Feature Articles

Winchester’s Train and Defend line is a concept long overdue. Use range ammo to train, but carry the good stuff. And both are the same grain weight. The idea is that you save money, but the ammo performs exactly the same. How well does it work?

We’ve covered do-it-yourself lowers, but are here today with a new installment. This 80% lower is cut from an aluminum billet. And you can finish it off with a few simple tools. No milling machine needed. The jigs and instructions from 80% Arms make finishing their lower surprisingly easy. Check out or review of the process.

I grew up with the MAC 10, but the gun was rarely portrayed in a favorable light. It was the emblem of the war-on-drugs. Now, though, the old open bolt automatic seems like an antique. Or it did until Masterpiece Arms updated their defender line. This take on the old classic is completely updated, and my new favorite large-framed 9mm.

This time, we’re looking at the Ultimate Defense 9mm 124 grain load for Full-size handguns. It’s a standard pressure load, not a +P, so especially in a larger handgun, it’s tame to fire. With lower recoil and less muzzle flip, you can get back on target more quickly for follow up shots. So how does it perform? Let’s take a look.

The MULE. That’s an appropriate name for this beast. The MULE Tactical Stock is one of a kind. Inside the main compartment on the MULE is a storage area that is built to house a GLOCK, or other similarly sized pistol. Now you can put your back up gun inside you gun. But how practical is the MULE and how does it change the AR? Read on….

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.

The recent dominance of the bullpup shotgun has made the pistol grip scatter-gun seem old fashioned. But there’s still a place for the reliability of a pump shotgun. But operating a shotgun without a stock is a challange. So how practical are these cinematic beasts?

Barnes has offered pretty amazing projectiles to other ammunition manufacturers and reloaders for some time. More recently, they’ve launched their own line of loaded self-defense handgun ammunition. Available in .380 ACP, 9mm +P, .40 S&W, .45 ACP +P and .357 Magnum, we’re going to be trying out most of them over the next couple of [...]

You know the funniest thing? When someone posts a comment on one of these articles that starts with “You can just..”. One hundred percent of the time it is someone who read a tip on a survival board or something and they are here to parrot an idea that may or may not be true. But what I have found in working on this column, every single time, is that while knowledge may be power, experience is survival. My experience with distilling water was not easy using fuel and means that would be available in a post collapse world. Oh my goodness it is slow going, about 1/2 gallon an hour using the distiller yous see here. “You can just…” distill dirty water was a comment that I got very early on in this series, and it just isn’t as easy as you would think it would be. Check out the pictures below, using a 3 gallon still from the Ebay seller linked above, and my Rocket Stove. I did get good, clean, drinkable water from yellow sulphur water, but it was not fun.