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Originally Posted by Blackheart
Originally Posted by 5sdad
Originally Posted by Mule Deer
Part of it is the decline in hunter numbers in the U.S., and of course most gun magazines are American. Over the past 30-some years the number of U.S. citizens who purchased hunting licenses dropped from around 17 million to under 12 millions, mostly because it's more difficult and expensive to hunt....


And as we decry the decline, we as individuals do our best to promote the decline.
Yeah, tackin up those posted signs and don't let anybody hunt ain't doing the sport any favors.


That's a whole nuther can of worms. Don't go laying this at the feet of private land owners. I used to keep my land open and free to anyone who wanted to hunt and fish. After years of finding trees cut, fields rutted up, truck loads of trash and carcasses from illegal kills, along with other disregards for my land, I have been posting my property. I have found that someone with enough integrity to knock on my door, present himself like a gentleman, and ask for permission, is 99% of the time going to be respectful of my property. And I will still give that person permission. Anyone who is now caught trespassing without permission is arrested and I press charges. It's been working well for six years, now.

Sorry to take the long way around, but to get back to your original statement, the problem is not with landowners posting. It's the inconsiderate slobs who have forced us to do so.


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I like and own all firearms from flintlocks to AR’s, It’s not the guns, it’s the rest of it....
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Originally Posted by eaglemountainman
Originally Posted by Blackheart
Originally Posted by 5sdad
Originally Posted by Mule Deer
Part of it is the decline in hunter numbers in the U.S., and of course most gun magazines are American. Over the past 30-some years the number of U.S. citizens who purchased hunting licenses dropped from around 17 million to under 12 millions, mostly because it's more difficult and expensive to hunt....


And as we decry the decline, we as individuals do our best to promote the decline.
Yeah, tackin up those posted signs and don't let anybody hunt ain't doing the sport any favors.


That's a whole nuther can of worms. Don't go laying this at the feet of private land owners. I used to keep my land open and free to anyone who wanted to hunt and fish. After years of finding trees cut, fields rutted up, truck loads of trash and carcasses from illegal kills, along with other disregards for my land, I have been posting my property. I have found that someone with enough integrity to knock on my door, present himself like a gentleman, and ask for permission, is 99% of the time going to be respectful of my property. And I will still give that person permission. Anyone who is now caught trespassing without permission is arrested and I press charges. It's been working well for six years, now.

Sorry to take the long way around, but to get back to your original statement, the problem is not with landowners posting. It's the inconsiderate slobs who have forced us to do so.
Don't try to feed me your fuggin bullshyt. It does rest securely at the feet of landowners and hunters and particularly landowners who are hunters. All of whom are out to be the big hero trophy hunters these days. Planting food plots, putting out feeders, "letting them go so they can grow" and keeping other hunters from shooting "their deer" so they can raise their very own trophy bucks. Other non huting landowners know how far gone these bozo's who measure their dicks by how big of a buck they kill are cashing in with big lease fee's too. The end result is more and more land locked up and more and more hunters locked out. I've been watching it happen in real time over the last 50 years. If you indeed do give permission to those who ask to hunt on your land you are the exception today, not the rule and I've damn sure knocked on enough doors and know enough landowners/hunters to know damn good and well what I'm talking about. Oh, and as the the inconsiderate slobs. No doubt there are plenty of those these days. The funny thing is, it always seems to be the guys who post their property that have the most trouble with them. My grandfather and great uncle owned farms in Otsego and Delaware Counties in upstate NY. Neither of those properties had a posted sign on it from 1946 when purchased until 2003 and 2007 when they died and the farms were sold. Neither ever had any problems with hunters to speak of and tons of people hunted over the years.

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Originally Posted by eaglemountainman


That's a whole nuther can of worms. Don't go laying this at the feet of private land owners. I used to keep my land open and free to anyone who wanted to hunt and fish. After years of finding trees cut, fields rutted up, truck loads of trash and carcasses from illegal kills, along with other disregards for my land, I have been posting my property. I have found that someone with enough integrity to knock on my door, present himself like a gentleman, and ask for permission, is 99% of the time going to be respectful of my property. And I will still give that person permission. Anyone who is now caught trespassing without permission is arrested and I press charges. It's been working well for six years, now.

Sorry to take the long way around, but to get back to your original statement, the problem is not with landowners posting. It's the inconsiderate slobs who have forced us to do so.



I think you nailed it eagle, and I agree with you, especially with the general hunting public and trespassing. No way in hades' I'd let just anyone hunt my ground, especially nitwits like Blackheart.

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Originally Posted by JGRaider
Originally Posted by eaglemountainman


That's a whole nuther can of worms. Don't go laying this at the feet of private land owners. I used to keep my land open and free to anyone who wanted to hunt and fish. After years of finding trees cut, fields rutted up, truck loads of trash and carcasses from illegal kills, along with other disregards for my land, I have been posting my property. I have found that someone with enough integrity to knock on my door, present himself like a gentleman, and ask for permission, is 99% of the time going to be respectful of my property. And I will still give that person permission. Anyone who is now caught trespassing without permission is arrested and I press charges. It's been working well for six years, now.

Sorry to take the long way around, but to get back to your original statement, the problem is not with landowners posting. It's the inconsiderate slobs who have forced us to do so.



I think you nailed it eagle, and I agree with you, especially with the general hunting public and trespassing. No way in hades' I'd let just anyone hunt my ground, especially nitwits like Blackheart.
As if I'd ever go to that shyt hole you call home. Everybody know there ain't any real huntin goes on in Texas anyways. You ass holes have so perverted the word you don't even know what it means anymore.

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BH, you apparently know as much about hunting TX as you showed in your posts regarding hunting the Adirondacks vs. hunting the West. Those were some real gems.........

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Originally Posted by JGRaider
I'm not a black rifle/AR guy either........others can have at it.


This is my FAV Black Rifle --> --> 70 Black Shadow 300 WM

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Originally Posted by JGRaider
BH, you apparently know as much about hunting TX as you showed in your posts regarding hunting the Adirondacks vs. hunting the West. Those were some real gems.........
I know when I see a nice buck that's been killed in Texas I immediately discount it as a non trophy and figure there's a better than even chance it was shot on a private ranch complete with feeders and likely a " trophy management plan" in place. The fact that feeders/nutrition plans, intense trophy management, culling for improvement of the gene pool and so on and so forth is widely practiced and condoned in Texas has fugged up your sandbox so to speak. At least as far as I'm concerned, no buck taken under those conditions is deseving of legitimate trophy status. Kinda like a big catfish caught out of a private pond where they've been fed every day of their lives or a 15 pound bass caught out of the aquarium at Bass Pro. Wow, what an accomplishment. For both the fish and the fisherman..

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Originally Posted by Blackheart
Originally Posted by JGRaider
BH, you apparently know as much about hunting TX as you showed in your posts regarding hunting the Adirondacks vs. hunting the West. Those were some real gems.........
I know when I see a nice buck that's been killed in Texas I immediately discount it as a non trophy and figure there's a better than even chance it was shot on private land complete with feeders and likely a " trophy management plan" in place. The fact that feeders,/nutrition plans, intense trophy management, culling for improvement of the gene pool and so on and so forth is widely practiced and condoned in Texas has fugged up your sandbox so to speak. At least as far as I'm concerned, no buck taken under those conditions is deseving of legitimate trophy status.



Your stupidity is once again on parade for all the 'fire to see.


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I've got a Blackheart spotting.....

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Originally Posted by Blackheart
I know when I see a nice buck that's been killed in Texas I immediately discount it as a non trophy and figure there's a better than even chance it was shot on a private ranch complete with feeders and likely a " trophy management plan" in place. The fact that feeders/nutrition plans, intense trophy management, culling for improvement of the gene pool and so on and so forth is widely practiced and condoned in Texas has fugged up your sandbox so to speak. At least as far as I'm concerned, no buck taken under those conditions is deseving of legitimate trophy status. Kinda like a big catfish caught out of a private pond where they've been fed every day of their lives or a 15 pound bass caught out of the aquarium at Bass Pro. Wow, what an accomplishment. For both the fish and the fisherman.



Originally Posted by JGRaider
Your stupidity is once again on parade for all the 'fire to see.
How so. All of those things are obviously in wide practice and widely accepted in Texas as is more than evident by the posts made by Texans here on the fire.

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Originally Posted by GregW
I've got a Blackheart spotting.....

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Bwahahahahahaaaa!!!!! You're killing me....


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Originally Posted by Blackheart
Originally Posted by Blackheart
I know when I see a nice buck that's been killed in Texas I immediately discount it as a non trophy and figure there's a better than even chance it was shot on a private ranch complete with feeders and likely a " trophy management plan" in place. The fact that feeders/nutrition plans, intense trophy management, culling for improvement of the gene pool and so on and so forth is widely practiced and condoned in Texas has fugged up your sandbox so to speak. At least as far as I'm concerned, no buck taken under those conditions is deseving of legitimate trophy status. Kinda like a big catfish caught out of a private pond where they've been fed every day of their lives or a 15 pound bass caught out of the aquarium at Bass Pro. Wow, what an accomplishment. For both the fish and the fisherman.



Originally Posted by JGRaider
Your stupidity is once again on parade for all the 'fire to see.
How so. All of those things are obviously in wide practice and widely accepted in Texas as is more than evident by the posts made by Texans here on the fire.
Crickets from the big mouth, big eared Texican ?

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If you owned private property,would you manage for bigger deer? Would you open it up to strangers or save it for family and friends?

I want to hunt mature deer,and I don't trust strangers based on past experiences, so the answer for me is easy.

Public land abounds in many states for those willing to do what it takes to hunt there.

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Originally Posted by ruraldoc

If you owned private property,would you manage for bigger deer? Would you open it up to strangers or save it for family and friends?
No I would not manage for bigger deer. I could have posted my grandfathers farm 45 years ago but did not. I hunted it for many years right along with dozens of friends, neighbors, relatives and strangers. I do own a small parcel of land now and it is not posted. I have come home from work and as soon as I pulled in the driveway saw an orange clad hunter perched on a log in my woods 100 yards from the house. I went up and introduced myself. Told the guy I didn't care if he sat there so long as he didn't shoot in the direction of the house.

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After 21 years in the Air Force, I honestly could have cared less if I handled another M16A2 or M4 again in my life. I became a contractor last July (no my company doesn't carry weapons) and when I went home on R&R, my son enlisted in the Army National Guard, and asked if we could build an AR together. I decided I would and have everything ready for him when he returns home from AIT in the fall. My youngest son, plays the video games where they shoot each other up and I have not had any luck trying to get him to shoot real guns with me. I thought maybe the AR build with the older son, would be two fold and I could get the youngest to go shoot the real deal with me. I prefer bolt action rifles and nice shotguns. Had my son not asked to build an AR, I would have rather spent the money on a new bolt gun in .280 AI and a new 28 gauge for grouse and ptarmigan hunting.

That being said, I have two co-workers that one retired AF and the other did 6 years and got out. Neither one of them deployed while on AD, but all they talk about are AR this and AR that. It's quite boring to be honest with you hearing them talk about having 8 plus AR's all in the same caliber. Oh well, they shoot and support the 2nd Amendment, so that's good.

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Originally Posted by antelope_sniper
Originally Posted by Goosey
Originally Posted by murkydismal
It's the mentality of most of today's youth. More interest in what is portrayed in movies/gaming/tv than in reality.


This is the correct answer. It's very obvious. Video games and movies. You can see it on any forum for the younger crowd. They can list all the military weapons and calibers featured in such games and movies... and have never heard even of a .22-250.

It was probably true in the past, too. Knights. Cowboys. Okay. It's fine.


But the tactical obsessions some people get deep into are a total fantasy. When the Walter Mittys living in their perfectly safe neighbourhoods start taking this stuff far too seriously I can only shake my head.

I think it's something to do with helping to providing a certain feeling of power and masculinity to those folks. Some people will actually get quite angry over someone else recommending a Smith & Wesson AR-15 or hollow-point ammunition which "only" penetrates 11.8 inches in ballistic gelatin. MIL-SPEC!!! FIGHTING RIFLE!! STAKE YOUR LIFE ON IT!! FBI PROTOCOL!!! WHAT IS YOUR LIFE WORTH!!!

A total joke.




Are you sure?

https://medium.com/s/story/the-surp...he-tin-foil-hat-gun-prepper-15fce7d10437

As gun policy discussions unfold in the wake of mass shooter incidents, they routinely end in three buckets. There’s the “tyranny can never happen here” bucket, which the left has mostly abdicated in the wake of Trump winning after they called (and still call) him a tyrant. There’s the “you can’t fight the army with small arms” bucket, which is increasingly unsound given our ongoing decade-and-a-half war with Afghani tribal goat herders. And there’s the “what the hell do you need an AR-15 for anyway?” bucket, which, by its very language, eschews a fundamental lack of understanding of what those people are thinking. I am not a prepper. But I know a few. Some of the ones I do know are smart. They may not be doing as deep an analysis as I present here, on a mathematical level, but the smart ones are definitely doing it at a subconscious level. If you want to understand the perspectives of others, as everyone in my opinion should strive to do, then you would do well to read to the end of this article. To get where we’re going, we will need to discuss the general framework of disaster mathematics.

Stormwater Hydrology and the Mathematics of Unlikely Events
I’m not a writer by trade. I’m a stormwater hydrologist, and in my opinion, a pretty good one. Hydrology is the science of tracking water as it moves through the water cycle, from ocean evaporation through cloud formation, precipitation, groundwater infiltration, runoff, evapotranspiration, riverine hydraulics, and the time series behavior of reservoirs. It is a deep and fascinating field, but one of its most relevant applications to our lives is delineating floodplain boundaries.

To determine a floodplain boundary, we first identify a “storm event” that concerns us. We use historical rainfall data and some statistical magic to calculate the worst storm event a place is likely to experience in a 100-year time span, probabilistically speaking, and we call that the “100-year storm.” There’s a push in the field to quit calling it that, because it confuses the muggles, so now we often say something like “the storm which has a 1% chance of happening in any given year.” Then we take that rainfall data, judiciously apply more math, and turn it into a flow rate in a river. Then we do hydraulics (more math) to determine how deep the river will have to be to carry that much water, and we draw a line on a map.

You should have seen this line, if you’ve ever bought a house near a floodplain. If you bought a house near a floodplain and were not shown this line, contact me professionally to ensure you didn’t make a terrible mistake.

We don’t buy houses in the floodplain if we can help it, because we are risk averse, even though the chance of it flooding in any given year is only 1%. Why? We will live in the house longer than one year. Over the 30-year life of a mortgage, the chance of the house flooding at least once vastly exceeds 1%, because every year is another roll of the dice. It’s not cumulative, though. The mathematics for back-calculating the odds is called a Bernoulli Process. Here’s what it looks like:


Let’s quickly walk through this. The chance of flooding, P(F), is 1%, or 0.01. The chance of not flooding, which we notate P(F’), is 100%-1%, or 99%, or 0.99. To see the chance you don’t flood two years in a row, you would have to “not-flood” the first year, and then “not-flood” the second year, so you multiply the two probabilities together, and get 0.9801. The chance of “not-flooding” 30 years in a row is calculated by multiplying the chance of not flooding with itself, over and over, 30 times, which is a power relationship. P(F’)³⁰. That’s 0.7397 chance of 30 consecutive years of no flood, which means a 26% chance of at least one flood.

And then your mortgage broker doesn’t give you your thirty-year fixed rate loan, because a 26% chance of a disaster is a big chance, when we’re talking about disasters. Now let’s talk about a bigger, nastier disaster than a flood.

Prepper Math
There’s a common misconception in the media about the eventuality for which the preppers are exactly prepping. That’s because they’re a diverse group, and prep for many different things. No, they aren’t planning for a revolution to overthrow the government. (Most of them, anyway.) Mostly they’re planning to keep themselves and their families safe while someone else tries to overthrow the government. That, or zombies. (More on zombies below.)

While we don’t have any good sources of data on how often zombies take over the world, we definitely have good sources of data on when the group of people on the piece of dirt we currently call the USA attempt to overthrow the ruling government. It’s happened twice since colonization. The first one, the American Revolution, succeeded. The second one, the Civil War, failed. But they are both qualifying events. Now we can do math.


(post publication author’s note: This is the “five minute” version of how to do the math. There are certainly deeply more complicated analyses someone could use to establish the P(R) number, and someone with the resources to do so should absolutely do that. But I don’t find this result unreasonable. 5/5/2018)

Stepping through this, the average year for colony establishment is 1678, which is 340 years ago. Two qualifying events in 340 years is a 0.5882% annual chance of nationwide violent revolution against the ruling government. Do the same math as we did above with the floodplains, in precisely the same way, and we see a 37% chance that any American of average life expectancy will experience at least one nationwide violent revolution.

This is a bigger chance than your floodplain-bound home flooding during your mortgage.

It’s noticeably bigger.

Following the same procedure, we can see that even over an 18-year span we have a 10% chance of violent revolution, which is an interesting thought experiment to entertain before you have kids. It’s also important to note that a violent nation-state transition doesn’t just affect people who live in a floodplain. It affects everyone stuck in the middle. Especially the poor and defenseless.

But You’re Cheating
Am I? Two instances in 340 years is not a great data pool to work with, I will grant, but if you take a grab sample of other countries around the world you’ll see this could be much worse. Since our 1678 benchmark, Russia has had a two world wars, a civil war, a revolution, and at least half a dozen uprisings, depending on how you want to count them. Depending on when you start the clock, France had a 30-year war, a seven-year war, a particularly nasty revolution, a counter-revolution, that Napoleon thing, and a couple of world wars tacked on the end. China, North Korea, Vietnam, and basically most of the Pacific Rim has had some flavor of violent revolution in the last 100 years, sometimes more than one. With Africa, it’s hard to even conceive where to start and end the data points. Most Central and South American countries have had significant qualifying events in the time span. And honestly, if we were to widen our analysis to not only include nationwide violent civil wars, but also instances of slavery, internment, and taking of native lands, our own numbers go way up.

Or we could look at a modern snapshot. Counting places like the Vatican, we have 195 countries on the planet today. Somalia is basically in perpetual war, Syria is a hot mess with no signs of mitigation any time soon, Iraq is sketchy, Afghanistan has been in some flavor of civil war or occupation my entire life outside the salad days of the Taliban, and Libya is in such deep throes of anarchy that they’ve reinvented the African slave trade. Venezuela. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict may be a qualifying event depending on how you define it. And again, Africa is … hard to even conceive of where to start. Spitballing, perhaps 3% of the nations in the modern world are in some version of violent revolt against the ruling government, some worse than others. There’s at least some case to be made that our 0.5% annual chance estimate may be low, if we’re looking at comps.

Or we could look at a broader historical brush. Since the fall of Constantinople in 1453, there have been 465 sovereign nations which no longer exist, and that doesn’t even count colonies, secessionist states, or annexed countries. Even if we presume that half of these nation-state transitions were peaceful, which is probably a vast over-estimation, that’s still an average of one violent state transition every 2.43 years.

If we look at raw dialectic alone, we reach dismal conclusions. “Do you think the United States will exist forever and until the end of time?” Clearly any reasonable answer must be “no.” So at that point, we’re not talking “if,” but “when.” If you don’t believe my presumed probability, cook up your own, based on whatever givens and data pool you’d like, and plug it in. The equations are right up there. Steelman my argument in whatever way you like, and the answer will still probably scare you.

Eyes on the Horizon
In 2010, 8.5 million tourists visited Syria, accounting for 14% of their entire GDP. Eight years later, they have almost half a million dead citizens, and ten million more displaced into Europe. They didn’t see this coming, because if they did, they would have fled sooner. Nobody notices the signs of impending doom unless they’re looking carefully.

Further, the elites of a nation rarely take it on the chin. They can hop on a plane. The poor, disenfranchised, and defenseless experience the preponderance of the suffering, violence, and death. They’re the ones that should be worried.

Pretend you’re someone with your eyes on the horizon. What would you be looking for, exactly? Increasing partisanship. Civil disorder. Coup rhetoric. A widening wealth gap. A further entrenching oligarchy. Dysfunctional governance. The rise of violent extremist ideologies such as Nazism and Communism. Violent street protests. People marching with masks and dressing like the Italian Blackshirts. Attempts at large scale political assassination. Any one of those might not necessarily be the canary in the coal mine, but all of them in aggregate might be alarming to someone with their eyes on the horizon. Someone with disproportionate faith in the state is naturally inclined to disregard these sorts of events as a cognitive bias, while someone with little faith in the state might take these signs to mean they should buy a few more boxes of ammunition.

“Prepping” is Just Disaster Planning
“But if one of these things happens, you’re screwed anyway!” Well, sure. The point of disaster planning for a hurricane, tornado, earthquake, or wildfire, is not to be “not-screwed.” It’s to be notably less screwed. Ready.gov is the central point for information about family disaster preparedness planning here in the US. They list a wide range of things they think you might want to prepare for. Chief among these is flooding, which is my field, but they also list many other things an alarmist might include in their family disaster preparedness plan, from volcanoes and tsunamis to space debris, nukes, and terrorist dirty bombs. Violent nation-state transition doesn’t make the list, though, because the list was compiled by the government. But the best one to prepare for, in my opinion, is zombies.

The zombie apocalypse is obviously pure fiction, but it has an allure to a few tongue-in-cheek preppers because of its functional completeness. If you are prepared for zombies, you are literally prepared for anything. The key fixture of zombie preparedness is a fundamental understanding of what happens when our systems of economics, governance, and civil infrastructure fail. There’s a great one going on right now in Venezuela, with people eating rats and dogs, incapable of trading in the local currency, and a general humanitarian disaster associated with descent into anarchy. No class of person is more capable of riding out a situation like that than a well-provisioned zombie prepper. Various fixtures of zombie prepping include:

Food stockpiles
Access to clean (or cleanable) water
Shelter that exists away from the zombies (a.k.a. other citizens)
Subsistence agriculture
Medicinal supplies
A way to defend items 1–5. In modern terms, that means firearms. Rifles in particular.
Optional: Escape method. Sailboats rank highly on any objective list here.
For the ethical zombie prepper, firearms are a relatively small piece of this overall disaster plan, but a necessary one. For an unethical zombie prepper, firearms may be all they need, if they can find someone else from whom to steal.

The Bosnian War is a great test case for this, and many firsthand experiences have been chronicled since, about how prepper-minded people were the likeliest to survive.

And it’s not just tin foil hat equipped right wingers thinking about this stuff. There’s a widely reported trend of Silicon Valley billionaires building apocalypse bunkers, as many as 50% according to Steve Huffman, the guy who founded Reddit. Yishan Wong, another former Reddit CEO, goes through a conceptual ROI analysis with The New Yorker.

Yishan Wong, an early Facebook employee, was the C.E.O. of Reddit from 2012 to 2014. He, too, had eye surgery for survival purposes, eliminating his dependence, as he put it, “on a nonsustainable external aid for perfect vision.” In an e-mail, Wong told me, “Most people just assume improbable events don’t happen, but technical people tend to view risk very mathematically.” He continued, “The tech preppers do not necessarily think a collapse is likely. They consider it a remote event, but one with a very severe downside, so, given how much money they have, spending a fraction of their net worth to hedge against this . . . is a logical thing to do.”
And it’s not just the techies. A lot of folks in Hollywood are thinking the same thing. It’s big business out there.

Gary Lynch, GM at Rising S Bunkers, a Texas-based company that specializes in underground bunkers and services scores of Los Angeles residences, says that sales at the most upscale end of the market — mainly to actors, pro athletes and politicians (who require signed NDAs) — have increased 700 percent this year compared with 2015, and overall sales have risen 150 percent.
So that’s another canary in the coal mine for the tin foil hat right winger — you have a class of people who are vehemently demanding confiscation of rifles in the public sphere, while some of them are secretly building underground fortresses in the private sphere.

Buy another box of ammo. Clearly.

A Fundamental Disconnect on Rifles
When our semiannual mass shooter culture war erupts after the latest round of media Handwaving Freakoutery, it always seems to focus on rifles. Most recently, we had some guy cut his own AR-15 in half on YouTube, to thunderous applause. Don’t mischaracterize my position. If Mr. Pappalardo thought that he might be prone to murdering someone with his rifle, or more statistically likely — purposely killing himself with it, then he should absolutely sell or destroy it. But if he isn’t going to do either of those things, all he must do to ensure it doesn’t hurt anyone is not shoot anyone with it. He could leave it in his attic with a couple of cans of ammunition, just in case something horrible does transpire where he might actually need it. There are certain things in the world you’d rather have and not need, than need and not have. And paramount among those things, given the state of the modern human condition, is a rifle.

So if you ask someone else on the opposite side of a culture war argument, “Why would you want to own one of those things, anyway?” please don’t be surprised if they simply respond, “Why wouldn’t you?”

Excellent post.
I built my AR-15.450BUSHMASTER for deer hunting. (Ohio requires a straight wall cartridge between. 357-.50cal).
I went with the AR platform because it's modular. Swap uppers, and magizines, and it's a new rifle. Different ammo, different range, different purpose. I can't afford a lot of different rifles. But I can watch the sales, and buy another piece from time to time.
With the ammo shortages we have all seen, different uppers means options are available.
(I know someone with a .35 Remington, and had only 4 bullets left, and could not find a source for more ammo. He was asking if anyone had any, or could find any for him. At the time, he could not find any at any price.)
I haven't decided on my next upper yet, but it will likely be a 5.56, or it could be a 6.5 Grendel.
It ain't about looking "tacticool" as being Versatile.

As for the rookie cop showing up at the range wearing his work gear, how many times have I heard "train as you will actually use it, practice as if it were real." ?
Besides, if he did have some issue with his work gear interfering his accuracy or ability, it would be much better to discover that at the range, than when someone's life could be lost, due to a sleeve getting caught, or a vest not fitting right. If it could effect his accuracy, he should practice in it.
I know a bowman who when hunting in a Ghillie suit without practice beforehand. It cost him his deer, because he got hung up in his suit.


An unemployed Jester, is nobody's Fool.

the only real difference between a good tracker and a bad tracker, is observation. all the same data is present for both. The rest, is understanding what you're seeing.

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Originally Posted by Blackheart
Originally Posted by ruraldoc

If you owned private property,would you manage for bigger deer? Would you open it up to strangers or save it for family and friends?
No I would not manage for bigger deer. I could have posted my grandfathers farm 45 years ago but did not. I hunted it for many years right along with dozens of friends, neighbors, relatives and strangers. I do own a small parcel of land now and it is not posted. I have come home from work and as soon as I pulled in the driveway saw an orange clad hunter perched on a log in my woods 100 yards from the house. I went up and introduced myself. Told the guy I didn't care if he sat there so long as he didn't shoot in the direction of the house.



Very, very weird. Getting to know poachers?


- Greg

Success is found at the intersection of planning, hard work, and stubbornness.
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Let me throw in another angle on this tactical thing.

I was a caver in the late 70's to mid 80's. I went down the hole about every 6 weeks during that time, and I wore and used pretty much what everyone else was using. Most of it was milsurp. We went in wearing jungle boots, wearing web belts and carrying gas mask bags. We looked like a cross between garbage collectors and light infantry.

There wasn't anything military about us. It was just that caving had a bunch of distinct demands, and old military surplus was the only thing out there at the time that met those demands. We were slogging through water in 50F and 100% humidity for 12 hours at a time, and we needed gear that would stand up to the abuse. Stuff left over from WWII and Korea and Vietnam were the only things out there.

Nowadays, cavers look like they have just left a Pilates class. It's all bright colors and stretchy fabrics and fancy. Over time the manufacturers found the niche and started making stuff for it.

I see somewhat the same thing going on with hunting. On the one hand, you're looking for stuff that best meets the demand of the sport at the right price point. Mil spec and Mil Surp does the trick. Second, you have manufacturers that are trying to situate themselves into the market and meet consumer expectations.

And it isn't just hunting anymore. I had a consultant come in the other day with a tactical Molle laptop case in Desert Tan.


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