I recently had a conversation with a co-worker who owns a lot more firearms than me. When asked whether I'd gotten any "new toys" over the break, I said no, I "have enough already." This was met with a mildly derisive chuckle and the declaration that "no you don't."
I retorted with "I already own more than I can carry."
The response I got from him was "I don't plan on walking anywhere."
Now, I quickly realized how stupid I had been and adjusted my responses in the conversation going forward, because you can tell where this would have ended up had I continued as I started. Too quickly I forget that other people aren't interested in a practical discussion, but are more often than not just seeking validation in some form or another.
When it comes to emergency or disaster preparedness, one of the biggest mistakes you can make is investing considerable time and energy into only one possible outcome. It's easy to do, because most folks don't talk about the presumptions going into their assertions, they just take a stance and then challenge anyone to take them on.
For example, preparing for a flood is different than preparing for war.
Preparing for a nuclear blast is different than preparing for an economic collapse.
In every "End Of The World As We Know It" scenario, there are going to be different skills, tools, and mindsets required in order to increase your odds of surviving, let alone thriving.
The simplest example of this is in how people try to decide whether they'll "bug out" or stay put in a time or crisis. Why you would do one or the other will be based on a large number of variables, yet folks want to ignore such subtlety to instead claim that there is a single correct answer, instead of addressing the fact that all they're doing is changing how the odds look for them under a given set of circumstances.
If there is nuclear fallout in the air, traveling is probably not going to be a good idea, likewise if there are foreign armies on the march.
If your house has just been washed down the river, or been burned by rioters, your only choice is to travel.
If you are only prepared for one, you'll be screwed if the other occurs.
If you are relying on a huge arsenal, you'll be screwed if you lose it.
If you are relying on not having a huge arsenal, you'll be screwed by anyone who has held onto one.
The frustration with the conversation, and how many of these conversations end up going, is that folks presume they can predict the future, and have then planned for that future, and have pride in how well they've planned for that future. It's not a scientific thing, it's an emotional thing, because nobody can really predict the future with any great degree of reliability.
If your plan is to be the neighborhood warlord, do you keep yourself armed enough to fight back into your neighborhood? Unless you work from home, or carry around said arsenal with you at all times, you're going to be in scenarios where you don't have the tools and resources you expected to have, and you still need to act. You can't just tell everyone to wait while you get ready.
It can be entertaining to discuss things as if all of our plans will be successful, but nowhere in life is anyone so. In FOREX, for example, one is a great success if 51% of the trades done are profitable. Listen to stories of entrepreneurs about their success rate with inventions and start-ups.
Most plans fail miserably, or are thrown away quickly, so instead of investing yourself into a single plan, develop the skills to create new plans. Don't get really good at implementing one plan, but get good at the "OODA" loop. Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.
Then, invest in tools, devices, and skills that support such circumstantial flexibility. People and circumstances can take away what you have, but neither of those can change what you know, or what you can do.
Don't brag about how well you've prepared for what you think will happen, but in how well you can react to the unexpected and still come out on top.
Showing posts with label SHTF. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SHTF. Show all posts
20.12.18
Shewts gewd, raht?
In SHTF, you won't be able to replace barrels on your rifles very easily, because folks will be struggling just to find their next meal.
Many of the "old" cartridges that have fallen out of favor in the modern shooting world have done so because marketing is more powerful than physics.
For folks who aren't "gun people", bullets fly in an arc when you shoot them. The easier it is for a bullet to hit your target without needing to account for how wind will move the bullet left or right, or accounting for drop due to distance, the "better" a cartridge is determined to be, for largely the same reasons that people think buying a Ferrari means they're a better driver.
Now, this isn't done with just marketing magic, but through tuning the velocity of the bullet and by choosing bullets with different dimensions. This is something you can already do if you hand load ammunition, but what currently drives the gun market is not capability, but ease.
You can build a car that has a better 0-60 or skidpad rating that a Ferrari for a fraction of the cost, but if someone can just buy something off-the-shelf and "shoot better" than someone else, it won't matter if they could have done the same thing less expensively. Status, not function.
So, the first part of the "not-magic" is that when shooting a lighter bullet, the felt recoil will also be smaller, because the physics of accelerating the bullet to a certain speed require less force. F=MA, so at the same acceleration, you'll need less force if you have less mass. This is a big part of how modern rounds of a smaller caliber "reduce recoil", and do so off-the-shelf, because they're shooting a lighter bullet.
The thing is, though, that shooting a lighter bullet to the same velocity requires more powder charge, due to how inertia works. A lighter bullet is going to start moving down the barrel faster than a heavier one because of inertia. Heavier bullets will resist accelerating longer than a lighter bullet, so in order to keep generating pressure behind the lighter bullet, more powder has to be burned so that the drop in pressure as the bullet travels down the barrel doesn't occur fast enough to prevent the bullet from reaching the desired speed.
Think of it like how, the better you can keep your lips pressed together, the more pressure you can hold in your mouth.
Now, given F=MA above, it's not only easier to accelerate the bullet when it's lighter, but if you've got the same barrel length and force being applied, the final velocity of the bullet will be higher as well. Higher velocities make a "flatter" bullet arc, because the faster a bullet is the less time gravity has to work on the bullet before it finds its target.
You can also do things like use a smaller diameter bullet, because the smaller the diameter, the less that wind resistance will come into play.
The modern "hot rounds" all thus tend to be smaller in diameter than "old" rounds, lighter weight bullets than "old" rounds, and are universally praised in marketing as being "better".
Except that, you remember how you need more powder for these lighter rounds?
Each time you fire a gun, you do a very small, but still real, amount of damage to the barrel and chamber. Most firearms are capable of making many thousands of shots before that damage becomes a problem.
These new rounds shorten that lifespan considerably before a replacement barrel is required.
If you live in the 1st world, and shoot for fun, then this isn't really an issue. Just go online, order a replacement barrel, and then install it. Most new firearms are also designed to be easily serviced by the user, so you often don't even need a gunsmith or gunsmithing skills.
If SHTF though, you no longer live in the 1st world.
Instead of a controlled shooting environment like a range, you're most likely going to be dealing with suburban distances which are frequently much shorter. It won't matter if you could reliably hit a stationary gong at a thousand meters if the hostile you need to kill is moving quickly and at only 50 meters away.
Further, to be very accurate you must also deal with issues in poor reliability, because accuracy requires consistency down to very small minutia, every component needs to be doing the same exact thing the same exact way every time you shoot. Variation means things don't work exactly the way they're expected, and you won't know by how much until after you've already pulled the trigger.
Like putting the wrong gas in your Ferrari. Might still run, or it might not at all.
In evaluating your firearm choice in preparing for SHTF, you thus cannot rely on what is currently popular. The AR-15 platform is fine for its intended purpose, but as I've written before, people have deceived themselves as to what that intended purpose is, and a lot of folks think their tacticool AR-15 will give them any sort of edge in the post-apocalyptic wasteland.
The reality is that they've got a weapon which wasn't designed based on raw lethality, on efficiency of materials across the entire lifespan of the weapon, but on how well the weapon would sell in a particular market.
1st world military and SHTF are not the same market.
Prepare based on what you will encounter, not on what you currently experience.
There's a reason certain cartridges and firearm layouts were popular in the past, when technology and materials science weren't what they are today. We'll be entering such a "dark era" again, when we can't rely on modernity to be our savior, and if we can thus learn from the past, why things did or didn't work and why, then we'll actually be ready to deal with what is to come.
Many of the "old" cartridges that have fallen out of favor in the modern shooting world have done so because marketing is more powerful than physics.
For folks who aren't "gun people", bullets fly in an arc when you shoot them. The easier it is for a bullet to hit your target without needing to account for how wind will move the bullet left or right, or accounting for drop due to distance, the "better" a cartridge is determined to be, for largely the same reasons that people think buying a Ferrari means they're a better driver.
Now, this isn't done with just marketing magic, but through tuning the velocity of the bullet and by choosing bullets with different dimensions. This is something you can already do if you hand load ammunition, but what currently drives the gun market is not capability, but ease.
You can build a car that has a better 0-60 or skidpad rating that a Ferrari for a fraction of the cost, but if someone can just buy something off-the-shelf and "shoot better" than someone else, it won't matter if they could have done the same thing less expensively. Status, not function.
So, the first part of the "not-magic" is that when shooting a lighter bullet, the felt recoil will also be smaller, because the physics of accelerating the bullet to a certain speed require less force. F=MA, so at the same acceleration, you'll need less force if you have less mass. This is a big part of how modern rounds of a smaller caliber "reduce recoil", and do so off-the-shelf, because they're shooting a lighter bullet.
The thing is, though, that shooting a lighter bullet to the same velocity requires more powder charge, due to how inertia works. A lighter bullet is going to start moving down the barrel faster than a heavier one because of inertia. Heavier bullets will resist accelerating longer than a lighter bullet, so in order to keep generating pressure behind the lighter bullet, more powder has to be burned so that the drop in pressure as the bullet travels down the barrel doesn't occur fast enough to prevent the bullet from reaching the desired speed.
Think of it like how, the better you can keep your lips pressed together, the more pressure you can hold in your mouth.
Now, given F=MA above, it's not only easier to accelerate the bullet when it's lighter, but if you've got the same barrel length and force being applied, the final velocity of the bullet will be higher as well. Higher velocities make a "flatter" bullet arc, because the faster a bullet is the less time gravity has to work on the bullet before it finds its target.
You can also do things like use a smaller diameter bullet, because the smaller the diameter, the less that wind resistance will come into play.
The modern "hot rounds" all thus tend to be smaller in diameter than "old" rounds, lighter weight bullets than "old" rounds, and are universally praised in marketing as being "better".
Except that, you remember how you need more powder for these lighter rounds?
Each time you fire a gun, you do a very small, but still real, amount of damage to the barrel and chamber. Most firearms are capable of making many thousands of shots before that damage becomes a problem.
These new rounds shorten that lifespan considerably before a replacement barrel is required.
If you live in the 1st world, and shoot for fun, then this isn't really an issue. Just go online, order a replacement barrel, and then install it. Most new firearms are also designed to be easily serviced by the user, so you often don't even need a gunsmith or gunsmithing skills.
If SHTF though, you no longer live in the 1st world.
Instead of a controlled shooting environment like a range, you're most likely going to be dealing with suburban distances which are frequently much shorter. It won't matter if you could reliably hit a stationary gong at a thousand meters if the hostile you need to kill is moving quickly and at only 50 meters away.
Further, to be very accurate you must also deal with issues in poor reliability, because accuracy requires consistency down to very small minutia, every component needs to be doing the same exact thing the same exact way every time you shoot. Variation means things don't work exactly the way they're expected, and you won't know by how much until after you've already pulled the trigger.
Like putting the wrong gas in your Ferrari. Might still run, or it might not at all.
In evaluating your firearm choice in preparing for SHTF, you thus cannot rely on what is currently popular. The AR-15 platform is fine for its intended purpose, but as I've written before, people have deceived themselves as to what that intended purpose is, and a lot of folks think their tacticool AR-15 will give them any sort of edge in the post-apocalyptic wasteland.
The reality is that they've got a weapon which wasn't designed based on raw lethality, on efficiency of materials across the entire lifespan of the weapon, but on how well the weapon would sell in a particular market.
1st world military and SHTF are not the same market.
Prepare based on what you will encounter, not on what you currently experience.
There's a reason certain cartridges and firearm layouts were popular in the past, when technology and materials science weren't what they are today. We'll be entering such a "dark era" again, when we can't rely on modernity to be our savior, and if we can thus learn from the past, why things did or didn't work and why, then we'll actually be ready to deal with what is to come.
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