Paul Helinski

If there is one thing I have learned since starting this column, it is that survival is very detailed. The byproduct of this is that survival can also be very expensive, because the cheaper options, while they look viable, fail in the details. To stay on the topic of bugging out which I started three weeks ago with pack basics and essentials, I got to thinking about family tents. In any disaster scenario, a large percentage of those who survive will end up displaced, and third only to food and water is shelter. And while small tents may be the way to go if you are lighting out alone or as a couple, if you have a family, with supplies, being able to drop everybody and everything into a dry single secure shelter is going to be a very big deal.

I love finding useful things that handy people can make themselves, and that the rest of us can buy cheap. If you follow this column, you already know that I fell in love with the StoveTec “Rocket Stove.” I still see them from $75 to $150 on Ebay all the time, and as a stay at home stove, I don’t think you can beat it. But as I discussed last week in my overview of bugout bags, if you are stuck on the road, the StoveTec is just too big and heavy. I have been on a quest for some time for a smaller, lighter, more portable contraption that does the same thing as my StoveTec. Right now I have a few products on the way, but in the meantime, I’d like to share a cool stove I got a few months ago that I just tried last week. It is made from square tubular steel, and the guy who makes them on Ebay adds legs, as well as a baffle, so that the stove burns reliably.

I have avoided the subject of “bugging out” in this series until now, and it was intentional. Most bugout articles are absolute garbage. I even saw one in a large format news stand magazine that compared **children’s backpacks** because in the same issue were several advertising spreads from Columbia. Bugging out is a great topic if you want clicks and magazine purchases, but few people address what it means to actually bug out, and the different scenarios that may force you to leave a secure location. Think about it. Are the roads jammed? Am I going to be on foot at some point? I can’t hide that I am carrying resources, and at some point I may have to deal with “the authorities” who are going to make sure that I am unarmed. How do I maximize the money that I can spend right now, to perhaps survive at some point out on the road to somewhere.

I like to ask myself regularly, what do I take for granted? Because when I asked myself that three years ago, the answer was “everything.” These days I don’t take for granted that there will be food in the supermarket, electricity to pump water out of my well (or from city waterpumps), or that there will be any 911 to call should I need help…with anything. But one of my last pillars to fall was the fact that I really thought that I had enough knowledge, and what I didn’t know I could easily put my hand on, because of the internet. But the more I have thought about how much I rely on the internet, the more I have realized that it is time to downloading information about things I needs. The problem is, re-finding it all and downloading it is time consuming, so I decided to start buying CD and DVD compendiums on things I might need.

I have come to realize that some products are worth figuring out. That was the case on my newest trunk gun project, adding an Adaptive Tactical Sidewinder Venom kit to one of my Mossberg 500 shotguns. The kit did not go on easy, which I’ll explain, and I even had to send my gun into the company. But it turned out that the issue was my misunderstanding of the directions, and a miscue of information on the phone. If you have considered buying a KSG, or some other high cap shotgun, yet you have an otherwise unused Mossberg 500 in the safe, I would seriously consider this kit, which starts at $199 and goes to fully decked out at $399. My review is of the base model with a standard forend, but as you’ll see on the company website, there is now a version with an optics rail forend, as well as some current camo pattern options. The Adaptive Tactical Venom Sidewinder is a detachable magazine kit for the Mossberg 500/Maverick 88 shotguns, with the 6 round mag tube. And after some unnecessary trepidation on my part, it works marvelously.

Gun maker Colt Defense LLC plans to file for chapter 11 bankruptcy-court protection by Monday, according to people familiar with the matter, amid business-execution issues and a heavy debt burden.

What would you do if survival arrived on your doorstep? Would you become part of the rescue effort? Or would you just hunker down and wait to see if the next wave is coming to wipe out the people who did rush in to rescue the survivors of…whatever? I recently got a sample of a really cool product from our friends at BriteStrike, and their multi-colored APALS personal light system made me think about the subject of triage. Back in August I wrote an extremely substantive article on “Survival Medicine,” in which I copied the title of a book you absolutely have to get. My approach is meant to be a compliment to the book, because I go through where you can actually buy stuff. Good intentions and knowledge are great, but you need the tools to do the job. And like everything for this column, I try to find useful stuff on the cheap. These APALS lights are not cheap, $50 for 10 of them (retailers discount them some), but even if you can only afford the much less expensive alternatives, this is a good chance to talk about triaging the wounded. It is hard to admit to yourself that someday you may have to label someone as “Expectant,” because that means expected to die, but that is the reality we all face.

We are all living in a potential radiation hotzone of the future. Radiation is silent, invisible, has no smell, and there is a good chance that we all will have to deal with radiation in our lifetimes. It could be, as NWO kingpin George Soros says, an all out nuclear war with China and Russia. It could just be that a few nukes pop a couple hundred miles in the air, using our nationwide electrical grid as a giant antenna to wipe out our power stations (an EMP). That would lead to a meltdown of our nuke plants plants all over the country, which need a power grid to cool themselves. If you think you are “prepping,” but you aren’t prepared to measure both high and low levels of radiation (two distinct issues), it might be time to take a look at your options.

These occasional “Prepping Theory” columns can be hard to write, but I feel that unless we periodically talk about why we do this and what the priorities are, it is hard to maintain any kind of enthusiasm. We are after all preparing for the end of life as we know it, and it’s hard to not feel like you are nuts sometimes, or all the time. This topic, investing, is perhaps the hardest thing to talk about, because I know that so many of the tens of thousands of the readers of this column (25,000 last month) are not preparing sufficiently for what I now know is a coming collapse. Many people are sitting on retirement savings and investments, hoping to weather whatever the storm is coming, and though they could put some of those assets into actual preparation, they think that a gun and a savings account will guarantee them survival. It won’t, but that isn’t the point of this article.