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Tuesday, April 16, 2019

April 16, 2019 -- A Quick Run Around the Web

"Shotgun Slugs for Home Defense"--Lucky Gunner (5-1/2 min.)

1. Determine status of weapon (loaded, unloaded? External safety or no? Magazine in or out, loaded or unloaded, external safety or not?
2. How to make a weapon safe: If safety,look for F/S, engage safety. Remove magazine. Lock back slide and visually/physical inspect chamber.
3. How to load the weapon.
4. Muzzle awareness — guns are geometric instruments
5. Trigger finger awareness — location of finger trigger at all time.
But this is the key point: "The above steps are all hands on. No lecture, just show them one time, then let them do it. Don’t do it for them, let them make mistakes and figure it out by themselves." Of course, there are still safety considerations, but the goal is for the student to learn, not for you (the instructor) to lecture, criticize, or confuse the student with the finer points of trigger control, stance, or what have you. He discusses the cycle of training and gives other tips, so read the whole thing.
            Unlike a Colt Single Action Army (SAA) revolver or a modern Ruger SA revolver, the Remington 1875 had a one-piece main frame and grip strap. This made for an exceptionally strong assembly.
             Frames were blued or nickel plated and the hammer and loading gate were case-hardened. Remington Model 1875 revolvers were never manufactured with color case-hardened frames, although most modern 1875 replicas have this feature.
             There was a lanyard ring attached to the bottom of the grip frame. Remington promoted this feature as useful when mounted on horseback.
               Most 1875's had 7-1/2 inch round barrels, while a very few late production guns were supplied with 5-3/4 inch barrels. Calibers were .44 Remington, .44-40 and .45 Colt. .45 Colt revolvers had slightly longer cylinders to prevent inserting a .45 Colt cylinder in a .44 caliber frame.
                 Model 1875 revolvers were supplied with fluted cylinders and most came with smooth, two-piece walnut grips, although checkered grips, ivory grips and pearl grips were available, as was engraving by special order. Examples of beautifully engraved presentation revolvers still exist today and are prized by Remington collectors. 
              Reproductions in varying barrel lengths and calibers are available from Uberti and Taylor's & Co.
              • "No More Stinky Body Armor"--Active Response Training. Tips and tricks to keep yourself and your body armor smelling better, including using Elimishield Hunt Scent Eliminator spray after a shift, washing the carriers with OxiClean Odor Blaster and wiping down the inserts with an antibacterial wipe, and, once a month, washing your carrier, clothes and undershirt with a hunting odor killer detergent. 
              • "Escape and Evasion 101: Overview"--Integrated Skills Group. This article is not about wilderness E&E, but one for the urban environment, including a Western country, in the event you are kidnapped, wrongfully detained, or just need to get out of country ahead of a coup. Among many other things, the author advises: 
                This component of your skill development isn't about violence. It's about tact, discretion, subterfuge, and wit. You can't shoot your way out of being on the lam in a hostile foreign nation, or when professional attackers come for you. All you can do is out-last their will to track you down, or get far enough away fast enough that it's no longer worth their time. Failing that, staying focused on something that keeps you from giving up.
                  If this subject interests you, you should also check out the Dark Arts for Good Guys series of articles at Matthew Allen's Straight Forward in a Crooked World blog, which covers specific topics such a bribery, offensive driving, weapons for the non-permissive environment, and other ideas for getting out of a sticky situation in foreign countries.
                           What would you do if you didn’t have your ‘day job’? I don’t mean “How would you survive.”  At least for a while a prepper should have food and shelter covered. But what would you do as a means of earning the services or goods of others that you might need or want? How would you add value to your community? What would be your new profession?
                             This kind of thinking can be useful in every kind of prepper situation, be it the personal Stuff Hits The Fan (SHTF) of a job loss or the End Of The World As We Know It (TEOTWAWKI). All of us either have or can develop skills that could be of value to others. We’d all be wise to figure out what they are, develop them, and be ready to employ them. Expanding your skill set is also highly portable and very much a stealth prep.
                               The big advantage of using a slug is that it has a much longer effective range than buckshot. A 50-75 yard shot on a deer is usually well within the performance capability of a shotgun shooting slugs. When using a barrel designed to shoot slugs and more precise iron sights or a scope, this range can be extended even further. Though a shotgun shooting slugs will not even come close to matching the effective range of most centerfire rifles, it can easily be used to take ethical shots on animals 2-3x further away than a shotgun shooting buckshot.
                                 Additionally, since a slug is a single large diameter projectile, it makes a very big hole in whatever it hits. Though the exact size of the projectile varies, at .615 caliber, a 20 gauge slug is approximately twice the diameter of a .30-06 bullet and a 12 gauge slug (.729 caliber) is even larger. Shotgun slugs are also usually very heavy: a 3/4 ounce (328 gr) 20 gauge slug and a 1 ounce (437.5 gr) 12 gauge slug are both significantly heavier than a 150 gr .30-06 bullet. Additionally, shotgun slugs retain their energy better and typically penetrate much deeper than buckshot.
                          • Related: "Rifled Slugs vs. Sabot Slugs"--Ammunition to Go. Basic point is that rifled slugs are for smooth bore barrels, while sabot slugs are for rifled barrels.


                          "US Marine shows how to survive in an urban environment"--Greek Prepper (41 min.)
                          This appears to have been the pilot for a 2010 show called "Apocalypse Man". It is sort of like a Bear Grylls program, except aimed at surviving in a city after an apocalyptic event. Taking the events and challenges together in the show, it can come across as silly. For instance, he shows how to make fuel from cooking oil/grease shortly he had scavenged diesel fuel from an underground fuel tank, which doesn't make sense in the sequence of things. It is better to view it as a series of vignettes rather than a logical progression of activities you would want to follow. If nothing else, though, it is entertaining.  

                                 A poster of the blazing cathedral appeared online accompanied by the words, 'Have a good day,' and was created by the ISIS affiliated Al-Muntasir group according to the Terrorism Research & Analysis Consortium.
                                  The poster says: 'Its construction began in the year 1163 and ended in 1345. It's time to say goodbye to your oratory polytheism.'
                                    The jihadists referred to the catastrophe as 'retribution and punishment,' SITE intelligence reported.
                                       When 25 [Hamas] members and supporters gathered at a Marriott Hotel in Philadelphia on October 27, 1993, they were unaware that the FBI was monitoring their deliberations. The confab was a brainstorming exercise: how best to back Hamas and derail the Oslo Accords while concealing these activities from the American government? . . . In the U.S., Hamas was [by this time] perceived as the principal enemy of the popular “peace process.” . . .
                                         That was where [a] new organization would come in. . . . The new entity’s Islamism and Hamas promotion would have to be less “conspicuous.” It would need to couch its rhetoric in sweet nothings like “social justice,” “due process,” and “resistance.” If it did those things, though, it might be more attractive . . . and effective. A Muslim organization posing as a civil-rights activist while soft-pedaling its jihadist sympathies might be able to snow the American political class, the courts, the media, and the academy. It might make real inroads with the . . . progressives who dominated the Clinton administration. 
                                    An unusual species of human apparently lived on the island of Luzon in the Philippines as recently as 50,000 years ago. Based on teeth and bones found there, scientists suspect that these early humans probably stood less than 4 feet tall and had several apelike features. Yet, the researchers say, the bones are distinctly human — from a previously undiscovered species.
                                             Henry had gotten some sign reversed while I was distracting him, so for a moment it looked as if modern humans had originated in Southeast Asia, instead of  Africa or nearby.  So the new task  was to come up with a scenario that might explain that.  I was in a silly mood, which helped: took me about a minute to suggest that some of  the Indonesian islands and their neighbors went back and forth between between being accessible during deep glacial maxima ( low sea levels, Indonesian archipelago turns into Sundaland)  and separated most of the rest of the time:  allowing  for occasional colonization by archaic sapiens, isolation and local adaptation, maybe even speciation.
                                              Since then we’ve found signs of Denisovan admixture in people in Melanesians ( PNG, Australia, the Solomons), hobbits on Flores, other little guys in the Philippines, and old tools in Sulawesi.  Very likely we’re going to find Sulawesi man.  I wouldn’t be surprised to see five or more separate archaic pops in those islands. Maybe derived erectus, maybe something earlier, maybe highly differentiated Denisovans, maybe all of the above and a few dark elves. I still don’t think they made to Australia, but I wouldn’t bet my life on it.
                                                While it looks as if Neanderthals made it to Crete.
                                                  Since there were land bridges to Japan in  glacial maxima, you’d have to to suspect that they had their own local archaic populations as well.  To a decent approximation, if elephants could colonize a place, so could archaic humans.
                                                    Astrobee is "a compact one-foot-cube of a robot in development at NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. This robot is designed to work autonomously without astronaut supervision, or to be remotely operated by mission controllers."
                                                      All in all, from inventory checking to monitoring noise levels and more, the robotic bees are all set to be helpers, and they will serve as the crew's extra eyes and ears.
                                                       Three Astrobee helpers will be joining the Space Station crew—and two of the bees are scheduled for launch soon. They have been given cameras and sensors for navigating inside the space station and avoiding obstacles.
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                                                  Weekend Reading -- A New Weekend Knowledge Dump

                                                  Greg Ellifritz has posted a new Weekend Knowledge Dump at his Active Response Training blog . Before I discuss some of his links, I want to ...