Paul Helinski

Most of us think of the Mosin-Nagant as a cheap gun. The rifles are still relatively cheap. The ammo is, again, “cheap” relative to other calibers. And it is a rare day that you go to the range and someone is not there shooting a Mosin just for fun. What many people never realize is that in the world of firearms, it is rare that a gun both **never breaks** and is cheap. But when it comes to using the Mosin outside of the range, for real world applications, there are four problems with the Mosin.

Yet another brutal winter has a lot of people thinking about heating their homes when the power goes out. Even a few days without heat can be deadly, let alone the potential damages to your home from frozen water pipes and expanding ice. Imagine a whole winter without heat! Could you survive it? How would you survive it is the better question. Because if you live in the country, it is easy to just own an emergency wood stove, and keep a cord of wood covered in the back yard. That will keep you warm enough, and keep your pipes from freezing. But what if you live in an urban setting, or even a suburban area where you don’t have a lot of land to store wood?

This 33 second video from Febuary 8th never made the national news, not even Drudge, despite that fact that it has over 3,000,000 plays on Youtube. Alex Jones (aka Bill Hicks) even played information gatekeeper on it by changing the story from the original “breaking” story of a nuke, to later explaining that it was a chemical plant. What do you think it was? But the bigger question is, why wasn’t it injected into the 24 hour news cycle for the talking heads to speculate on for at least a day? Could it be that the powers that be decided it wasn’t the time for the next nuclear fear porn? Why would they do that? Is it because that the real “black swan” event scheduled to trigger WWIII is set to be nukes?

It is really hard to review a product that will be sticker shock to most people. That is the realm of high end optics in general, and especially binoculars. There are only a few makers of high end optics for which I personally would pay more than $500, and Meopta is one of them. In fact I bought two of these 10×42 Meopta Meostar binos that you see here in the pictures (on EuroOptic for $689). So when the opportunity came up to review their newest 15×56 pair, I jumped at the chance, and I may actually buy these as well.

I don’t care how prepared you are. Whether you own a fully stocked bunker 500 feet below the surface that used to be a missile silo, or if you consider prepping to be a generator, 5 gallons of gas and some canned vegetables, there is always a chance that you will have to light out on foot with nothing but the clothes on your back. What then? You aren’t a cow and you can’t eat grass, but there are a lot of things in the woods and in the fields that you can eat for survival. The trick is knowing what is good and what is bad, and don’t that in advance.

This article is something of a shootout between my favorite (and cheap at $400) night vision scope and an interesting new digital night vision product that was made from a converted IR CCTV camera. In my experience, digital night vision normally isn’t worth the inflated pricetag. I’ve even declined to review the couple “clip on” models that I’ve tried because they were just too expensive for what you get. This product, called Digital Crosshairs, is also a clip on that uses your existing scope. But at only $400-$575, it is at least arguably worth the price.

Trapping is always a very sensitive subject. What is the purpose of a trap, whether for a man or animal? I think mostly it is so you can catch something or someone without having to be there. Sure, silence is also an issue. In a survival situation, silence is golden. In the mountains a .22 rimfire will echo for miles, and even in the flatlands, a knowing ear will be able to single it out in a suddenly very quiet, collapsed world. But though you can kill with both a bow and a suppressed firearm, you still have to be there. A trap, a good trap, removes that variable, and either stands guard for you or hunts for you while you are off doing other things.

With so many first time gun owners out there are bound to be a whole bunch of first time hunters as well. Wild hogs are available to hunt year round, and because they have a short gestation cycle, there are almost no bounds to their numbers. Corn feeders can bring wild hogs in to a specific location at fairly reliable regular times, and the wild-caught meat is not gamy at all. Most would agree that especially corn fed wild hog is much better than feedlot commercial pork. This is a photo essay on how to butcher your own wild hog.

After “winning” the midterm election in November, I think a lot of people who were about to take the leap into preparing for any kind of imminent collapse got lazy. I just took a trip to the Northeast US, and couldn’t believe how asleep the general population is up there to what is going on in the world around them. At Logon Airport, Boston, I encountered one of their State Troopers, who you would swear was intentionally dressed in a costume of a Nazi SS trooper, and who was sporting, right there in the airport, a front slung suppressed MP5 with a double pancake mag in it. His hand was on the grip and his finger was across the trigger guard. Yet nobody but me seemed to be bothered by such a thing.