Articles by Paul Helinski

Are you a hero? I’m just asking because as much as I hate it, I probably am. It is so stupid from a survival perspective to rush in to the face of a disaster to help people, but the reality is, most of us reading this column are going to do it. So if you believe that there will be an event of some sort to distract the sheep away from who caused this mess, it might help to buy some trauma bandages and learn how to clean wounds now. There is no worse feeling than wanting to help but not being able to do so because you lack the proper tools. It also sucks for the people who would be trying to help of course. You can pull off your shirt, rip it, tie it as a tourniquet, then use a stick to tighten it. But after a couple of those, helping people naked is just asking for trouble. You could use their shirt duh, but how hard is it to get a shirt off of someone screaming in pain? Wouldn’t it be better to get a few tourniquets in advance?

As many of my regular readers know by now, this column is about actually surviving a complete collapse of our infrastructure. Headlines titled “Bug Out Bags” and “Which Gun is Best for SHTF” get a lot of clicks, but compared to food, water, shelter, and keeping warm in the winter, they are virtually immaterial. Those who survive are going to be those who sat tight and waited for everyone else to kill each other. If you live in the northern climes, it is coming to be that time of year again where you’ll have to consider keeping warm in the winter, without city gas, or an oil or propane delivery. I have covered a simple and cheap woodstove, a military heater that burns home heating oil and gasoline without a pump, and even a cookstove that would also heat your home. If you live where firewood is plentiful and you don’t have worry about people shooting you for taking wood off their land, a woodstove can be a long term solution, but if not, you probably should think about the sun.

How important are survival communications? From a prepping budget perspective, I’ve asked that question a lot. And unfortunately, as with many subjects I’ve covered, there is a ton of misinformation out there about the subject. When you buy a “survival radio,” like the ones with the little solar panel and hand crank, you are buying a multi-band receiver, and you’ll pay more depending on how many bands you want. A basic radio, some even under $20, will be AM/FM, and most of them also have the NOAA weather channel, which is 162.4 mhz. Pay a little more and you may get some of the Ham radio bands, but you will seldom hear any traffic on those bands, because the included whip antenna is not made for those frequencies. Police, fire, airplane, and a hots of other frequencies that would be nice to monitor in a survival situation are not in those radios. Getting all of those frequencies, until now, has been very expensive. This article is about a newer type of radio called “Software Defined Radio,” or SDR-RTL, and it changes everything.

When I first started this column, I discussed the importance of putting away your own bulk food, and not just buying a cat litter bucket with a “30 day supply” in it. Without food, water and shelter you will have to leave the house after things collapse, and that’s bad. You don’t have to spend big bucks on mail order food. Survival food is just food that won’t spoil without refrigeration. Beyond that, survival food is what you make of it. And you can make it a lot cheaper than you might think.

One of the most embarrassing moments for a prepper is not being able to light your Rocket Stove with a butane lighter stick after half an hour. And since this has happened to me a couple times, it got me to thinking about what I would have to go through on the road, trying to cook dinner. Sticks, leaves and even pine needles on the ground absorb water. They may look dry, but try to light them and have them stay lit. So I went looking for firestarting help, and I found some pretty good options. The most important thing is that I tested them with a “flint and steel,” because matches get wet, and you run out of matches. In an afternoon of trying to start fires, I ended up with a sore arm and some good experience with what of my experiments worked, and which ones didn’t.

There was a lot of buzz this week about the UFC and their position on gun sponsorships after a writer on one of the gun blogs noticed that the GunsAmerica sponsorship was blurred out on the television. This “new” discovery was spun up to imply that the UFC, and even MMA fighters, were anti-gun.

Some prepping subjects are sexy, and some are decidedly not. But the one thing you always have to remember is that you have to eat and drink, first and foremost. Then it comes down to what you think is going to happen. I spoke to a guy this week who has been a prepping expert for years, including some cool alternative energy stuff. But when pressed, he admitted to me that he isn’t prepared for anything longer than a month or two. That’s great, and it’s way better than sticking your head in the sand and doing nothing, but I think we have a long time of off grid living coming our way, and if you have a bunch of people to feed, that means you would have to grow and regrow some of your own food at the very least. That sounds simple, but gardening is not as easy as you might think. Even if you get things to grow reliably, pests will come along and eat them all up. And then you have to save seeds for next year. That is the spectacularly nonsexy topic of this week’s article.

The first thing that many survivalists buy is often a gas mask, but they seldom ask themselves why. “NBC” stands for nuclear, biological and chemical, so the answer is obviously “well duh, that. Hello!” But what do those scenarios look like on the ground if/when they happen, and what help will a gas mask be if they do? Also, what’s the budget? You can find gas masks with NBC filters on Ebay for $10 up to $700 sometimes. Which ones work? Can you get away with the cheap models? I heard Russian filters have asbestos? And what about kids? Are there any gas masks for traveling with children?

The new Precision Stock model of the M1A “Loaded” from Springfield Armory builds the Archangel adjustable comb and adjustable length of pull stock into a factory rifle. This is a true scoped M1A platform, rivaling our own tests of the original Pro-Mag Archangel, as well as other higher priced aftermarket sniper stocks. As the only truly Mil-Spec .308 semi-auto in current production, the M1A is as classic a rifle as you can get. This latest article in the M1A series asks the question, is this the best factory original M1A ever?