Village Praxis: How to Structure Range Practice by John Meyers

“Training is a process, not an event.” – Claude Werner “Either learn to drive a rifle or ride a rail car.” – Bill Buppert Publisher’s Note: The blog is at 95% and I am still black-listed by Verizon and ATT on cell but not WiFi. I remain blacklisted on all DoD websites. I would suggest that anyone who is opposed to human slavery will find themselves harassed by providers on the ‘net. Just a fact of life.  The forum is now accessible, but we had to create it from scratch. We will start to add sub-forums on the forum like the old version on request. You’ll find in the forum tab, go ahead and join.  ZeroGov t-shirts are on the horizon.  I have several avocations and one of them is as a layman observer and listener of jazz to include the Great American Songbook which was probably born around 1911 with Irving Berlin’s splendid and sublime Alexander’s ragtime Band. Four.years after in 1915, the greatest song interpreter of the twentieth century was born, Frank Sinatra. One of the few benefits of WWI was the birth of the American jazz music industry after 1918 into a commercial empire. I have been enjoying the 100 song retrospective by the musically erudite and eloquent Mark Steyn.  I have also enjoyed one of the best single volume treatments of the jazz oeuvre in But Beautiful by Geoff Dyer.  Some of the most vivid jazz criticism I have read of late.  On the home front, I have concentrating on optics upgrades with Vortex Viper scopes and shifting the pistol RMR configurations to 7 MOA amber-dotted dual illumination devices by Trijicon. Update 8-13-2018: ZeroGov T-shirts are now available on Amazon for 22 debt-bucks shipped.  The always scintillating John Meyers has written another ball-buster of an essay. -BB It’s surreal. If the average liberty adherent went to sleep in the late 80’s and woke up in 2018, they’d be flabbergasted. Conservatives love Russia and Liberals hate it. Liberals are in favor of free trade and Conservatives are in favor of Protectionism (i.e. taxes). Democrats want to abolish a department of government while Republicans fight vehemently to boost its funding. Lefties on the fringe are arming themselves and a conservative populist president is responsible for one of the biggest budgets and deficits in history as well as the more gun control than the entire eight years of Obama.  There seems to be validity to the unnamed law that says ‘the new president will always be worse than the last.’ The proprietor of Attack the System, Keith Preston, a website dedicated to a big tent, ‘pan secessionist’ approach to curtailing Leviathan made a social media post that sums up the current state of affairs.  He commented that the next civil war in these united States would be a giant food fight between one side hurling Starbucks Latte’s and the other tossing Chic Fil-A sandwiches. At this point I cannot find fault in that argument. Change my mind. The topic of a looming domestic conflict is popular to speculate about in certain circles and the very real threat of dealing day to day with criminal violence is a motivator to train.  The folks in the survival milieu tend to be very good at amassing piles of stuff but often the skillset to employ the equipment can be lacking or suffering from severe Dunning Kruger syndrome. Which brings us to the topic du jour, structuring practice at the range particularly for a group of dedicated folks. The following is merely written as a set of contextual suggestions and/or a detailing of things I have found beneficial. Why Group Range Days?  The opening quote of this article by Claude Werner may seem self-evident, however it is lost on many. Some folks approach the Tactical Art of Gun-Fu with a definitive mindset. “I’ve taken that class!” or “I got my CCW permit already, I’m good.” The common refrain of the Retreat Sniper is “I’ve hunted all my life.” Le Sigh. Skills must constantly be worked to just maintain your skill level. Even more work must be done to increase performance. Training is a process, indeed. We can accomplish quite a bit of work in the shooting arena by ourselves. Working fundamentals, turning techniques into skills and honing those skills to competency can be done on one’s own time. So why should we also seek practice sessions in a group environment?

Tenth Anniversary of Secession Tales by Bill Buppert

  Publisher’s Note: For those of you silly enough to have watched the collectivists in the media melt down in the past 18 months over the reign of the Mango Emperor, this is nothing new. The deep state urinalists have been doing this discrediting of Grand Old Politburo Rezidents in the Offal Office since the first Nixon regime. Ted Kennedy tried to enlist his Soviet contacts and handlers in the 1980s to destabilize Raygun’s proceedings. I say again, please stop watching any media outlet on TV, the internets or whatever portal you employ. Only read opinion pieces. This gives you the distinct advantage of establishing and calibrating a single most accurate picture by knowing your bias filters arrayed against the stated bias filters of the opinion piece. Then use Mortimer Adler’s syntopical mode of reading by analyzing three or more related essays or long form journalism from a source whose bias you can identify. I used to love to read Alexander Cockburn’s Beat the Devil column in The Nation because he would engage in savaging his own lefty colleagues just as adroitly as his attacks on the individualists. I loved Christopher Hitchens’ brutal and eloquent “Hitch-slapping” of his opponents both collectivist and individualist. Now they’re both dead and I mourn their passing. Glenn Greenwald comes close to the mantle but he is far too well mannered. In addition, cut the cable and satellite. Yesterday. You are funding your own cultural suicide. Stop giving money to your hangmen. All communists want you dead. Don’t read newspapers. I celebrate every death of a newspaper. Don’t read any ‘net sites that have locked out comments. Fuck. Them. When I transferred providers for my blog, my Simple Machines forum disappeared without a trace sort of like the CRU climate data in London. Gone. I always had a low-density membership there and wonder now at resuscitating the forum corpse and simply using the comments on the blog for the rhetorical sparring. Let me know what you think as the readership here. My site is also having access problems on Sprint and Verizon unless you use WiFi, my cyber-ninja tells me he has ninety sites he maintains and mine is the only one "blacklisted" like this. Go to the range, get your kit in order, make peace with your creator[s] and use the time the Mango Emperor has afforded you to get ready for the coming Endarkenment. My lovely younger daughter has started a T-shirt business and offered some custom T-shirt for ZG we are designing, and I wanted to test the waters for demand. I will only produce the premium shirts at about 22 each. My email is on the site if you search so send me your inclinations on those. Yes, it does seem like a vanity project of sorts. But I always go above and beyond when my children start some kind of entrepreneurial enterprise. This is the tenth anniversary of my popular Secession Tales series on LewRockwell before I was excommunicated in 2008. Please be advised I have nothing whatsoever to say out of sorts about Lew, his site, his rules. I still visit there and thank him for what he has dome for abolition and anarchy. Enjoy. -BB "Power attracts the corruptible and absolute power attracts even worse".   Buppert's Corollary to Acton's Axiom   "Good Morning, Governor, how might we…" "Mr. President, I realize you are a busy man so let’s get down to brass tacks…we are calling the ball and withdrawing our support of your Administration and the Federal government in DC. Effective immediately, we have coordinated to place all outgoing receipts to the IRS in a caged account here in Boise…" "Governor, you can’t do that…" "Please don’t interrupt while I am speaking as we are from this point onward peers in the family of nations. I hope you have reviewed the diplomatic instruments we sent by courier last night to Department of State which delineates the terms of our divorce." "I did receive those and you have no earthly idea the can of whoop-…" "Please, sir, maintain the decorum of these proceedings so we can move forward to an amicable separation. I give you my personal assurance on the safety and well-being of all Federal personnel we have detained for immediate repatriation to the remainder of these United States. Any non-law enforcement Federal personnel who wish to remain behind will be permitted to do so." "I hope you have thought through the consequences of what you are embarking on."

Deep Throating the [D]eep [S]tate by Bill Buppert

Publisher’s Note: Just returning from visiting my eldest daughter in Oregon. A beautiful state but I would never live here, we entertained moving to the Rogue River area in 2003 but were fortunate in moving to Sandpoint, ID instead. On another note, we were gob smacked by the number of weed stores in Eugene alone. And, of course, as I predicted the state would swoop in and tax the shit out of it, regulate the dog balls off of it and encourage a black market to take up the slack once the MJ started to price itself out of conventional prices in the underground. The local communist weekly covered this here: “Oregon has 571 licensed marijuana retailers, which comes out to one for every 7,385 Oregonians. There’s roughly one for every 4,425 people in Lane County, and retailers are just about as common as cracks in sidewalks. With a market that is becoming increasingly saturated and competitive, the dire financial situation of some retailers shows that the cannabis industry is evolving and moving into the mainstream.”  Read the article to get an idea of the regulatory feeding frenzy by the usual government suspects to tunnel their regulatory tentacles into the corpus of this local business. The visit reinforced something that has been bugging me for years. I know that root causes for complex problem sets tend to be multivariate and have a complex ripple effect to and from the nexus of the observed phenomena. If you want to severely reduce the influence of communism, government supremacism and deep throating of the deep state by ordinary humans, get the government out of education… If you have not been to the range in a month, you are underperforming. -BB  “Higher education is the only product where the consumer tries to get as little out of it as possible. —Arnold Kling, “College Customers vs. Suppliers”  “When students celebrate the absence of education, it's tempting to blame their myopia on immaturity. Tempting, but wrongheaded. Once they're in college, myopic, immature students can unilaterally skip class whenever they like. Why wait for the teacher's green light? For most students, there's an obvious answer: When you skip class, your relative performance suffers. When your teacher cancels class, everyone learns less, leaving your relative performance unimpaired.”  "We're mediocre at teaching what we measure, but great at teaching what we don't measure" is comically convenient... Should we believe teachers are better at achieving unmeasured afterthoughts?”  “Incidentally, the marriage market is probably the strongest reason to pay for expensive private schools. Going to Harvard may not get you a better job but almost certainly puts you in an exclusive dating pool for life.”  ― Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money  There is the Deep State and the deep state. The former is the credentialed nomenklatura both in the bureaucracy and politically appointed robed government employees numbering approximately 3300 making over 200k a year to rubber stamp the expansion of the Federal government in the star chambers. There is a reason more than 90% of cases are pled down and over ninety percent of all Helots who seek a jury trial are convinced in a system that overwhelming favors the ability of the government incinerate any lone defendant that dares defy the system. Then you have the 1.8 million Federal “workers” (my friend refers to most of these workers as being on assisted living), part of the 12-million-member mob of government employees in the US today. Of these you have at any one time between 7,500 and 8,000 employees occupy Senior Executive Service (SES) positions across the U.S. government. Career SES employees comprise approximately 90% of the government's SES workforce (with non-career SES employees comprising 8.5% and limited appointees comprising 1.5%). Vermin like Peter Strzok and his confreres at the FBI are an example of this untouchable class in the Federal hierarchy. That is the composition of the Deep State. The deep state is the vast oceans of government employees at every level to include the myriad remora organizations and the vast army of apparatchiks at schools from the K-12 mind laundries to the communist finishing schools known as universities. And then what Stalin and his ilk would call the useful idiots, the family, friends, and neighbors who actively support government violence at every level to include the 19,000 police departments from the local to the federal level that provide the muscle for the government to hit, steal and terrorize to fulfill its single mission of occupation and zookeeping. Tens of millions of former humans whose allegiance to the Stockholm Syndrome and the Milgram phenomenon followed by a police state chaser inform every advocacy they spew and mewl about. In Vichy France, they were known as collaborators. I would suggest that a large part of this fealty and weaponized feelz are a result of the vast “education” complex in the US university education outside of STEM. Nothing galvanizes the communist movement and its invasion of every crack and crevice of moral society than the vast alien enterprise of professors in the “liberal arts” who have no grasp of real economics, history nor a modicum of decency or morality with access to the vast legions of skulls full of mush and tender inexperience. The infestations of these credentialed collectivists are a virus on humanity. Bryan Caplan wrote a book recently that speaks to this with alacrity and crackling wit.

ZeroGov 2.0

Publisher's Note: Welcome aboard the new, improved and more secure ZG. As the years have moved forward, the site has become subject to a variety of mishaps and attacks on occasion. I've updated and secured the site on a far more robust server. Still working on getting the forum linked up and synched. Digital Ocean has been an expensive curse and I highly recommend if you use them, abandon them immediately. Forum is still down right now. On 7 July, we celebrated our ninth year and 482 posts after being excommunicated by Lew Rockwell at LRC in that same year. I still wish Lew the best and you should make LRC a daily sojourn.-BB In July, I briefed a presentation to an academic society annual symposium in Kalifornia. I am a co-chair of the Irregular Warfare and Special Operations Working Group in the organization. Here's the abstract: Sisyphus Rules: The Antifragility of the Insurgency Enterprise * Operations research needs to acquaint itself with the limits of modeling and the pitfalls of insufficient and misguided asymmetrical evidentiary bars. The West has been combating insurgencies of one stripe or another for hundreds of years and it has occupied center stage in all military efforts in the new century. The insurgency and counterinsurgency (COIN) dialectic provides a scheme t o map the strengths and weaknesses of the intersection of the two methodologies. Historically, the insurgency has been much more adaptive to COIN efforts and overcoming the conflict dynamics to favor strategic compression on the part of the insurgent. The COIN...

Happy Dependence Day, Comrades by Bill Buppert

Publisher’s Note:  I took a stab at modifying the 1776 American Declaration of Independence to present standards of governance, moral malpractice and cowardice; I discovered that much would be left out on the cutting floor and severe alterations to verbiage would be necessary to keep the Homo Sovieticus Booboisie in America from filling their pants and gibbering in abject fear at the prospect of freedom with risks and costs not underwritten by their neighbors. I had to erase over half of it and wipe out any reference to any behavior absent government permission. So I had to move on to the more fitting document for human bondage and perpetual government, the Constitution. The Declaration of Independence continues to be a masterwork of brevity and directness in its promise to sever ties and formalize a divorce.  There is no sizable sector of America today that would even have the temerity to sign it much less live up to it. Well, maybe at an abolitionist meeting but I digress. So I scrapped that project and found a document more in keeping with the modern 21st century American mood. Now the Soviet Constitution is something that most Americans can cotton to with the slightest modification in verbiage.  I chose the latest of three variants from 1977.  I have included a link to the original text at the bottom.  All I changed were the descriptors and none of the prospective language. On another note, in a nation that has institutionalized theft and torture and turned it into rule and color of law, I figured the Supremes would get around to the codification of taxing inactivity, which is the secret sauce in the recent ruling.  On page 193 of the infamous  decision, Thomas says the most important observation in all the pages of painful and obtuse totalitarian apologia for ObamugabeCare: "As I have explained, the Court’s continued use of that test “has encouraged the Federal Government to persist in its view that the Commerce Clause has virtually no limits.” Morrison, supra, at 627. The Government’s unprecedented claim in this suit that it may regulate not only economic activity but also inactivity that substantially affects interstate commerce is a case in point." The latest Chief Justice Roberts Goebbels-gargling for the Offal Office to keep National Socialist healthcare afloat came out just a few weeks ago to make this 4^th of July in 2015 even more ridiculous if anyone still believes this is a free country. When Roberts isn’t teaching creative writing to the Executive Branch, he’s lording over the finer details of totalitarian architecture at the Supremes’ monster factory. In essence: “In this instance, the context and structure of the act compel us to depart from what would otherwise be the most natural reading of the pertinent statutory phrase . . . Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them. If at all possible, we must interpret the act in a way that is consistent with the former, and avoids the latter.” You can’t make this up. Most of the ahistorical tax Helots automatically associate the 4th of July with the wretched Constitution anyway. Constitution Day is in September but why wait when the DI has been so famously and ingloriously betrayed in every aspect of its essence and message. The majority in that decision would applaud the Soviet Constitution not that the earlier American version was any shakes when it came to liberty. The Fourth of July is the same day in 1863 that the defeats at Vicksburg and Gettysburg snuffed out any hope of the South prevailing in its divorce proceedings during the Second American Revolution and the Lincolnian juggernaut would take the Constitution to its final stages of expanding and securing a place for the leviathan state in North America. Happy Dependence Day, comrades. -BB PREAMBLE to the 1977 Soviet Constitution slightly modified to American standards: The Great November Democratic Revolution, made by the workers and peasants of United States under the leadership of the US Government headed by its Presidents, overthrew capitalist and landowner rule, broke the fetters of oppression, established the dictatorship of the voter, and created the American state, a new type of state, the basic instrument for defending the gains of the revolution and for building government intervention and democracy. Humanity thereby began the epoch-making turn from capitalist to government intervention. After achieving victory in the elections and repulsing free market intervention, the American government carried through far-reaching social and economic transformations, and put an end once and for all to exploitation of man by man, antagonisms between classes, and strive between nationalities. The unification of the American Republics in the Union of American Democratic Republics multiplied the forces and opportunities of the peoples of the country in the building of government intervention. Social ownership of the means of production and genuine democracy for the working masses were established. For the first time in the history of mankind a democratic society was created. The strength of government intervention was vividly demonstrated by the immortal feat of the American people and their Armed Forces in achieving their historic victory in the Great Cold War. This victory consolidated the influence and international standing of the American Union and created new opportunities for growth of the forces of government intervention, national liberation, democracy, and peace throughout the world. Continuing their creative endeavors, the working people of the American Union have ensured rapid, all-round development of the country and steady improvement of the democratic system. They have consolidated the alliance of the working class, collective-farm peasantry, and people's intelligentsia, and friendship of the nations and nationalities of the US. Sociopolitical and ideological unity of American society, in which the middle class is the leading force, has been achieved. The aims of the dictatorship of the voter having been fulfilled, the American state has become a state of the whole people. The leading role of the US Government, the vanguard of all the people, has grown.

Village Praxis: Mountain Guerrilla Combat Rifle Fundamentals AAR by John Meyers

Publisher's Note: Another guest post by the indefatigable John Meyers. I have taken a departure for a bit from the more philosophical ruminations one is accustomed to seeing here to focus on establishing training and preparedness baselines for the coming Endarkenment. Things are getting sporty and the communists will not relent in employing every means to rob you of your self-ownership. Prepare accordingly. -BB “The rifle itself has no moral stature, since it has no will of its own. Naturally, it may be used by evil men for evil purposes, but there are more good men than evil, and while the latter cannot be persuaded to the path of righteousness by propaganda, they can certainly be corrected by good men with rifles.” - Jeff Cooper, Art of the Rifle Instructor: John Mosby Course outline from site: “This is a beginner to novice level class on how to run your gun effectively under tactical field conditions. Beginning with basic square range work out to 200+ meters, it focuses on the fundamentals of marksmanship and effective gun handling as an individual, before moving into working with a partner. This class requires a fighting rifle, a minimum of four magazines (for magazine fed rifles), and some method of carrying those magazines effectively.” Background: I previously organized Mosby’s Clandestine Carry Pistol course last summer in Western NC. Due to its wild popularity and by shooter demand, we had him back for his carbine course in May 2018. The class maxed out very quickly on announcement of the course and I stopped keeping an alternative list for slots if anyone backed out, when it reached 10. Personal Objectives: As with all courses I take, I was seeking to better my personal skills. In particular, in my work in hosting/organizing classes, I also want to better the local community’s skillset as well. I have taken a number carbine courses over the years and spent most of my training time working a rifle. I wanted to get another set of experienced eyes on me and looked to ratchet up the efficiency in my own application of tactical rifle craft. I am a fan of RDS (red dot sights) and LPVO (low power variable optics) for their respective applications. I have however been putting more time into focusing mostly on the LPVO as a ‘do all’ optic. Knowing Mosby is also a fan, I chose to run an LPVO exclusively during the class. Course Work: Of course with most former and current SOF guys, it was no surprise to me that fundamentals were the main focus of this class. After the medical and safety briefing, we headed straight to the range. Mosby went over philosophy on press checks and make ready procedures. The serious nature he brings to his make ready procedure was instilled in the students very effectively. We then went into a discussion about the types of stops in a gunfight. Mosby recited a Jack Donovan quote that stuck with me “Respect your enemy, but have enemies worthy of respecting.”

Village Praxis: Building the Liberty Training Rifle (Updated) by Bill Buppert

Publisher's Note: Skip is one of my best friends and he is our Village Armorer.  He is quite expert in the technical and arcane aspects of building and maintaining the teeth of Liberty.  He helped compile this brief but detailed primer on building one of these handy little rifles.   I was an Appleseed Instructor in the state of Arizona (on sabbatical) and we urge those who wish to husband their ammunition with the prices they command now to maintain their skill set with modified .22 rifles to ensure the edge does not dull for the Riflemen standing up across America. Much has changed in the six years since I wrote the first primer and this is completely updated to reflect the improvement available. The main platform we use is the Ruger 10/22 and modify it fairly substantially to better replicate the handling and characteristics of a Main Battle Rifle or Carbine much like the purpose-built rifles that festooned colonial mantles in the 18th century here in America.  It is an implied task that once you build the rifle, you go out and practice and become proficient.  While the primer below is by no means exhaustive, it will give you a terrific head start. You will notice some tabs above which speak to the Appleseed program.  I would urge you to explore the RWVA and Appleseed pages and sign up for an event near you. -BB Yes...

Village Praxis: The Sling is the Ring of Power by Bill Buppert

Publisher’s Note: If you’ve been following the latest on the tariff nonsense, you will note that the Mango Emperor is doubling down on taxing Americans, again. It may be Make American Government Gargantuan Again Taxpayer, MAGGOT, instead of MAGA.  I’ll make this painfully simple: tariffs are a tax on the consuming citizens of the country that imposes the tariff and every penny of that money stolen from the captive consumers goes into the maw of the government coffers. No more complex than that. Per the latest kerfuffle over the separation of children from their parents or guardians at the border, the bugbear is consistency. You’ll notice that both wings of the Uniparty have lorded over the Offal Office and the ranking scum in both the houses that pass laws like gas from a sick elephant. Not once have they protested the hundreds of thousands of Americans caged and separated from their children for the commission of crime for whom the only victim was the state from distracted driving to illegal vegetation to extortion fraud when they failed to pay the appropriate taxes to the local political warlords. I am looking to my readership to give me a quality lead on some good videos on sling employment. The advice here is spot-on and he has since retired from active blogging. -BB I briefly covered slings in a previous Praxis and want to plumb some more information for this basic yet vital component of the free rifleman’s kit. Slings have come a long way from the beautiful but anachronistic 1917 sling that adorned my M14 when I was on a Navy rifle and pistol team. Like my transition from leather holsters to Kydex, we’ve seen the ubiquity of nylon slings with various components. These serve the same purpose as the holster does for your pistol. They serve two primary purposes: nature’s bipod and the ability to multitask when conducting social work. Nothing makes a long gun steadier after your hundreds of hours of training and mastering the seven steps to firing the shot than the sling properly employed. From the standing off-hand to the prone and everything in between from SBS to patty-prone. The sling may be the least expensive and most cost-effective kit you employ with your long guns. The primary sling variations employed today are one-point and two-point (to include the tactical sling and hunting sling).

Village Praxis: Pistol Carry Options by Bill Buppert

“The paradigm that government should have a monopoly of small arms implies the surreal normative postulate that citizens—or, rather, subjects—should be treated as the Jews were in Nazi Germany.” - Stephen P. Halbrook, Gun Control in the Third Reich “Rome remained free for four hundred years and Sparta eight hundred, although their citizens were armed all that time; but many other states that have been disarmed have lost their liberties in less than forty years.” ― Stephen P. Halbrook, That Every Man Be Armed: The Evolution of a Constitutional Right Publisher’s Note:  I am a non-voter and not a fan of any inhabitant of the Offal Office but I have to admit, I am impressed with the peace efforts pursued by The Amphibian right now with his trip to Singapore to meet with the nK communist leader. No one has used this simple hands-on approach to trying to bridge the gap. I wish he would do the same with Iran after calling the ball in the Middle East and bring all the soldiers and other American mischief machinery home to real jobs in America. In other news, if you want to know just how amazing it is to be alive today, go to a Dollar Store and spend half an hour looking around at a bounty no communist country could match. The free market in America manages to deliver this in spite of a government regulatory regime of monstrous proportions that soils and shits on everything it touches. I can just imagine the riches available to every human once individual industry is untethered from the statist shackles. I would also recommend that every polling place in America replace the lever in the booth with a phallic lever and ask the voters to use their mouths to select their new masters. It would make the experience more authentic and reflect great things to come. You now have six months and counting of opportunities to plus up your stores and munitions until January comes if the Grand Old Politburo manages to fuck themselves out of power in the November Plantation Owner Selection contests across the nation. The Collapsitarian (h/t to Skip, the Village Armorer) Party has yet to get off the ground but I may just become a voter again if SMOD and Cthulhu manage to top that ticket in 2020. Yes, we have been experiencing regular outages. And yes, I have reading more Halbrook lately.-BB Herschel posted a video of a man successfully injecting lead in his junk through an ND entirely of his own making. The usual suspects started to blame the carry modality; in this case, Appendix Inside the Waistband (AIWB) carry. I can’t account for the reason for the ND or what pressed the trigger. When I don’t OC, I do carry AIWB. I have no other way for my body-type to do so because dedicated IWB holsters don’t conceal well and I don’t want to have two sizes of pants in my closet. Kydex holsters in the waistband prepositioned can be very dangerous carry options for the reasons this gentleman apparently demonstrated. As with all things gun, you practice to perfection and repetition the little shit. The engineering profession teaches you that attention to detail is the secret sauce for success. You never re-holster a weapon without checking the magazine and a chamber check. You clean them regularly on a schedule. You don’t put a Punisher symbol on the back plate. You wear it everywhere so it becomes second nature and you are not fiddle-fucking with it. Even at home. You either live with guns or use them every now and again. I decided to live with them both at work when I served in the Legions and at home and out and about. I am strong hand right.

Village Praxis: Capabilities Assessments 101 by Bill Buppert

Let's talk today about assessing your required capabilities. Jim Rawles, who puts the style in the preparedness lifestyle, has had many articles that touch on specific capabilities assessments. What we'll be talking about today is the general theory and practice of how to assess a given situation and determine, based on conditions, what your required capabilities are. First things first, identify your particular situation. For example, a person living in a rural area will have vastly different needs that someone living in an urban environment, while a suburban person will have different needs than either a rural farmer or an urbanite. I highly recommend including climate, terrain, population density, demographics (population age distribution, etc), unemployment statistics, local fabrication capabilities, water and sewer infrastructure, transportation infrastructure and other pertinent data. Now that you know what your local physical and human terrain looks like, assess the most likely threats and scenarios that could impact you and your area. There are two broad categories: natural (hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes) and human (riots, civil unrest, infrastructure collapse) that affect and interact with each other. A localized "grid down" scenario driven by a hurricane can influence secondary, human driven scenarios. For each scenario, I recommend analyzing it by comparing "Probability of Occurrence vs Impact if Risk is Incurred". You’ll also be wise to use a variation of the Military Decision-Making Process (MDMP) to assess the most likely and most For a particular potential event, determine the probability of occurrence, for example, if you live on the east coast, a hurricane is a "likely" event. Next determine the impact. If the event occurs, how bad will things get? Once you've determined your risk for a potential event and its attendant impact, now you know what to prepare for. Now that you know the probability and occurrence of your particular situation, the "how to prepare" should be framed in terms of "capabilities" and not "widgets" or "gear". Basics, Basics, Basics One reason some Western special operations forces are so good at what they do is because they perfect the most banal tasks in small unit tactics to the best of their abilities; they live with weapons and not simply carry them on occasion as a totem. One rifleman has examined this very practice and unfortunately he stopped blogging. In concert with a couple Appleseeds under your belt, there is no better way to catch up. And remember Buppert’s Law of Military Topography: “Mountainous terrain held by riflemen who know what they are about cannot be militarily defeated”. Drive a rifle or ride a boxcar, that is the future. No matter what occurs, you are going to need water, food and shelter. For water and food, you must determine how much per person, per day and how many days of supply should be required. Keeping bottled water on hand is great. Also, have the ability to purify water of unknown provenance- boil, chemicals or filtration. Have a capability to store the water you’ve purified, both in bulk and in ready to carry containers. Food is a little trickier. Once again, you’ll have to determine how much you will need, per person, per day and for how long. I won’t get into ration planning and preparing food for long term storage as others have covered it much better than I can, notably Jim Rawles. A good place to start on nutrition outside of normal refrigerator, freezer and canned fare is NOLS Cookery. This book is a little gem on ration planning, nutrition, staple foods that will keep without refrigeration and recipes (that taste pretty damn good) prepared in one pot on a single burner stove from basic foodstuffs. Shelter can be the toughest basic of all to accurately assess. Is your dwelling hardened against natural and manmade disasters? If not, do you have building materials and tools on hand to repair any critical damage? Or do you anticipate relocating to a planned fallback position? If so, by vehicle or by foot? How does your region’s climate affect your choice in shelter- is a poncho and 550 cord going to suffice, or will you need a 4 season tent and a sleeping bag designed for a mountaineering expedition? This paragraph is in questions because only you have the answers to your situation. There is no one size fits all answer.