“Spring forward, fall back.” It’s that day again.

The daylight savings time thing got a smart enhancement this year when they postponed the turning back of the clocks to today. It allowed the trick-or-treaters another hour of daylight last night, and made things safer for all those excited little pedestrians running around the streets in the evening hours. (I noticed last night that ninjas seem to be “in” for Halloween this year. Black clad in the dark, scampering across streets…sigh. And I didn’t see a one of the little ninjas wearing the usual light-stick around their neck. Doesn’t go with the ninja costume, I guess.)

I dunno who came up with the idea of changing flashlight batteries and especially smoke alarm batteries at time change, but it made excellent sense and has probably saved lives. I’ll be doing that today. (As noted in an earlier blog entry, flashlight batteries can be expensive, especially the modern lithium type, but not being good-to-go in fast breaking emergencies is MORE expensive.)

As a gun person, I extend the concept a little and on “spring forward, fall back” days also change out the magazines in my autoloading firearms. For instance, the standard “load-out” for a duty pistol is three magazines, one in the gun and two on the uniform belt, so I try to keep at least six mags on hand for any auto pistol I use regularly. When I change the clocks and the batteries, I’ll also unload the carry mags that have been full up, and “let ‘em rest” until the next time change. The ones that have had their springs at rest will be filled up and put into the “carry rotation.” A good way to keep track of them is with a tiny spot of white or yellow paint on the floorplates, yellow for summer and white denoting winter.

I’ve heard many engineers say that this isn’t necessary, and that they learned in metallurgy class that it’s flexion of the springs caused by action and use that wears them out, and they’re not under stress when compressed. Well, I ain’t never been to metallurgy class, and can’t speak to that. However, there are other studies that say otherwise, and tell us that being constantly under maximum pressure can cause magazine springs to “take a set,” resulting in them being too weak to keep doing their job when the cartridge reservoir in the magazine has been reduced by firing, and the tired spring has to keep pushing them up. Mike Izumi is one who has studied this, and he holds several aerospace patents. When guys who are literally rocket scientists talk about this, I tend to listen. In his avocation as a part-time cop and firearms instructor, Mike determined that it was a good idea not only to rotate full and empty magazines, but to store the full ones a cartridge or two down from full capacity to lighten their load, and top them off only when he was “taking them to work.”

Maybe it’s a belt-and-suspenders approach, but that kind of caution is what firearms are all about.

Readers of this particular blog at the Backwoods Home magazine site seem to break down largely into two categories: seriously interested “gun people,” and the now-and-future rural dwellers who understand that firearms and related gear are simply logical tools for self-sufficient living. “Related gear” is the operative term at the moment, for this particular blog entry.

Even if you choose not to own firearms, you can’t live away from the city streetlights without artificial illumination at your disposal. The more you need that artificial illumination, the better you need it to be.

What we used to call flashlights and battery lanterns are now, in the crossover languages of modernspeak and tacticalspeak, “illumination tools.” We have the finest of their kind that have ever existed, branded with names like SureFire and InSight and Streamlight. Truth to tell, these devices have rapidly outpaced firearms in their rate of development in the last couple of decades. We now have lights more powerful than our grandparents could have gotten from the garage with advance warning of emergency, which are small enough for us to have in our pockets 24/7. Personally, I have similar technology on detachable white light and sometimes white light plus laser sight units that lock onto my guns.

They generally work on Size 123 batteries.

There are batteries, and there are batteries. And with this sort of hardware, you want the best. The photo below shows you what can happen when you “buy cheap” with this sort of stuff. It is said by reliable sources to have happened to a police officer in Texas who, like many cops today, had the light unit attached to his service pistol in a holster designed to accommodate same. The officer sustained burn injuries, and the famously rugged Glock pistol he was carrying was seriously damaged. His holster and patrol jacket were ruined, as well. The light unit in question is a heavy duty InSight M6X, one that I have a lot of personal experience with, and trust and recommend.

The problem has been, apparently, traced to cheap, substandard batteries. In addition it is not recommended that you mix different brands of batteries or mix batteries that have different charges, for example putting a new battery in with an old one.

The photo of the damaged gun and illumination unit come from an old friend who is a heavy hitter in the law enforcement tactical equipment world, and a watch commander on a good-sized Midwestern municipal police department. He strongly recommends using only the Size 123 batteries designed especially for tactical flashlights and tactical light units. I totally concur. My colleague states that he trusts only SureFire, Streamlight, Duracell, Eveready, and Sanyo brand batteries, and notes that SureFire and Streamlight are the only two brands of 123 batteries that he has determined to be optimized for performance in heavy duty tactical lighting units.

Whether for the SureFire, InSight, and Streamlight tactical lights I keep on some of my guns and available to quickly attach to some of the others, or for the SureFire A2 LED Aviator light that I carry virtually every day from when I put my pants on in the morning to when I take them off at night, I use SureFire Size 123 batteries. I order them in quantity and keep them well-stocked at home, and take a few on the road on extended trips. The rare times I’m caught without my own spares, I make a point of buying the available-everywhere Duracell brand for replacements. A call to InSight elicited the information that they currently ship their products with Duracells.

It ain’t just a performance thing. It’s obviously a safety thing, as well. Be warned. In the photo below, the substandard batteries didn’t just burn, they EXPLODED.

HPD officer injured by exploding flashlight

Exploding Lithium Flashlight Batteries?

Info from the CDC.

More info and Links to other instances.

A few entries ago, you were promised that as soon as we got our hands on the latest new Ruger rifle, you’d hear back. Well, we muckled onto three or so of ‘em this past week, so here we go.

We toured the production cell at the Newport, New Hampshire plant. Ruger’s switchover to “lean manufacturing” has changed the look of the factory dramatically in the last few years. SR556s were literally flowing off the production line.

But, enough of that: how does it SHOOT?

The subtle feel of the mechanism as it cycles is different from your usual Stoner-type AR15, because the Ruger entry works of a piston design, specifically a proprietary two-piece piston. One of my fellow shooters said, “It feels like a whoosh, not a sproing.” That about describes it, even if it ain’t engineer terminology.

My buddy Russ Lary threw a 6.5-20X variable power Leupold Tactical scope onto his T&E SR556, and cranked it all the way up. Twenty power magnification ain’t much for sophisticated bench rest shooters, but for us meat n’ potatoes riflemen, think “Hubble telescope with crosshairs.” At about 100 yards, he found sub-one-inch groups easy, with Match grade 69 grain and 77 grain loads from Black Hills Ammunition shooting the tightest.

The piston system does indeed run cool. I could race a pair of 30-round magazines through it as fast as I could pull the trigger, and the carrier (bolt) was still room temperature to the touch. I’m told by folks I trust at Ruger that this thing has gone 20,000 rounds without a malfunction OR a cleaning in factory torture-testing. In the several hundred rounds of 5.56mm and .223 Remington that we’ve run through it, we didn’t have any malfs either.

It’s early yet, but I’m likin’ this rifle!

Russ Lary discovers that the SR556 is accurate…

…Gail Pepin discovers that the SR556 is reliable…

…and Mas discovers that the SR556 is fun.

On the SR556 production line.

Things are tough all over. Municipal, county, and state budgets are facing critical shortfalls that could cause severe limitation of ability to deliver emergency services in a timely fashion. A brother officer recently sent me a whimsical photo that says it all: a police K9 car with a Chihuahua in the back seat.

In Hawthorne, Florida, the police department was disbanded because the community couldn’t afford it anymore. Hawthorne will presumably pay the county for sheriff’s deputies to take up the slack. The same has happened with other municipalities in the area.

The Washington Post reports that “Philadelphia officials are leaving 200 police positions unfilled and cutting back on overtime…And police in Atlanta are shouldering a 10 percent pay cut after all 1,770 employees and the police chief agreed to a furlough of four hours per week.” This gives a broader view of the problem.

Our nation is veering toward an economic depression. Poverty breeds crime. More crime demands more cops, but there are going to be fewer.

Meanwhile, the Orlando Sun-Sentinel offers this story on the current, acute ammunition shortage due to panic buying. True, a lot of that comes from public fear of pending legislation under the new Administration.

But could that simple formula of more poverty, more crime, and fewer law enforcement officers just have a little bit to do with ordinary American citizens feeling a need to be more prepared for crisis than usual?

Why do Latvians oil their gardens?

So their buried AK47s won’t rust before the Russians attack them again.

The joke comes to us from gun-savvy, politically wise Peter Buxtun. Oppressed nations have a long history of their citizens burying their guns. Some in the US worry that the time might be coming for them to do the same.

The January/February 2009 issue of Backwoods Home magazine has a fascinating article by Charles Wood about how he did just that. He sealed a Ruger Mini-14, suitably greased and accompanied by a quantity of ammunition and useful accessories, in PVC pipe and dug it up fifteen years later. The experiment ended with a functional semiautomatic .223 autoloading rifle in fine condition.

Mr. Wood notes, however: “…it took me several days with a shovel and a rake to locate the rifle.” Burying a gun is like burying treasure. If you have a map, you have to worry about someone else getting their hands on said map, because whoever has the map has the treasure…or in this case, the treasured gun. If I was going to your house looking for genuine criminal contraband, I’d ask the judge to sign a warrant that included GPS devices and computer hard drives so we could check places where said contraband might be hidden. If you bury stuff, you need a good memory and stable landmarks, not to mention the ability to cover the “burial site” unrecognizably, and the absolute certainty that no one watched you bury it and you never mentioned it to a soul.

They’re selling “survival guns” now with the PVC pipe to bury them included. Mossberg’s JIC (“Just In Case”?) package includes a stockless 12-gauge pump shotgun and the pipe in which to inter it. I can picture myself standing next to a customer buying one, and feeling my evil sense of humor rise, and hearing myself say loudly, “Hey, does anybody know where they sell metal detectors around here?”

If folks do come with black helicopters to take our guns, they’ll doubtless have metal-finding technology that will reach deep. I’m told that burying them vertical helps reduce their profile to metal detectors, as of course does greater depth. However, metal detection technology ain’t my side of the house, and I’ll defer to those with genuine expertise if they’d care to post comments here.

The old saying is that redress is found in four boxes: the ballot box, the jury box, the soapbox, and finally the bullet box. The ballot box has failed us this time around, but we have another crack at it coming up in a couple of years. The “jury box” has been pretty good to us, since the highest court in the land resoundingly confirmed the individual right to bear arms in SCOTUS’ Heller decision this past June. I’m on the soapbox right now, and so are a lot of us. The bullet box is a LONG way off.

And I don’t think we need to bury it yet.

At the same time, it wouldn’t hurt to keep your Jan/Feb ’09 issue of Backwoods Home handy, where you can review Charles Wood’s good advice if in case it turns out that I have been overly optimistic.

Last week, I had the pleasure of watching the second annual Thin Blue Line match in Anderson, South Carolina at the outstanding Skip-J range. It’s a win-win event where armed citizens who appreciate their local police do something good for them, turning out to run a several-stage practical shooting event where the cops compete in realistic, simulated gunfighting scenarios with their on-duty service pistols…and the entry fees go to local charities.

It gives the street cops a chance to show that they care about the most disadvantaged members of society, who so often need their assistance in disproportionate degree. It gives law-abiding armed citizens a chance to better know the boys (and girls!) in blue who protect them while they sleep, and it gives society’s designated centurions a better chance to get to know the self-sufficient Americans who are prepared to hold the line and take care of themselves until the folks with the badges get there.

Kudos to Ron Griffin and his team, mostly IDPA (International Defensive Pistol Association) shooters, who busted their butts to do something good for local charities and local cops.

I attended the eight-stage event (though I didn’t compete: it was for the South Carolina cops), and it was a helluva good match. If you patrol rural areas or communities big enough to have their own airports, there’s a chance you’ll have to interdict a small drug plane on the ground. When was the last time you actually shot around one? They had an airplane set up on the range! See photos.

More than one shooting has taken place in or around an ambulance; after all, that’s where surviving gang-bangers get loaded, and occasionally they’re down but not out, or their counterparts come back to finish the job. When was the last time you fired live ammo inside an actual ambulance, at hostile threat targets both inside and outside? At Thin Blue Line, the cops got to do both.

What goes around, comes around. Lavish props donated for the police match remained on the range the Saturday after the Thin Blue Line shoot for the armed citizens of the local IDPA group to test their skills upon. A match entry fee is same cost as a medium-priced box of ammo; most of us would find that setting up these elaborate stages is impractical and unaffordable. However, training should be authentically replicated experience, and both Thin Blue Line and IDPA deliver that in spades.

Congrats to all involved in this exemplary effort! If you’d care to donate a prize for next year’s match, or offer your services to help out on the range, or just get an idea of what’s going on and maybe see about your club doing the same locally in the future, go to www.thinbluelinesc.org. For more info on IDPA and to find a club near you, go to www.idpa.com. Finally, a tip of the Backwoods Home shooting cap to the winning squad, Anderson County Team 1, and to the high overall individual shooter, streetwise police instructor Sgt. Heath Clevenger of the York County Sheriff’s pistol team. And…a “biggest cojones” award to Sheriff John Skipper, who took time out of running for reelection to show his support for brother officers and armed citizens alike as he stood in front of an audience of 132 law-dogs and won the hard-fought, man-on-man “dueling tree shootoff” to prove himself the straightest-shootin’ high sheriff in South Carolina!

County, state, and city cops joined together for the Thin Blue Line event.

This officer fires on the move as he scoots between cover points on the “drug plane” stage. How’s this for realistic scenario props?

Note flash at muzzle of duty Glock as this officer “repels boarders” from inside an actual ambulance, live fire.

Winning team was Anderson County squad #1.

Flashlight is mounted on holstered duty Glock of Sgt. Heath Clevenger, high individual contestant.

Sheriff Skipper, right, comes from behind to win dueling tree event for fastest/straightest shooting High Sheriff. At left is Sheriff Steve Loftis.

Sheriff Skipper took time out from running for reelection to show his support for both brother/sister law enforcement personnel, and armed citizens.

There’s something yellow and vaguely familiar outside. It’s…it’s…sunshine! Yes, I remember now.

Tropical Storm Fay didn’t do much damage where I live. Bunch of branches down on my property, a tree down on my neighbor’s, some flood damage elsewhere in the area. The phrase I keep hearing is, “We dodged the bullet.”

That’s technically incorrect. We didn’t dodge nothin’. Basically, we were awfully lucky and it just missed. The worst part of the storm unexpectedly veered away from this particular county. Others were not so lucky: Fay killed a dozen or so people in the Caribbean and seven to eleven in Florida, depending on which source you believe. One city to the east of us saw 70,000 people without power and dealt with a lot of severe flooding, and another 12,000 people were without electricity in a community about equidistant to the west. And, as Dan predicted in a letter to this blog, there were indeed alligators in the streets, at least in Melbourne, Florida according to reports.

Folks are accusing the Governor and other officials of having overreacted in opening shelters, evacuating some communities, and all the rest. It’s easy to call it overreaction, after it’s over. However, the folks who needed evacuation and shelter were damn glad it was there, and that help appeared Johnny-on-the-spot when they needed it.

After something like this, you feel a little like the guy who got a terminal cancer diagnosis and feverishly put his affairs in order. Then the doctor calls and says, “We got your diagnosis wrong and you’re fine.” “What,” shouts the patient, “I went through all that for nothing!?!?”

It’s something on which we need to maintain perspective. I see it as having an excellent drill to prepare for the next such crisis that does hit full force. At my place, the power only went out briefly and intermittently. Didn’t mean a generator ain’t worth its price for peace of mind. I didn’t get a flat this week, either, but it doesn’t mean I’m gonna throw the spare tires and the jacks out of the vehicles.

Today, we just relaxed and looked at the bright side. It’s helped the drought conditions. The waters have receded quickly here. Last night, on the way to the Policeman’s Ball in the last of the driving rain (yes, policemen do have balls), we noticed that the water was up to Smokey Bear’s knees, on the fire danger sign, and look how low it is already.

So here I am in North Florida right now, battening down the hatches as Tropical Storm Fay makes her approach. According to the Weather Service predictions, the small community where I am is right in Fay’s crosshairs. They’re speculating that she might have achieved Hurricane status by the time she arrives.

Most folks are preparing as usual. The last of these storms that hit this part of the state was more of an adventure than a disaster for me and those I hang with. Generators, food, chainsaws et al were in place and ready to go. They are this time, too.

Some folks overlook less common preparations until it’s too late. Have extra cash and keep it on your person. I like it folded into secure ZipLoc bags in a money belt. When power goes out, so do credit card machines, and many of today’s generation of moneychangers don’t seem to know how to process a charge card other than electronically. Stock up on bleach. Yes, it can be used to purify water in a pinch (retch!) but mainly, there are cleanup issues. Floods tend to accompany hurricanes, and floods float sewage everywhere. Friends who were in New Orleans for weeks after Katrina reported sometimes being chest-high in water that was brown with feces. Bleach is a most effective field decontaminant. Stock up on pre-moistened towelettes, a.k.a. “baby wipes.” They’ll seem worth their weight in gold when the water stops running.

My corner of the Backwoods Home bailiwick is the gun room. When emergency services are stretched to the breaking point by natural disaster, the Bad Guys know they are more likely to be able to literally get away with murder. Ask Miamians about the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew, or New Orleans survivors about what happened after Katrina. In such situations, I would be keeping a semiautomatic .223 carbine close to hand at all times. Where I’m posting from right now, that sort of thing is low on my list of concerns. In time of disaster, the back-country folks here come out in force, but to help others, not to plunder.

Greater concerns are suddenly-homeless dogs that go desperately feral…large livestock maddened by terror sufficiently to attack humans after escaping from blown-down fencing…and, here, venomous water moccasins that get very temperamental when flood waters move them unwillingly from their swamp to your front yard.

Every piece of equipment you deploy is going to face a ruinous hostile weather environment. My fancier sporting guns with their deep blue finishes and Circassian walnut stocks will stay in their (dessicant-filled) gun safes. On my hip will be a Glock 31 pistol with polymer frame and Tenifer finish. The cops who worked Katrina told me that the Glocks were the only firearms among them that didn’t rust in constant exposure to that environment. It will be in a synthetic holster on a synthetic belt: the septic environment you face in floods will ruin leather, but the pathogenic filth can be wiped off plastic and machine-washed out of heavy duty nylon. The G31 holds 16 .357 SIG cartridges – powerful, likely to penetrate deeply enough into large animals, flat-shooting enough for long shots – and will be backed up with its subcompact 10-shot baby brother in the same caliber, a Glock 33, where my other hand can reach it. The smaller gun will take the 15-shot spare magazine for the larger.

For any serious shooting needs, my “hurricane gun” is an old beater 12-gauge pump shotgun, a Remington 870 traded in by a police department on AR15 rifles. Mechanically perfect on the inside, it has enough pitting on the outside that I no longer worry about what will happen to it in the rain or the muck. One-ounce 12-gauge rifled slugs at about 1400 feet per second should take care of any large, “hard target” that requires emergency shooting.

As they like to say at the police Street Survival© Seminars, it’s about “preparation, not paranoia.” The longer I’m alive, the more experience confirms for me that bad things are most likely to happen to the people least prepared for them.

Mas loads a well-worn Remington pump gun with Remington 12-gauge rifled slugs, with spare shells attached to the stock in a butt cuff. Glock .357 pistol rides in Kydex holster by FIN on nylon mountaineer belt by Jack DeShong.