”, in fact the pre-existing faultlines of life actually grow stronger as we retreat into fear and anger. So I guess the lesson here is that, at least for a while, SHTF society will be kind of like pre-SHTF society, only more so.
The common thread through all of this is that these folks are the “preachers”. They are scared and externalize. That is how they handle crisis. It is toxic, counterproductive and dangerous.
Its not all bad though. Survival is partly about attitude. And we are also seeing “doers” emerge.
We’ve seen folks do things like take it upon themselves to buy groceries for at risk folks. Or sew masks. Or start humor threads on places like NextDoor. Or coordinate planning for what comes next (more on this in a post to follow).
People are revealing themselves in this crisis. They did so pretty quickly. Survival is going to partly be about identifying and differentiating the preachers and the doers. Form alliances with doers and ignore preachers.
In short, decoupling basically means in practice a shift away from international supply chains. These chains emerged in part because outsourcing to foreign nations has some advantages: cost savings, technology transfer, etc. But there are obvious risks involved.
In terms of international economics, decoupling is not exactly a new idea, or at least new in terms of the timespan of the Covid-19 crisis:
However, the disruptions from Covid-19 have made clear exactly how vulnerable we are. It seems likely there is going to be a new urgency to the notion of decoupling. Whether that translates into actual decoupling remains to be seen, but some degree of decoupling may already have been happening so there may be some momentum.
For our purposes decoupling is a more immediate and personal concept. In some sense prepping is an act in anticipation of forced decoupling. You might not get supplies you need, for instance, so you have stores of them. You may not be able to rely on public security services, so you have to think about your own defense. And so on.
It is possible that this instinct to be ready for personal decoupling will be strengthened by this crisis. More folks probably will start looking to reduce their reliance on society, at least in terms of reliance on continuously functioning social structures. They will build up their stores of food, ammo, key pieces of equipment, medicine, etc. Some will start looking for property with survival in mind. And this is a good thing: we will be a more de-centralized society where fewer folks will operate under the assumption of constant support from larger social structures.
Above all, folks will probably start thinking more and more as units decoupled from, and not necessarily aligned with, society. This won’t just manifest itself through prepping: the next few months will probably accelerate an already present trend toward isolated lives based on a bespoke virtual existence. Bearing witness to the way that their fellow Americans have reacted to the crisis, many are probably now concluding that they cannot count on at least some of their neighbors to be smart in tough times: we have also witnessed an epidemic of denial, statistical illiteracy, arrogance, etc.
This reaction is natural, but may also be the wrong move. First, the more atomized and dysfunctional our society, the more likely we are to face some types of crises that would put preps to the test.
Second, the lone wolf model of prepping is a risky. Yes, it allows for faster, more streamlined decisionmaking. The appeal of this is obvious: who wants to spend time convincing the obstinate in times of emergency? The only catch here is what if you are the one that is wrong or not quite right? What if there is some consideration you missed? Sometimes dialogue leads to better decisions. There are clearly limits to this, but a small group of reasonable folks aligned in their goals often delivers better decisions that balance risks better.
Yes, you can develop skills for many things you need to survive. But small groups allow for some degree of specialization. The truth is, some people’s minds are better bent toward thinking about health and medicine. Some are just better at cooking, or sewing, or shooting, or hunting, or just telling stories by the fire that, believe me, might be your psychological salvation on the darkest nights.
This is why I have rule 6 for my personal preps:
6. Community
Yes, a lot of big, long standing vulnerabilities in our society are being revealed now. But don’t go to the other extreme, throwing the baby out with the bathwater in the process.
Its not just about feeling good about yourself. Its also a safer bet in lots of circumstances.
In the last post we learned some basics about guns. In this post we begin a discussion of half of the gun equation: ammunition. There are a stunning number of options in the world of ammunition. Most ammunition is designed with a specific kind of performance and/or mission in mind. I can’t cover all ammunition. That’s just ridiculously broad and unnecessary. Who cares what ammunition Teddy Roosevelt carried on African Safari?
Our focus here should rightly be on ammunition best suited to the prepper. I will simply list some good alternatives, give what I think is the most important upshot to know about them and briefly list some guns that accept that ammunition. Later, we will talk about the guns.
Before proceeding we need to make two basic distinctions. First we need to distinguish between pistols and rifles. As I explained in my first post on guns, with the arrival of things like AR-15 pistols this is getting a little fuzzy for ordinary folks. When I say pistol for present purposes I mean the kind of weapon you could place in a traditional holster on your belt. You would not fire this gun from the shoulder. A rifle, by comparison, is a long gun that you would typically fire from the shoulder. One thing pistols and rifles generally have in common is that their barrels are rifled. Here is an example of rifling looking down the barrel:
Lookig down the barrel of a 9mm pistol
The rifling is what creates the smooth swirlling or twisting pattern you see as you look down the barrel (the little splotches you see here and there are burnt carbon and other fouling from shooting: this barrel needs to be cleaned). What rifling does is cause a bullet to develop a spin as it moves down the barrel. A spinning object often follows a more stable and predictable pattern when in motion. This is the reason some wicked pitches in baseball involve putting a little spin on the ball, why spin is a part of “Bending Like Beckham”, etc. The classic modern bullet shape would actually quickly start to tumble without spin, leading to a completely unpredictable trajectory.
The other major category of firearm is a shotgun. Traditionally, a shotgun was a long gun that fires shot, which usually means multiple projectiles per cartridge fired. Below is a classic “shotgun” cartridge:
The pellets or “shot” that shotguns typically fire looks like this:
To get a better handle on this, here is an image of a shotgun cartridge with a partially translucent casing:
The base is brass and contains the primer and some powder, but the powder is also seen in the dark substance extending beyond the brass base into the translucent section. What follows (the light greenish, pink, brownish and pink rings) is the wad. Traditionally, the wad was used just to create a rough seal against the barrel so that more energy from the gas expansion of the powder would be harnessed, leading to shot leaving the barrel at higher speeds. These days the wad often provides a “flight control” feature that make the shotgun more accurate at distances; this is particularly true of rounds designed for birds like ducks and turkeys. Finally, we have the pellets, or “shot” as we often call them.
One other type of shotgun cartridge that is getting increasingly popular is the “rifled slug”. These fire a solid (and huge) bullet with rifling on the bullet (as opposed to the barrel in a rifle) thus generating spin and therefore some flight stability. Here is an example of one (not the diagonal “rifling” on the bullet at the right):
A rifled slug
Shotguns and shotgun shell size and power are a fairly complex affair. Shotguns generally are sized in “gauges” which tells you about the interior diameter of the barrel. The most popular gauges are 12, 16 and 20, and there is also a .410 gauge (although techically this is a caliber). As gauge increases the barrel narrows. Thus, all other things being equal a 12 gauge delivers a bigger punch than, say, a 16 gauge.
A shotgun shell must have the same gauge as the shotgun you intend to shoot it out of. Beyond that, the defining features of a shotgun shell is whether it fires shot or a slug, the shot size if it does fire shot and the cartridge length (typically, 2 3/4″, 3″ and 3 1/2″). There are many shot sizes but shot largely falls into two categories: “buck shot” (bigger pellets) and “bird shot” (smaller pellets). Widely commercially available buckshot comes numbered sizes, beginning with 00 (often confusingly referred to a “double O” or sometimes “double aught”) running up to 4. The lower the size the bigger the shot; 00 is the largest widely available buckshot. A smaller class of pellet is bird shot which runs from number 1 to 10 (with again, diameter decreasing as the number increases). Longer cartridge lengths are typically associated with more power, though you must insure that you shotgun can accomodate a given cartridge length (and refer to the shotgun manufacturer’s manual for guidance; from a safety standpoint the issue is not simply whether it will technically fit).
For prepping I recommend relying on the 12 gauge round. It is a big, powerful and versatile round. I usually carry 00 buckshot and various birdshot. For the latter I run number 3 or 4 shot for duck and 7 or 9 for turkey. The purpose of the buckshot is mainly self defense while the purpose of the birdshot is potential food (ie hunting). For turkey I like Federal TSS rounds (number 7 or 9 shot). These are very expensive but their high yield per shot makes them more cost effective. For duck I typically use Federal Black Cloud. In all cases I try to use 3 inch or 3 1/2 inch cartridges.
Good choices for defensive shotguns are pumps (my favorite is the Mossberg 590a1 for home defense and the Mossberg Shockwave for mobile defense) and semi-autos (I can recommend the Benelli M4 or M2, the Mossberg 930 or the FN SLP). For a bird gun I use the Benelli Super Vinci but there are any number of good pump action bird guns. Now these hunting cartridge choices are driven by the hunting opportunities where I live and you should research the game choices in your area, talk to local hunters if you don’t already hunt (you should hunt) and tailor your cartridges accordingly.
On to pistols. Here there are a ton of cartridges but only two I would probably recommend: 9mm (or 9mm Luger) and 45 ACP (ACP=Automatic Colt Pistol). Here is a pic comparing the two to some other pistol rounds:
I can (and people have) gone on forever about these two cartridges so let me say a few big things about them. They are both widely available and can usually be had for competitive prices. The big knock on the 9mm was that is lacked hitting power, but these days there are a lot of loads for this cartridge engineered to have a lot of stopping power. No one has ever complained about the stopping power of the 45ACP. It is a hammer of a cartridge. The complaint instead has been about its size (which limits magazine capacity for a given magazine size) but there is a lot of skepticism about pistols in high round count gun fights. For either of these I would get a solid but basic pistol like a Glock. In a collapse situation a pistol is basically a bridging tool as you get to your rifle.
There are a some rifles that take “pistol” rounds. For instance, a friend of mine bought a Kel Tec Sub 2000 (pictured below) in 9mm. It shot without issue. It is light, seems reliable (we had no issues in a couple hundred rounds), accurate enough and is very collapsible, which might make it an attractive option if you were forced to bug out.
A Kel Tec Sub 2000, in fighting trim (top) and folded
Moving on to rifle rounds, let me list some important ones for prepping. This is my list. If you have thoughts please throw a log on the fire in the comments. Here is a picture to start the discussion:
From left to right: 50 BMG (BMG=Browning Machine Gun), 300 Winchester Magnum, .308 Win, 7.62 Soviet, 5.56 NATO and .22 LR.
.22 LR (22 long rifle)-This is a small cartridge. This limits its power and range. However, it is light (the combat load a mid-sized man could carry with it is considerable), very accurate within a modest range (say 25-50 yards for small game like squirrels) and out to maybe 150 yards for defense (maybe farther but I admit I have only really shot it this far). I use this round mainly for small game and training. As a training round it has the advantage of being cheap and wearing out barrels more slowly. I can recommend the Ruger 10/22 rifle for this. The 10/22 has a take down model that packs down small.
.223 Remington/5.56X45mm (5.56 NATO)-This is the famous M-16 round. The 5.56 NATO is the military version and the .223 Remington is the civilian variant. The 5.56 NATO tends to be more powerful than the .223, so typically if a rifle accepts the 5.56 you can run .223 in it but the reverse might not be true. The reason is that rifle chambers are rated to a certain amount of pressure from the gas expansion when the powder ignites, and 5.56 has a higher pressure rating. This is a small, very high velocity round. It is not unreasonable to call it a “.22LR on steroids”. It is cheap and light. Rifles chambered for these generally have manageable kick (recoil). The two knocks against it (at least compared with some cartridges we are about to discuss) are that it has limited effective range and maybe less stopping power. The latter can be mitigated by choosing a good loading. I would run these mainly for defensive purposes. I usually run 5.56X45mm in three flavors: XM193 (a 55 grain round with good soft target performance); M855 (these are sometimes called “green tips”, these are 62 grain and have somewhat better barrier penetrating qualities); and 77 grain open tip match (I particularly favor 77 grain “Sierra Match King” 5.56X45 cartridges). 77 grain Sierra Match King (SMK) rounds are sometimes sarcastically called (if you forgive my language) “Operator as Fuck” because of their popularity in the US military special forces teams. Yucks aside there is a reason for this: the 77 grain SMK round is a hard hitting round battle-proven to neutralize threats, and quickly. Three guns I would recommend for these cartridges might include the AR-15, Tavor/X-95 and SCAR-16.
7.62X39mm (7.62 Soviet)– This is the round chambered by the world famous AK-47 rifle. Another very good rifle that chambers it is the SKS rifle. This is basically a 30 caliber (.30 cal) cartridge, so it is big. But it has a low drag coefficient (i.e. high drag). It is best out to maybe 300 meters and in that range it is a very hard hitting round. It is not a long distance round. 7.62 rounds are also fairly cheap. I don’t have a particularly strong opinion about versions of the round. If find nearly all of them get the job done. I would use this primarily as a defensive round but it is a good choice for medium sized game (like deer) out to maybe 200 yards or perhaps a bit more.
The SKS rifle
.308 Winchester (“Three Oh Eight Winchester”, the “.308 Win” in the image of rifle cartridges above)/7.62X51mm (7.62 NATO)-The .308 Winchester round is the civilian version of the military 7.62X51mm cartridge. In this case the civilian round, the .308 Winchester, is generally the more powerful than its military counterpart. This is a big, heavy hitting 30 caliber cartridge with good long distance performance, good barrier penetration, hard hitting. Its downsides are probably its weight and kick (which exceeds that of all of the cartridges we have discussed so far). It is in a class of cartrdiges that all have roughly similar performance. Some of these include the .303 British (a standard service cartridge for the British military and associated colonial forces from the late 19th century to the post WWII period), .30-06 (“Thirty Aught Six”, a common US military cartridge of the first half of the 20th century), the 8mm Mauser (played a role in the German military similar to that of the .303 British in the U.K. sphere). The difference is that there are generally a far wider range of firearms in your local gun store that chamber the .308 Winchester/7.62X51mm and the cartridge itself is widely commercially available. This is a great round for self-defense, particularly at longer ranges. Because of its power, you need to be aware of its wall penetrating capabilities. This is also true of the .223 Remington/5.56X45 and 7.62 Soviet cartridges, but in the case of the .308/7.62X51 you have to be mindful of this out to much longer ranges. To put it in perspective, this round hits harder at a thousand yards than really powerful pistol cartridges, like the .357 Magnum, do at point blank range. This is also a superb hunting round, particularly for medium sized game. In my corner of the American south it is popular for deer and hogs. 7.62X51 is more associated with defensive use and most run roughly 147 grain “M80 ball”, which is basically a pretty standard military round. For hunting .308 Winchester, usually around 168 grains, is popular. Popular rifles for this cartridge include a wide array of bolt action hunting guns, the AR-10, FN FAL, FN-SCAR, etc.
So this has been a brief, whirlwind tour that captures a few of the essential points about some cartridges I think might be most useful for prepping. I didn’t talk about all the intricacies of these cartridges. This was more like a bullet point introduction that captures the larger points about these common cartridges.
A key thing to remember is that some of the choices, especially hunting rounds, reflect the nature of where I live. I live in a woodsy area of the South where truly long range hunting shots are not that common. If you live somewhere like the open country of the U.S. West, you might want to choose a cartridge with slightly better long distance performance like the 6.5 Creedmoor or 7mm Remington Magnum. We also have no really big game, like Moose for instance (for which you might want to consider something like perhaps 300 Winchester Magnum). I didn’t write about these because I lack enough experience with them (though I have shot them all) to speak with confidence.
I also did not focus much on cartridges for level-action guns. That simply reflects my lack of experience with them. I have grown increasingly interested in these in the last year or so (maybe it was Chris Pratt’s Marlin Model 1895SBL in Jurassic World) and plan to evaluate them over the next couple of years.
It’ll knock down a T-Rex
Finally, these aren’t the only choices for prepping even in my neck of the world and are not the only cartridges I’ll mention in years to come. For instance, the aforementioned 8mm Mauser cartridge is used by the Zastava M48, which in my opinion currently represents a great deal on a high quality clone of the storied K-98 Mauser rifle (K98s are great too, but are crazy expensive compared with M48s).
Well, I don’t know if that title is how I would put it. But it does seem like we might be at a kind of inflection point, where an idea that had currency in a small minority, prepping, begins to achieve wider acceptance.
To be sure, the people clogging Costcos right now (probably helping to spread Covid-19 in the process) are not preppers. They are reactors. And some who currently contemplate a newfound commitment to prepping will forget and move on when the present crisis passes.
But I do think some see the need to make a change and start being prepared for the possibility of a significant social disruption. And make no mistake, significant social disruption is likely in the cards. That the Covid-19 crisis may leave many folks in better shape for future problems might be a small silver lining in this cloud.
This evening the local news had a special on covid-19. An economist opined that this could cause a recession. On the other hand, if there was some good news, such as a fall in cases in Italy, it could rally people’s spirits and make them think everything was going to be alright. I got stuck on the thought of people’s “spirits” and how they shaped personal trajectories thus far in this story.
Though I have prepped for a decade, this has been the first
really big crisis I have experienced as a prepper. We’ve had weather threats
and stuff like that, but those were all at best local threats. This is the
first really big disruption I have seen. Put differently, this is the first dry
run for something even remotely approaching SHTF.
Now, before proceeding, let’s characterize this event. It is
the biggest thing that has happened to many of us, but there have been some
saving graces. It happened slowly enough that anyone who was paying attention
had the time to make at least adequate preparations for, say, bugging in to
ride it out (whether they have the resources to do so is admittedly a different
story). Moreover, this is a crisis that has not so far impacted vital systems:
the lights are still on, the gas pumps are still running, the store shelves are
still more or less stocked, etc.
This has been a comparatively forgiving event, at least compared with some plausible and serious alternatives (such as the grid going down, a virus that had a higher “Rho naught” combined with much higher mortality and morbidity, etc.).
One of the major lessons I am going to take from this experience is how badly so many folks process risk. The won’t see obvious threats approaching and then will react in a fashion that does nothing (angry Tweets really make a difference!) or, in a smaller and more intimate social unit where they might have more influence, is actually counterproductive. On an intellectual level I already understood this, but it somehow looms much larger in my thinking after watching the past few weeks.
The vast majority of people I encountered did not see the Covid-19 tsunami coming, even as they were obviously in its shadow. Really, their falure to pay attention was just incredible and could only be explained beyond a certain point by denial. And now when they have finally acknowledged this great, awful wave..
Anger. The dominate gear for many is anger. They are angry and want someone to pay. Some blame China. Some drove ever deeper into the labyrinth of “Orange Man Bad”.
Some of the angry are simply panicking. Some are disappearing into blame game escapism. Many instant public health experts explain that this is only happening because we don’t have enough test kits. The shortage of test kits has been really lamentable, but no, this was going to happen regardless because we were never going to detect most of the cases in time due to the nature of this virus. This morning I heard someone on YouTube explain slightly caustically that Italy is in trouble because they did not have total surveillance immediately: you see, as he so plainly explains, a nation needs to detect all with cough, fever, myalgia, aches, etc. and quarantine them and they need to do that before the health system even notices cases. Lets not focus on complication, such as that there is literally no way to do this in a Western democracy.
Others suddenly and angrily push “solutions” that are just punches in the air. And they can never understand why they those solutions haven’t been implemented yesterday (back when they were personally still in denial, that is). Some argue that we need immediately to test everyone and that will solve the problem, but that would likely put us in an entirely different crisis as we drowned in a sea of false positives. Others argue that we need to adopt China’s “get tough” measures. Mind you many of these folks split their time between this demand and insisting that Trump is a dictator, but what I think all sensible people can agree on is that Chinese solutions probably wouldn’t work in the U.S. You’ve got that who nagging problem of a different society with different political and institutional structures, culture, history, laws, etc.
Then you have a final, and rather amazing group: those who
still think there is no problem, even as they feel the first mist of the
tsunami upon their cheeks.
The problem with people who process risk poorly is that they are a liability when difficult, evidence-based decisions need to be made. Emotion and psychology enter too deeply in their process, and that more often than not leads us to do stupid things that enhance risk.
A lot of lone wolf preppers are probably nodding in approval at this point. They plan to rely on no one but themselves. This has the advantage of insulating yourself from dependency on people who make poor risk choices. But there are probably instances where all of us make poor decisions and one of the great things about a social unit is that it provides a check on our errors and excesses. Moreover, socieities cast a broader net in terms of information gathering. And society is really critical to things like specialization, emotional support, defense, etc.
A core assumption behind lone wolf prepping is that you can make better decisions than others (or, alternatively, better at making them in isolation) and execute them better on your own. The first assumption is questionable. At a minimum lone individuals are probably generally at an information disadvangtage. Per the second, while there is probably some speed advantage to being alone, the Rambo myth is just that: in the tactical arena individuals rarely if ever defeat teams. There is no reason to believe that gathering resources, performing tasks, etc. would be any different.
So where does that leave us? As preppers we need to build a social network for mutual support in a massive disruption. But we clearly have to be a little selective about who we choose. A lot of folks are a liability in bad times. This happens to perfectly encapsulate my person rules 6 and 7:
6. Community
7. Let the right ones in
Lone wolves will probably not make it. But neither will a society of clowns. Strike the balance between the two.
Guns are a key part of being prepared. If there is a major disruption they can be an essential source of security and food. This leads to my 12th rule of prepping:
Rule 12. Slaves and the dead are unarmed
This sounds harsh and intentionally so. You don’t want to be unarmed two months into a grid collapse. Trust me about that.
Before moving on, I need to acknowlege and emphasize that guns are a necessary but not sufficient condition for successful prepping. This is why my next rule of prepping is:
Rule 13. You can’t eat or drink bullets
But more on that later. The focus here is Rule 12.
Guns are a topic that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. This is not wholly unreasonable. Guns are dangerous and people do a lot of stupid things with them (just like they do with, say, cars). But some of the fear, and maybe some of the stupidity, is probably driven by a lack of familiarity.
Guns certainly are not the only weapons you can , or should, use when prepping. But at the same time guns are indispensable. I have run into preppers with a great aversion to guns who argue that their substitute, such as a recurve bow, is just as effective. Well, the probability of someone with a recurve defeating someone with an AR-15, for instance, isn’t zero. But it is low. Very low. In the rock, paper, scissors game in a post-disruption world without the rule of law, guns break most other weapons and defensive schemes. You should not kid yourself about that.
In this and a long series of posts to come I am going to provide an introduction to guns. I write under the assumption that the reader knows nothing about them and build from there. If you know everything up to a certain point, jump in then. Alternatively, simplification can sometimes lead to potentially misleading statements (e.g. missing important exceptions to general truths). If you feel I have done this, please call me out and I will edit appropriately.
Let’s begin at the most basic departure point:
A (“rifle”) cartridge
A gun is a device that uses a cartridge (pictured above, showing a shape often associated with “rifle’ cartridges) to deliver concentrated energy to a target via a bullet (1). The two major parts of a cartridge are the bullet (1) and the casing (2). Generally speaking, guns ignite the primer at the bottom of a casing, which then sets off a larger charge within the casing.
The bullet is the part that is shot out of the gun. The casing of the round being fired is immobilized in the chamber of the gun. This is a section of the barrel (on many guns it is technically an extension of the barrel, but let’s not worry about that) in which the round to be fired is placed ready to be fired. It is usually held in the chamber by the bolt of the gun.
The ignition of the primer (by the gun driving what is called a firing pin into the primer) and then of the charge by the primer causes gas expansion, the mounting pressure from which in turn causes the bullet to separate from the casing and accelerate down the barrel.
The energy involved in this is basically constrained within the narrow barrel between the bolt and the back of the bullet. That constrained energy feeds the acceleration of the bullet to its final velocity when it leaves the barrel. The bullet then travels beyond the muzzle of the gun.
Its trajectory thereafter reflects three basic forces. Atmospheric resistance causes it to slow, until other things being equal, it comes to a stop. Gravity causes the bullet path to fall relative to a straight line out of the barrel. Finally, atmospheric movement of air (i.e. wind) causes shifts in its trajectory as they act on the bullet. These forces operate on the bullet until it either hits something or comes to a rest somewhere.
That’s it, in essence.
To round out the anatomy of a cartridge, from the image above we have the neck (3), shoulder (4), rim (5) and base (6). The details and implications of these are not super important for now.
For those a little lost, below is another cross-sectional diagram of a cartridge, this time showing a profile more typical of a “pistol” cartridge (though to be sure, many rifles accept cartridges that look like this; for an example, Google “30 carbine” to see the cartridge for the M1 Carbine rifle from WWII) . Note the lack of a defined neck and shoulder. The bullet (1) is at the top of the cartridge and seated a bit in it. Striking the primer (5) ignites the charge (3), causing the bullet (1) to separate from the casing (2) and travel down the barrel.
A “pistol” cartridge
From the operational basics of a gun flows two big realities:
What bullets actually deliver is kinetic energy, which is the energy associated with an object due to its motion. And the kinetic energy of an object is its mass times (m) the square of its velocity (v):
e=m*v2
In terms of the energy delivered by a bullet, there are two big implications. First, there is a big payoff in terms of kinetic energy to higher bullet mass m, which is usually measured in grains (there are 7,000 grains in a pound). Second, there is an even more quickly growing payoff to the increasing velocity at which a round travels v (usually measured in feet per second). If someone threw a bullet at your chest, you would say “owww!”. If they shot it out of a gun at your chest you might be killed. The difference mainly reflects the implications of velocity for kinetic energy.
The damage a bullet does can depend on how the energy is delivered at the point of impact with the target. Some bullets designs concentrate energy (e.g. armor piercing bullets, which are in simple terms very hard and try to concentrate a huge amount of energy at a point to overcome great resistance) and some effectively act essentially to spread it (e.g. so-called “hollow point” rounds, which generally maximize damage to softer targets).
The flight performance of a bullet once it leaves the barrel can also depend heavily on bullet design. For instance, some bullets experience a large amount of air resistance as captured in a low drag coefficient. This may or may not be a big deal depended on the intended mission of the bullet. For example, the AK-47 cartridge, the famous 7.62X39mm (also sometimes called the “7.62 Soviet”), has a generally low drag coefficient compared with many cartridges for similar guns. But the AK-47 was designed primarily with engagements out to 300 meters or so in mind, and from what I have seen that cartridge gets the job done to those distances
The discussion thus far has hinted at two types of guns: pistols and rifles. For legal purposes, there is actually a third category, called an “any other weapon” (often abbreviated to AOW). I don’t went to get into these too much in this post except to say that the only even quasi-clear defintions for these are legal, and due to rapdily mounting innovation around legal technicalities, even these legal distinctions are starting to blur for practical purposes.
When most people hear “pistol” they think of this:
The guns at the top and bottom are rifles, the one in the middle is a pistol. Confused? That makes you a sensible person. But don’t worry about this for now: they are all guns. We will return to this distinction, but pistol and rifle definitions for practical purposes are at this point very much a discussion in flux. We’ll discuss this further in a later post.
Before concluding I want to clean up a little more on the terminology. I referred to the “M1 Carbine” earlier. If you’ve seen Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, etc, you have seen the M1 Carbine but for the uniniated here it is:
“Carbine” is one of those funny words you see bounced around in the gun world. Everyone familiar with guns generally understands what is meant in context when the term is invoked, but a precise definition that captures every application of the term is somewhat elusive. But the M1 Carbine is a pretty good example of the generally agreed on features of a carbine: it is a generally shorter, probably more maneuverable rifle and the term is sometimes also applied to rifles that chamber less powerful cartridges. For example, he is an M1 carbine next to the M1 Garand rifle:
And here is the M1 Carbine cartridge (.30 Carbine) next to the M1 Garand cardtridge (.30-06 Springfield, often referred to a “thirty aught six”):
.30 Carbine (left) and .30-06 Springfield (right)
Clearly, the M1 Carbine chambers a smaller cartridge and is a smaller gun, at least compared with the M1 Garand. Generally, in my experience carbine implies “short” more strongly than it does “less powerful cartridge” (for example, the M-16 and its carbine counterpart, the M4, generally still chamber the same cartridge, the 5.56X45mm). There are lots of other funny terms like carbine that are useful to know if a little fuzzy (e.g. some day we’ll talke about “recce”, which makes carbine look straightforward). For now it is important just to know that such words are abundant in the gun world, which evolved from a long and varied history, leading to a lot of sediment and confusion.
Finally, some slang. Bullets are sometimes called slugs, for example. Cartridges are sometimes called rounds. Confusingly, cartridges are sometimes referred to as bullets. And catridges, bullets, etc. are often referred to generically as “ammo” or “ammunition”. You’ll get used to it and you will learn how to process the almost unending malapropisms surrounding guns and shooting if you start with a good grounding in the fundamentals.
Social crises are human-made, not natural. This is not about the disease. It's about fear of gov't, neighbors, and an obsession with a particular type of apocalyptic myth in the US. This spike indicates how much fear and myth are circulating in a moment of uncertainty. https://t.co/3DffPOo2YW
The dog whistle target of this Tweet and the comments that follow should be clear enough to anyone who has witnessed our increasingly savage culture wars.
In case it wasn’t, one of the comments provided a helpful re-Tweet that translates this for the Bible thumpers among us:
When I hear men worshipping guns and talking about how there’s nothing that will stop them from defending their family, my mind goes to Naaman in the Bible. Do you remember Naaman? He was a great military leader, and he also had leprosy.
I know, I know: this is silly on one level. Twitter is becoming the last refuge of folks from the Left and Right who express themselves with so little art and so much condescencion that they Tweet with all the time they saved by getting dis-invited from social events, family gatherings, etc.
But I think it establishes an important ground rule: don’t judge other people’s preps. You can offer advice, but in the end their circumstances are not yours and you cannot understand all of the elements of their decisionmaking. We are a nation of, what, 330 million people, with possibly as many individual sets of constraints, strengths and liabilities before them.
For instance, how do these two posters not know that some of these sales are in anticipation of the all too real possibility that emergency services are going to be overwhelmed by a surge of cases? How do they know they aren’t rural people, for whom protection by security services may have been a thin shield even before this current crisis happened?
I am guilty of breaking this rule. When this Covid-19 panic began I questioned, maybe even a little dismissively I am now embarassed to say, the folks who were stocking up on so much water. After all, municipal water supplies (the source of my own water) haven’t even been interrupted in Wuhan, China.
But now that I am sitting here shaking my head at these Tweets I wonder: were some of the people purchasing water on wells that might need service that might not be possible if we go into lockdown?
Tecumseh, whose image requires little excuse to embed in a post
Tecumseh once said “trouble no one about their religion”. Well, I think an analogous mandate should apply in the prepping discussion.
And even if some preps are silly, they probably do provide psychological reassurance that steadies a person emotionally, allowing them to make better decisions in the face of crisis. And that can be as important as material preps.
North Carolina and Georgia lead the pack with 179% and 169% percent increases, but other states notable jumps include Pennsylvania (140%), Texas (128%), Florida (76%), Illinois (67%), New York (48%) and Ohio (40%). I suspect the absolute increases were strong in many other states, but they probably start from a higher base in terms of typical ammunition sales.
Speaking of starting from a low base, that’s maybe the only explanation I can think of why among calibers 40 S&W saw the biggest increase at a whopping 410%.
While the particulars here are from ammo.com’s numbers, I think we can assume this represents a fairly broad trend. And obviously this is Covid-19 driven phenomenon.
And Gold is up too. I have heard it said that ammo sales and gold often move together. Makes sense: both are types of insurance.
I am going to talk about prepping in part through a series
of rules or guidelines that have informed my prepping. In my last post I
introduced my number one rule (“Be the gray man”) because…hey, it’s
the number one rule.
And now I’ll skip to one of the last rules on my list,
because I think it is timely:
Rule 22. Don’t ignore experts, or follow them
Covid-19 is a complex foe. Though we are learning about it
faster than maybe any other pathogen in history (think of the terrifying
darkness that, for instance, surrounded the 1918-1919 Spanish flu) I suspect
that what we know now is only the slightest portion of what we will know in
only a few months.
There are a lot of questions, and many of them can only be
answered by folks with dense technical expertise in virology, medicine,
epidemiology, public health, hospital administration, etc.
At the same time it is already clear that the experts of the
moment are not infallible.
Take masks as a case in point. We are told not to buy masks because they cannot protect the general public and health care workers desperately need them for protection.
It should be self-evident that in some sense both of these claims cannot simultaneously be true. If they aren’t potentially protective then why do health care workers need them?
Now there are some complexities to proper mask usage. You need a fairly tight fit, no breaches in the seal (it’s time to shave your beard of Zeus), etc. But even health care workers fail these standards routinely (I have seen plenty of footage in the last few days of health care workers with clearly ill-fitting masks on, facial hair, etc.).
And you certainly could infect yourself by improperly
handling a mask that has Covid-19 on its exterior.
But couldn’t these issues be resolved with a simple public
information campaign?
It’s also true that an N95 mask won’t stop all virus
particles. But this seems like a silly framing of the issue: even military
grade full face CBRN masks are not an absolute guarantee of protection.
Surely properly used N95 masks must help inhibit some virus
contact and thus reduce risk. Again, why would health care workers need them
otherwise?
The suggestion that health care workers need these masks instead of us really means that there is a shortage of them in the health care system, at least compared with anticipated need. Now, there is some chutzpah in appeals to a shortage. At a minimum, to the extent that this is true much of our health care system failed to prep adequately. I’ve seen folks on Twitter who work in medical supplies argue that the rest of us just don’t understand that the health care sector runs on a just in time (JIT) supply model. They seem less aware of the implications of that statement for their credibility in lecturing us during an emergency.
I have also been trying to learn more about mask
distribution. I have some degree of skepticism that many of the masks ordinary
folks have bought really were in practice at the expense of the health care system.
Yes, there is a shortage of masks, but many of the masks available to us have
already travelled farther down the distribution chain from the bulk purchase
level where many health care facilities operate.
Nonetheless, if health care workers face critical shortages
of these masks, many will get sick. Some will die. And many others will die
because sickened health care workers couldn’t treat them.
The argument that masks can’t help the general public is kind of incredible. And many of those lecturing us about it played a role in bringing us to this sad pass. But nonetheless here we are: a shortage of masks could critically impair our health care response. And that means people will die. Maybe even someone you love.
So where does that leave us? First, this Covid-19 crisis isn’t your last rodeo. Preparation in advance, by ordinary people and health care institutions, could have averted this entirely. That does not help now but is a lesson that should be retained when this all over.
Second, if you’ve got masks keep them. But make them stretch
out as long as possible and only use them when it makes sense. And if you can,
give any masks you can spare to folks who don’t have them.
And if you have a really large number of them, consider
reaching out to your local health care provider to see if they could use some.
How many masks can you realistically use yourself? Put differently, if you are
putting yourself in situations where you need that many masks then you are
probably raising your risk profile. Maybe by a lot.
But perhaps most importantly remember this: experts and
authorities aren’t always wrong. But they aren’t exactly always right either.
And this isn’t the last time this will be true in this crisis. Think carefully
and critically about what you are being told. Cynicism isn’t sophistication,
but faith can be misplaced.
