Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire SKS for home protection?

They're awesome for home defense. You should get 2 of them and put 3-point tactical slings on them. You can crisscross the straps across your back and shoot them one handed.

Don't forget to tuck your nutzak into the top of your tube socks first so you don't stumble over it while you're tuckin and rollin.

Exactly.

Do they make a pistol grip for that trooper model?

Sure thing. That is exactly why all who actually know how to do CQB drop the the slung carbine and transition to their sidearm in close quarters.....fuggin idiot.

I wasn't crazy about the bayonet-mounting apparatus on the muzzle but otherwise a really liked the Russian SKS I had.

One problem with stock SKS's however is the firing pin. As the bolt slams into battery chambering a new cartridge after firing the inertia of the firing pin, which has no recoil spring, will carry it forward and ding the primer of the new cartridge.

Mine did that, to the point it was a wonder it didn't fire the new cartridge.

Not surprisingly there are a bunch of reports of that happening; either two rounds in quick succession or a whole ten-round clip, full auto.

With that free firing pin they can reportedly also be made to inertia fire if the rifle is dropped.

At the height of the SKS years at least one maker was offering a spring kit to be installed around the firing pin to alleviate this problem.

Birdwatcher

The M1 Garand, the M1A/M14 and the M16/AR-15 don't have spring loaded fp's either and dingingprimers is fairly common. PART of why milspec primers tend to be good ju-ju for semi's. Right now,the SKS would be a really good choice when you consider the potential of a "Ferguson" to occur in your AO.

NOTHING wrong with an SKS, esp a para. Someone used to make an aimpoint mount for one that put the optic way forward. The triggers suck but the rifles work. Hornaday loaded 123gr amax's in steel cases for a while. A para and a bandolier with 12-15 strippers would work for some serious social work.

Back in the 1990s, when factory-new Russian SKSs were coming in for $100.00 a piece retail, there was a company selling tuned trigger groups for them. I bought one, installed it, and it was excellent. It's still in there. Works great.

Your not a cop are you? Good lord that would be a disaster.

The SKS slam fire phenomenon was talked about quite a lot during the time they were coming in in large numbers.

Here's a pretty good thread from "The Firing Line" forum circa. 2002...

http://thefiringline.com/forums/showthread.php?t=129778

I've had my Chinese SKS for over 10 years now, and hardly ever a problem. Recently down at the local indoor firing range it started to do somthing interesting, 3 round burst.........

I reloaded the magzine and the same affect I squeeze the trigger I get 2-3 round bursts not all the time but pretty frequently.

and an incident so infamous and seemingly unlikely it seems almost an urban legend..

I have a reason. I watched a man die a few years ago from an SKS that went full auto on him and his buddy after they fed it from a stripper clip. Neither had a good hold on the full-auto SKS, and it rotated up as it continued firing. The last round in the magazine entered his face and exited the top of his head, right there on the firing line. Here's the report, including info from the Sacramento Bee:

As to WHEN this incident occurred I dunno, but Navy Arms put out a recall/warning way back in 1992...

http://www.firearmsid.com/Recalls/FA_Recalls%202.htm

WARNING: We hereby provide written notice to you that some Chinese SKS semiautomatic rifles may pose a serious risk of bodily injury or death.

Some of these rifles may have a manufacturing defect of the engaging surfaces in the trigger-hammer-sear assembly, which can cause intermittent failure of the sear to hold the hammer in a cocked position. This condition can result in the unexpected firing as a round is chambered, without pulling the trigger, or if the weapon is jarred or dropped. This condition may also result in sudden and unexpected automatic fire and loss of control of the firing weapon.

Perhaps not caused by firing pin inertia or sticking in these cases, but your point about using harder Mil-spec primers is well taken. My 1954 Tula example used to ding the primers on the cheap Russian ammo pretty serious.

(...and egad! Has it really been 20 years since SKS's were showing up everywhere for about $150?? )

Birdwatcher

Factory new Russian SKSs were available for $100.00 a piece in the middle 1990s. I bought four at that price. Sold one to my brother for what I paid, sold two more for a tidy profit a few years later, and kept the best one for myself, which I still have.

I have the Chinese SKS. I bought it NIB at a gun show in the early 90's. I have not shot it in years but shot it a LOT before. I have never had problems with it. I just picked up some more ammo for it and plan on shooting it again soon.

IMO, if you defy the basics of gun safety with any firearm, people are going to get hurt. It's not like if the SKS goes into full auto mode that you can't control where the barrel is pointing.

Nope. I know precious little of ballistics in general, as well as the effect of bullet designs and most anything else as far as rifles and pistols and loads go. And while I've managed to roll a few so-called big game type critters on hunts with rifles and pistols, I can say without shame nor embarrassment that while the technical wonders and realities of rifles/loads largely elude me, that one thing I can with confidence say I am pretty familiar with is the shotgun. I know well the way mine pattern loads I hunt with as well as what they will do in a pretty wide variety of applications, the vast percentage of familiarity of what I speak involves killing.

If anyone thinks that even a relatively 'wimpy' 12 bore bird load, say one I often use for teal, with an ounce or thereabouts of #4s, is practically a suicide ready to happen if used in a SD situation of the type we're talking about, well...


Let me opine and offer that the folks of that mind don't have a damned clue as to what a shotgun is capable of, and will do to tissue at close range.

Inside the confines of my home, I'd be willing to bet my life that I could render innocuous up to 5 invaders--with them armed with anything, as long as I had the luxury of shooting first -- and come out no worse for the wear, armed with one of my 12s and a magazine full of bird shot, and I would do so, if I HAD to, without much worry of any harm done to anyone that belongs in the house on the other side of an interior wall.



http://www.diagnoziz.com/facial-shotgun-wound/

Two ADF&G employees sitting in a small boat duck hunting a couple years ago almost within the Municipality of Anchorage were startled by a brown bear at very close range. The brown bear immediately turned to attack them and was met by nothing but birdshot (x12) and miraculously the bear not only failed to touch the hunters, though it sprayed them heavily with blood from its wounds, it was DRT.

Anyone foolish enough to think the birdshot would not work at indoor range and better as the perp approached has not shot much with a shottie...

Linkie: http://www.adn.com/article/girdwood-duck-hunter-recounts-unbelievable-grizzly-attack

Girdwood duck hunter recounts unbelievable grizzly attack
Craig Medred
October 18, 2011

Photos: Portage valley bear attack
The grizzly bear that attacked Tim Baker's duck blind was following a small bull moose.
Photo by Tim Baker
After the shooting stopped, with the grizzly bear dead in the marsh only feet from the duck blind, Tim Baker realized he was in shock. Everything had happened so fast, so damn fast. Only minutes before, he'd been watching a young, bull moose that came running through the brush and tall grass along Portage Creek. The moose had come and gone and passed barely out of sight when Baker and hunting buddy Steve Thompson heard the sound of something else.

Baker thought it was likely another bull moose. It was Oct. 8, the middle of moose mating season in Alaska. Plenty of moose go looking for trouble when they are in the rut. It wouldn't be unusual to see one bull chasing another, looking to pick a fight. Baker turned his head see this one. He isn't quite sure why he reached for the shotgun at the same time. Instinct maybe. A man spends fall after fall in a duck blind and some things just become instinctive. You want the gun close by, just in case.

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No telling when a couple of wigeon or a lone mallard might drop out of the sky into the decoys. They always seem to pick the most inopportune times. Best to keep the shotgun close at hand -- or, better yet -- in hand. Only later would Baker think about the odd twists of fate that mark the fine line between life and death. Having the shotgun in hand, rather then propped in the corner of the blind, might well have saved his life. It almost certainly saved him from being ripped up by a bear, something that happens to a few unlucky souls in Alaska every year.

The wilderness is still home to old, old dangers. A man of the wilderness, Baker understands them well.

"Let me tell you, I am very happy to be here to tell this story," he said in an email to friends just days after his real-life nightmare. "My friend Steve Thompson and I were duck hunting in Portage Valley, and we were attacked by a brown bear. We are both OK, but we killed the brown bear within 10 feet of our duck boat blind. This is one of those stories where you are just glad to be alive to tell it."

The email, which included pictures of the dead bear and the blood-spattered boat blind in which Baker and Thompson had been sitting, soon went viral. Baker started to get messages from people all over the country wanting to know what the hell happened. Many had a hard time imagining two guys sitting quietly in a duck blind being suddenly attacked by a bear.

No chance encounter
On a rainy, windy day in the Anchorage ski suburb of Girdwood -- just 10 or 15 miles back along the Seward Highway from the Portage marshes at the head of Turnagain Arm -- Baker meets a reporter at the door of his small home with its yard full of sporting equipment and politely says he really doesn't want to talk about the bear shooting. But then, he starts to talk, and finally he invites the reporter in.

Almost a week after the incident, Baker appears still somewhat traumatized. He admits as much. An obviously fit, blonde man of middle age, he has been duck hunting again this day. There are a couple of mallards under the canopy in the back of his pickup truck waiting to be plucked. Having grown up in Colorado, he spent much of his adult life on the edge of the Alaska wilderness, and he knows full well the adage about the need to get back on the horse after being thrown off.

The way to overcome the fear is to confront the fear. He is already confronting it, but it's not easy.

Normally, Baker confesses, he doesn't load his shotgun until he's settled in at his duck blind waiting on waterfowl. This morning, though, he stuffed it full of shells as soon as he started into the marsh. He's started packing along slugs, too -- shells designed for killing a bear. He's never carried them before, but he is now, even though he fully understands the odds of being attacked by another grizzly, while in a duck blind, while less than a mile from one of the busiest highways in Alaska, only 30 miles or so in a straight line south from Anchorage -- the largest city in the Last Frontier -- may be one in a million, or more.

And never mind that the slugs wouldn't have helped when the bear charged anyway, because there was no time to swap out the bird shot already in the gun.

Baker is a rational man, a scientist by training. He has worked for 25 years for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. As a commercial fisheries biologist studying Bristol Bay, a western region of the state known for its salmon and its giant brown bears, he has spent plenty of time around bruins. He knows they don't prey on humans. He knows they only rarely attack humans. He knows that when the latter happens it's usually because someone, often a hunter or a hiker, surprises a bear, and the animal -- faced with a choice to fight or flee -- decides to fight.

He knows just as well that most flee.

All of which serves to make what happened to him and Thompson only more incomprehensible.

"I guess if you live in Alaska long enough ..." he said.

Plenty of bears
The country in which Baker hunts waterfowl is at the western edge of a band of swamps and forests only eight miles wide that connects the mainland of Alaska to the Kenai Peninsula. Scientists at one time thought it was a bottleneck restricting the movement of large predators like wolves and bears. They have since learned otherwise. Radio-collared bears have in recent years demonstrated regular movements across the isthmus between the mainland and the Kenai.

But transients are not the only bears making use of the area. There are resident bears, too, though people seldom see them, said Sean Farley, a bear researcher for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. He noted that he once recovered a radio-collar that a sow grizzly in one of his studies had shed -- almost within sight of a salmon-viewing platform the U.S. Forest Service built along a tributary to Portage Creek. She'd visited it with her cubs.

The Forest Service has promoted Portage Valley as a recreation destination. The federal agency has tried to boost salmon runs to the valley while building campgrounds, trails and fishing ponds, turning the salmon, which the bears love to eat, into a tourist attraction. Usually, the bears aren't a problem. Many people don't even know that the bears are around. But they are always here.

Larry Daniels, a Girdwood friend of Baker, remembers sitting in his blind out in a huge, open stretch of the Portage-Twentymile River wetlands near the Alaska Railroad tracks in 2008 when he heard a sound and turned his head to look at what he expected to be a moose crossing the wetlands. What he saw instead was a large grizzly bear staring at him. It turned and walked off when Daniels yelled. He wonders now if it could have been the same bear that attacked Baker and Thompson in brushier country just across the railroad tracks.

No time to do anything but react
Baker wishes there had been time to yell at his bear. There wasn't.

About 30 seconds after the moose appeared, Baker said, the bear showed up moving fast, nose-down like a hunting dog on the trail of quarry. Baker and Thompson had only time to recognize it was not the second moose they expected. As they were registering the reaction that this was a bear instead of another moose, the bear looked up from the scent trail and saw them. Baker estimates the animal was no more than 20 feet away at the time, and in that moment it turned and came for the two hunters.

A bear can cover 20 feet faster than a person can read the paragraph above.

Baker understood this well, and as soon as the bear came he was on his feet and shooting. Size No. 4 steel shot is not what one wants to use to stop a brown bear. Such shot is almost twice the size of the 7-1/2 shot that former Vice President Dick Cheney used to merely wound a companion in one of the country's most famous hunting accidents back in 2006. The bear at which Baker was shooting was two or three times the size of Cheney's 78-year-old hunting friend.

If the pellets from a shotgun couldn't kill an old man, how could anyone expect them to stop a large, healthy grizzly bear pumped up on adrenaline?

Well, here's the thing you need to understand about shotguns. All of those pellets come out of the muzzle together just as if they were a slug, before they start to spread apart. The closer they are to the muzzle, the less they spread. At 15 feet, they might be the diameter of a saucer. At 10 feet, they are more like a steel fist. Baker believes his first shot, fired at the distance of 15 feet or so, had little effect. He believes his second shot, which came as fast as he could work the pump on his shotgun, must have done more damage. And he is sure his final shot of the the three total coming bang, bang, bang as fast he could get them off had to have seriously injured the bear.

The shots didn't, however, seem to slow the animal down. And Baker was quickly out of shells.

Federal waterfowl laws limit duck and goose hunters to shotguns loaded with only three shells. Baker wishes he'd had about seven. That's the number that will fit in a Remington 870 pump shotgun with an extended magazine. That is the style of shotgun a lot of state wildlife officials carry when they need to deal with problem bears. They, however, stuff the magazine with slugs, not bird shot.

Bird shot, even at extremely close range, isn't the best for stopping charging bears, as Baker discovered. His three shots spent, and the bear still coming, he dived out of the boat on which the duck blind had been built. Friends have asked him what he was thinking when he did that. His answer is simple:

"I wasn't going to stay there and let the bear run over me."

Choose your hunting partners wisely
As Baker was diving out of one end of the boat, Thompson was at the other end, swinging the bead on the end of his semi-automatic shotgun at the bear. Where Baker had been forced to shoot over the rock-hard head of the bear, trying to hit it in the shoulder or spine and break it down, Thompson had the exposed flank of the animal at which to shoot. Firing as fast as he could, pointing instead of aiming, he punched three shells into the side of the bear, knocking it away from the boat and down, and then he started to reload as fast as he could.

Thompson, Baker would remember later, believes "I fired my last round when the bear was two feet away. He goes on to say that my head and the bear's head were two feet apart at one point." That would have put the bear eight to 12 feet from Thompson when he started shooting.

Baker originally told friends that he and Thompson were shooting at the bear's head, but they both later realized they had instinctively tried to avoid that, knowing how famous bears are for their thick skulls. Thompson's shots, the two would discover after skinning the bear, ripped into the animals chest and did mortal, though not instantly fatal, damage.

The third of Thompson's shots did, fortunately, knock the bear into a spin, which gave Thompson time to reload. He shot it three more times as Baker scrambled back into the boat, grabbed his own shotgun and reloaded. Baker then put another three rounds into the bear as quick as he could. He's not sure now that shots 10, 11 and 12 were absolutely necessary, but in the moment he and Thompson were -- for lack of a better word -- freaked.

"Neither of us was hurt, not a scratch," Baker emailed friends. "We were just scared [bleep]. We had two dogs with us. The older dog, Mynx, was out of the blind with hackles up about 20 feet away from the bear. The young, 5-months dog, Lulu, was hidden under one of the chairs in the boat, She was shaking and wouldn't come out for awhile. On a side note, we got one duck, a gadwall.

"I have attached a few photos. You will see our boat blind is destroyed. That was from me diving out one side of the blind and the bear coming in the other. There is also a picture of blood on the blind to show how close the bear was when he got shot."

After the nightmare
By law, it is legal to shoot a grizzly bear in self defense in the state of Alaska. These shootings are known by an acronym: DLP. DLP stands for Defense of Life and Property. A DLP shooting is not the sort of thing in which any sensible person wants to be engaged, however, because the DLP law has a couple onerous requirements.

The least of them is the paperwork which must be filled out. More demanding is the stipulation that anyone involved in a DLP kill must skin the bear, remove its skull, and then deliver the hide and skull to the state. The hides are auctioned every year to help raise money for the Fish and Game department. Skinning bears is a time-consuming task. The same goes for packing out a hide that can weigh 100 pounds or more.

Baker and Thompson were lucky in that they have a friend in Portage who lives near where they hunt and has an all-terrain vehicle. They were able to borrow that to drag the dead bear's carcass to the bank of Portage Creek, where the two still very shaken duck hunters skinned it. The hide is now with the state. Farley, the bear researcher with Fish and Game, got the skull. He said it is that of a healthy, mature adult bear. Not a giant bear, but one big enough to tear a man apart.

As to why it attacked, Farley has no clue. But he suspects the incident falls into the surprise-encounter category, the only twist in this case being that the bear stumbled upon the people instead of the other way around.

"The duck blind made a good bear blind," Farley said.

Baker agrees. He, too, believes the bear was surprised to see the two men there and given the choice to fight or flee made a bad choice for all involved. The last thing he or Thompson ever wanted was to find themselves needing to shoot a bear while duck hunting, he said. But of the need to shoot it, he has no doubt, although since his email spread across the Internet he has heard those from those Outside chastising him for killing a grizzly.

"They don't have a clue as to how we live in Alaska," Baker said.

There is no telling what might have happened if Baker hadn't shot. Most people attacked by grizzly bears in Alaska survive. Some of the survivors, however, suffer massive injuries. Wes Perkins of Nome was attacked by a grizzly in May on the Seward Peninsula in Northwest Alaska. He spent June and July at the Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. Doctors needed to do reconstructive surgery on his face. When he finally returned to Alaska in August, it wasn't to go home to Nome.

He moved into his sister's house in Anchorage so he could continue medical treatments as a Providence Medical Center outpatient. At that point, he was still unable to talk because of the tube doctors put in his throat. His brother Nate reported at the time that "he (has) had nine surgeries, so far. They expect him to come back down in six weeks to Harborview" for more.

Perkins' treatment is ongoing. Baker understands full well his own luck in killing the bear before it could get hold of him.

Spend enough time off the road in the back country of Alaska, Baker said, and you will have some sort of dangerous encounter with a bear. It's inevitable. Just hope and pray you're lucky. Alaska is blessed with a large and healthy population of grizzlies, a species pushed to the edge of extinction in the Lower 48. They are wonderful animals. It's just that when things go wrong the blessing can start to look like a curse, and it can happen almost anywhere.

Farley noted that a grizzly of nearly 800 pounds was struck and killed by a car on Lake Otis Boulevard just outside of Midtown Anchorage this August. It had apparently been hanging out in a greenbelt behind Spring Hill Elementary School. Clearly, Farley said, that bear didn't want any problems with people. It grew to its size and ripe old age, in fact, by actively avoiding people. But all it takes is the wrong encounter in the wrong place with the wrong circumstances at the wrong time for a chance encounter to turn ugly.

Just ask Tim Baker and Steve Thompson.

Contact Craig Medred at craig(at)alaskadispatch.com

...and Bingo was his name-o.

Fuggin' right.

Many years ago while visiting the old family farm in NY I took the buckshot out of a factory shell and split them with a chisel, part way through. Then I crimped them on a piece of stranded wire and stuffed it into the shell.

It took several attempts but I finally whacked a woodchuck at about 20 yards with one of them as he left his burrow. It almost cut him in two, with just a shred of hide holding fore and aft together. The whistle as that string left sticks with me to this day, more than 4 decades later...

Ah, ye olde Whistle Pig load. Makes sense.

If that bruin wasn't mounted in a classic wing-cupped, neck outstretched, spilling air as it parachutes nobly into the meat of the set blocks pose, I'm disappointed.

Yep. A $150 chopped and channeled twelve bore of forged steel and walnut, a JC Higgins pawn shop piece, loaded with high base 2 3/4" lead 4's works for us.