American Survival Blog

By militia they of course mean a 60-year-old shut in and his three friends. The problem is the man was manufacturing fuse lit grenade loaded with shot. Sorry kids, they days of making a few bombs pre-SHTF to store in your basement ended back when Janet Reno turned the A.T.F into gun-grabbing shock troops for liberals.

That and a little thing called 9/11.

From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

A Clearfield County man who gave undercover federal agents explicit instructions on how to make what he called “bean can grenades” has been arrested on weapons charges.

Bradley Kahle, 60, of Troutville, who said the election of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama would prompt a civil war, is being held pending a detention hearing tomorrow in Johnstown.

He is one of four men now charged in separate but related investigations by the U.S. Attorney’s Office related to possible militia activity.

The other three men, also in custody, were indicted by a federal grand jury last week. They will have detention hearings in Pittsburgh tomorrow.

According to an eight-page affidavit filed in Mr. Kahle’s case in U.S. District Court today, undercover officers have been meeting with him for more than a year.

On Sunday, federal agents served a search warrant on his home, finding 16 improvised explosive devices in a “gun reloading room.” They were made out of cardboard cylinders and sealed on both ends with epoxy, with non-electric fusing systems. Agents also found cans of fragmentation and bags of lead shot.

At a previous visit to his home on April 10, according to the affidavit, Mr. Kahle showed two undercover agents several firearms, including assault rifles and a sniper rifle, as well as 5,000 rounds of ammunition.

Kahle sounds like an old fashioned crazed survivalists, which I franky see nothing wrong with. But my advice to fellow survivalists is to save the bomb making until post-TEOTWAWKI especially if you live in the north east or anywhere liberals hold sway.

h/t N.T.A. Cross posted at Red Alerts.

Time to start hoarding food, and some ammunition? From The New York Sun:

Major retailers in New York, in areas of New England, and on the West Coast are limiting purchases of flour, rice, and cooking oil as demand outstrips supply. There are also anecdotal reports that some consumers are hoarding grain stocks.

 At a Costco Warehouse in Mountain View, Calif., yesterday, shoppers grew frustrated and occasionally uttered expletives as they searched in vain for the large sacks of rice they usually buy.

“Where’s the rice?” an engineer from Palo Alto, Calif., Yajun Liu, said. “You should be able to buy something like rice. This is ridiculous.”

The bustling store in the heart of Silicon Valley usually sells four or five varieties of rice to a clientele largely of Asian immigrants, but only about half a pallet of Indian-grown Basmati rice was left in stock. A 20-pound bag was selling for $15.99.

The story goes on to detail the grumbling of people who don’t realize their support for “green” this or that (especially Ethanol) has led the world to the brink of starvation. There is much complaining about the current trend of of big box stores limiting purchases of rice and other staples. Then the survivalists chime in:

The curbs and shortages are being tracked with concern by survivalists who view the phenomenon as a harbinger of more serious trouble to come.

“It’s sporadic. It’s not every store, but it’s becoming more commonplace,” the editor of SurvivalBlog.com, James Rawles, said. “The number of reports I’ve been getting from readers who have seen signs posted with limits has increased almost exponentially, I’d say in the last three to five weeks.”

Spiking food prices have led to riots in recent weeks in Haiti, Indonesia, and several African nations. India recently banned export of all but the highest quality rice, and Vietnam blocked the signing of new contract for foreign rice sales.

“I’m surprised the Bush administration hasn’t slapped export controls on wheat,” Mr. Rawles said. “The Asian countries are here buying every kind of wheat.”

Mr. Rawles said it is hard to know how much of the shortages are due to lagging supply and how much is caused by consumers hedging against future price hikes or a total lack of product.

“There have been so many stories about worldwide shortages that it encourages people to stock up. What most people don’t realize is that supply chains have changed, so inventories are very short,” Mr. Rawles, a former Army intelligence officer, said. “Even if people increased their purchasing by 20%, all the store shelves would be wiped out.”

Panic inducing stuff. Speakng as a crazed survivalist myself (with the fallow blog to prove it) I say Rawles, a man who uses radical leftist websites to “prove” America’s on the verge of collapse,  isn’t over stating this one. Food shortages are real and even one season of corn crop lost here to trendy eco-nonsense has serious repercussions for the rest of the world.

I’m a free marketer but in this case Bush should be looking into some export caps, because the food shortages world wide will have a cascading effect as countries buy out our stock of food, causing more shortages and ultimately more chaos. If you’re going shopping stock up on long lasting foods you’ll be able to break out 4-8 months from now when shortages drive prices up beyond the ability of many to afford.

Me? I like my canned chicken breast, baked beans and canned fruit. But you’ll want a bigger variety, especially if you have kids. Beans are a good source of protein and most canned vegetables have a long enough shelf life to make storing them when they’re on sale easy.

Don’t panic, but be prepared.

Cross Posted at Red Alerts.

With the survivalist community increasingly based online, misinformation and panicky predictions of impending doom have the potential to spread faster than ever.

The “buy gold” phenomenon now sweeping the net is the best example of rumor based marketing aimed at vulnerable groups of people willing to accept sometimes preposterous claims due to their ideological or cultural views. Gold retailers are have been marketing their services to Americans by playing on the financial fear mongering of a left leaning MSM whose anti-Bush tax cut agenda is best served by convincing people that things are worse than they actually are.

Six years of propaganda, a chaotic middle east gearing up for World War III and China’s manipulation of world currency has substantially weakened the dollar, which is not all bad news by the way, though it does often make stock holdings more volatile. Congress demanded that credit be extended to poor people a decade ago or so, and now all that lending has led to a high default rate, which also hurts stock holders, causes market turmoil and basically makes people panic.

So is gold the answer to that?

Gold can be a wise investment for investors betting against the dollar or worried about long term dollar devaluation, but for the survivalist planning for TEOTWAWKI gold is not the answer. I know, gold prices are soaring and that makes what I’m about to tell you counterintuitive, but the fact remains that survivalists who put their savings into gold are playing a sucker’s bet that will haunt them well after they emerge from whatever apocalyptic scenario they envision.

First things first. Gold is like anything else, it’s only as valuable as long as the demand for it is. Gold prices are soaring in part because of good marketing by gold dealers and affiliate marketers. Many of the sites you’ve recently visited extolling the virtue of gold are what are called M.F.A. websites.

M.F.A. stands for “Made for Adsense” and they’re a powerful money making tool for web marketers. Google’s Adsense program is popular with web marketers because you make money anytime a visitor to your site just clicks an ad; they don’t have to buy anything. Different ads pay different amounts and the best way to guarantee high payouts is to write articles containing keywords that bring up high paying ads.

Guess what term has some high paying Adsense payouts. The payout for just one click can be $1 or more. Compare that to payouts for most subjects, which are often in the pennies per click.

Putting up a site with plenty of content discussing buying gold will bring up high paying ads. Thus site developers have an incentive to put up these sites. As more of the sites crop up, more people link to them, read them and begin internalizing their message, which the developer may or may not even buy into.

If you’re getting your info from a site that looks like this, consider the source.

Consider the message too. Gold sellers want you to believe that all currency is essentially valueless (which in a certain sense it is) but that gold has a value that transcends societal instability or world wide civil unrest. To prove this they point to gold’s wild climb in value, which if anything should prove to you that the gold market is as volatile as any other market.

Gold is only worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it, nothing more, nothing less. Gold popularity stems from its ability to be easily worked into various forms, like rings or bracelets, making it one of the first forms of portable wealth civilization had. If you’ve ever read the old Epic poems like Beowulf or The Niebulungenleid you will find that ancient lords and ladies were called “ring givers” and similar. That’s because gold rings were used as payment to vassals for their loyalty.

But times have changed. People don’t purchase farmland and cattle with a gold earring anymore, and modern money is a state monopoly. There is no way to be 100% sure that after civil unrest or worse, collapse, that people will trade gold at the levels you bought it at, if at all.

Imagine yourself in the closest America had to a TEOTWAWKI scenario, post-Katrina New Orleans. As the days go on and people emerge to trade you grab your trusty gold coins and hit the makeshift market. You plunk down the ounce of pure gold you bought for $800 and change (you bought at a premium) at the table of some enterprising fellow and then … what?

He gives you roughly $800 worth of goods and services for a coin he may or or may not get $800 bucks for when things normalize? He takes your word for it that it’s worth at least $796 or so?

Or he gives you less for it than if you traded in something he could really use?

People are nowhere near as far sighted as you think and unless you live in a community of gold hoarding survivalists, Ron Paul supporters or maybe Ren Festers, the chances of you trading gold coins for services post-TEOTWAWKI and getting anything near their value is a sucker’s bet.

Gold is a good investment in general, though profit wise currency trading seems as good as gold, pardon the pun. But gold isn’t guaranteed to keep its value any more than any other material. As a survivalist I’m all about the guarantee. I use my wealth now to prepare for worst case scenarios by stocking supplies and trade goods. Things like long storing foods, blankets and candles will have value no matter what the situation.

I have no idea, if civilization really collapsed, what the local economy will look like but I think the safest bet is having goods and a set of skills people will pay for. I’m not willing to bet my family’s lives on gold.

After a short term crisis when the banks reopen your gold will be valuable. But so will your check book. Any disaster in which gold would preserve your wealth would probably not be severe enough that having a diverse portfolio would hurt you either. Gold is a good buy, as long the demand keeps the prices going up, but like anything else the bubble will burst eventually.

But that’s just my two cents. Double down on gold if you want, just give me time to set up a site with plenty of Adsense.

Smith & Wesson have generated a good deal of buzz with their Emergency Survival Kit, which is basically a waterproof box with a a selection of camping gear style “survival” supplies (Blast Match, Mylar space blankets and what my generation used to call a rape whistle) topped off with a snub nosed revolver in .460 or .500 S&W. It also comes with a book on bear attacks, which is available on Amazon.com for $12.71.

S&W sells the book along with gun and some basic camping gear for $1469.

The .460 S&W is considered a little less uncomfortable to shoot than the .500, so I expect most people considering the $1469 MSR priced box of goodies will go for that caliber, which has the added bonus of being able to chamber both .454 Casull and the venerable .45 LC rounds. But the .460 is still, in my humble opinion, too much gun for the average survivalist. Unless you spend all your free time at the range, and have an enormous tolerance for recoil, these new mega calibers are not for you. Just how much recoil are we talking about? Watch this vid and see what happens to this guy shooting a .460 around 19 seconds in:

Yeah, that’s alot of recoil. Granted the .460 is bear gun strong but people have been killing bears with guns for a long time now without using calibers that will make the casual handgunner develop a flinch that will affect accuracy and allow the bear in question to get a good mauling in before your next shot.

You’ll also note that the above video is of a much beefier handgun than the snub nose in the kit, which will have more kick to it due to the loss of weight. In a life and death bear attack, accuracy and fast follow up shots are what’s going to save your life, and a snub nosed .460 won’t give either to anyone but the most accomplished big bore handgunner.

Here’s what passes for rapid firing a .460: imagine if you will that a bear is charging the shooter who missed the first shot, and wounded the brute on the second (strong language warning):

A gun is a tool, like a hammer or a knife, and like a hammer or knife it is great for self defense, but its main purpose, for the survivalist, is to put meat on the table when you can’t go to a store. In bear country big bores may make sense but for the majority of us in the lower 48, who are looking for a gun to take us through some Katrina-style rough patches, the .460 is a dead end.

A revolver is an excellent platform for a survival gun, because it’s simple, reliable and less likely to break. In an emergency anyone can be taught to operate one quickly, and a misfire won’t stop the gun from working. But in a TEOTWAWKI-style disaster, you’re not just going to be defending yourself against huge omnivores, you’ll be hunting small game like squirrels and rabbits, fending off packs of feral dogs and you’ll need to have stocked up on bulk ammunition which means going for a reasonably priced caliber. The .460 excels at none of these.

The best all round survival gun is probably the shotgun, with 12ga being the top dog, though I admit to owning and being quite happy with an NEF Survivor in .410/.45. In the sprawling megalopolis of the Northeast, the little .410 does everything I need it to do. When I need to “load for bear,” I grab Federal’s 225 grain semi-wadcutter hollow points.

But in terms of a survival handgun I’d choose either a double action .357, .44 or .45. The .357 is best because most of them can also chamber lower powered .38 specials. While not an ideal bullet for small game, you could conceivably kill a rabbit without wasting too much meat, and still have plenty of oomph left in the other cylinders.

.44’s and .45’s aren’t going to leave much behind but a smear on small game, though deer and similar sized animals are routinely harvested with these calibers. But if it’s stopping power you crave these are more manageable than a .460. If you don’t mind damaging the rifling of the barrel over time (and we are talking about emergencies), I’ve seen plenty of .44 shot loads for taking small game, but I’ve never even met someone who has used them so I can’t recommend them. Taurus offers a .45./.410 revolver in various configurations that’s just eccentric enough to pique my interest. They’re actually being made to fill a demand for anti carjacking guns in Latin America, so I’m not sure how suitable they are for survival use, but let’s just say I’m still hoping for a Judge for Christmas.

Remember that you may be a weight-lifting, gunrange owner with a high tolerance to recoil, but your family, who may need to fire your hand cannon in extremis, are not likely to spend countless hours at the range to get proficient with one of these pocket monsters. And the majority of preparedness-minded people aren’t going to either. Add to that the price tag, for which you could buy multiple revolvers and dozens of Blastmatches, and what you have is kitsch in a can.

The deadly bridge collapse in Minneapolis earlier this month has many people wondering whether they have the skills to survive such a situation. Although vehicle submersion emergencies like the one in Minneapolis don’t often make the national news, such incidents are responsible for approximately 600 deaths each year.

When your car or truck leaves the roadway and plunges into a body of water, it can easily sink in 3 minutes (or significantly less, depending on the weight of the car, length of the drop, angle of impact, and integrity of the door seals.) Because of the speed with which submersion occurs, waiting for first responders to rescue you simply isn’t an option. Instead, advance preparation is key if you hope to escape from your vehicle.

How do you prepare for a situation like this?

Always wear your seatbelt.
Sure, a seatbelt may give you one hell of a bruise on impact, but you’re less likely to experience head trauma if you’re safely strapped into your seat. Remaining conscious gives you a fighting chance if your car is filling with water. Plan to keep your seatbelt on as long as possible to avoid disorientation as the water rushes into the vehicle.

Understand the physics of vehicle submersion.
Once a car begins to sink, the doors and windows cannot be opened due to the immense water pressure. If you are unable to open a door or window before the car starts to sink, you will have to allow enough water into the car to equalize the pressure.This video provides an excellent visual illustration of how the pressure changes as a car becomes completely filled with water:

Make sure you have the necessary tools.
Despite what you see on TV, car windows are nearly impossible to break without a specially designed tool. One highly recommended device is the ResQMe - this ingenious little tool combines a spring loaded window breaker with a razor that can cut through stuck seatbelts. It is inexpensive (just under 10 bucks at Amazon), and is sold as a keychain to help you ensure that you actually have it when you need it.

Other popular options include the BodyGard Multifunction Emergency Tool and the LifeHammer Emergency Hammer. Just remember that windshields (and sometimes side and rear windows) are made from laminated glass that is difficult to break. Check your vehicle handbook to ensure that you have a tool designed to break the windows on your particular car.

Make sure you have the necessary skills.
Have you read the instruction manual for your auto glass breaker? Do you know how to swim?

Plan and rehearse.
Know exactly what steps you will take if your vehicle ends up in the water, always have the necessary tools in your car, and make certain you know how to use those tools. Think about how you will help passengers follow your plan. Practicing these measures, even just going over them in your mind, will help you remain calm, avoid panic, and remember your survival skills when you really need them.

image credit: dubaddict