.

Tuesday, February 27, 2018

The Sig P320 controversy continues



It was very interesting to see how people jumped into the Sig P320 bandwagon. Granted, most people serious about firearms didn’t fall for it but many did. As any firearms expert worth his salt knows, few things are as important as track record and you don’t create that overnight. You earn it over the years.

Why is the 1911 so highly regarded even today? Why is the Browning Hi Power considered one of the most proven autos ever made? Because they are. Because they have been used by hundreds of armed forces, thousands of police departments around the globe and both their virtues and shortcomings are understood, with virtues well outweighing their cons.

The Glock has been around since 1982 and it has rightfully earned its “Perfection” reputation. Ok, “Prefect” you say?... Actually yes, as close to perfect as any mechanical object can be. Few guns have exploded into popularity like Glocks did and do so successfully proving themselves beyond doubt, scoring very high on every aspect a combat handgun should.

And then came the U.S. Army new handgun selection and the Sig P320 “beating” Glock.
Amateurs fell for this as if such a thing proved that the newcomer was the best of the two, a gun with no track record that pales in comparison to one of the most successful handguns design, arguably the most dominant one in today’s market.

Everything about the Army’s trial and selection was suspicious, especially the outcome. It’s not just that they failed to select what is clearly the best handgun in the market today. What makes it worse is that instead they went with a gun that is an absolute newbie, with the US Army being the first mayor buyer, using the armed forces as Guiney pigs for the new gun.

The result?
Well, you all know about the drop firing problem. Drop or bump the gun and it goes off. To make matters worse Sig offers a   ‘Voluntary Upgrade’ rather than a recall, failing to at least admit something was wrong with the gun.


But that’s not the end of the story. A Pentagon report reveals the gun continued to suffer jams among other issues. Not only does the gun fire when dropped (something that the upgrade offered should fix) but it is reported to eject unfired ammo when cycling and suffer reliability issues with traditional “ball” ammo. The gun seems to run fine with XM1153 “special purpose” cartridge, a hollow point round. But with XM1152, a standard “ball” round with a bullet fully enclosed within a copper jacket, it is not reliable. Really Army? You want a gun that isnt reliable with the most common military ammo around? And how on Earth did they fail to see this during the selection trail? Heck, how on Earth did this gun beat the proven Glock?

My point with this post is for you guys to understand that when it comes to firearms, weapons that may save your life one day, you don’t want to the latest fad gun. You want to go with proven platforms, the design issued to thousands over the years and found to be reliable and trust worthy. Guns that have been issued in large quantities, shot and abused and came back asking for more.

FerFAL

Fernando “FerFAL” Aguirre is the author of “The Modern Survival Manual: Surviving the Economic Collapse” and “Bugging Out and Relocating: When Staying is not an Option”

Thursday, February 22, 2018

My Current EDC



So this is what I’ve been carrying lately. Truth be told the principle has been the same for me for many years, updating and upgrading as needed or when something worth it comes along.


LG G6
Waterproof, dustproof, nice 2:1 screen, great camera and well placed fingerprint. Does everything an iphone does and then a lot more, for half the price.

Leatherman Charge tti
Mi number one tool, the one I’d never want to be left without. To be honest it can double as a pocket knife, but its just so convenient and so handy when SHTF, you gotta have one.

ZT0630
Well made, tough, excellent steel Emerson design with a self-deploy wave feature.

Klarus Mi7 titanium
New to me but liking it a lot. Bright AA that can run 14500 li-ions and go up to 700 lumens. It has moonlight mode too which is the one I use the most. Strobe, SOS, battery indicator, and one little trick, at least in mine AAA works as well. I went with titanium because it just looks better and I do use and carry my EDC daily. Titanium holds on and looks much better over the years.

Klarus Mini One titanium
Fancy keychain light. 120 lumens and can be recharged via micro USB.

Casio Protrek PRG250T
Solar, titanium, barometer, compass, altimeter, best watch I ever had and I’ll take it over smart watches that need daily or weekly charging any day of the week.

Wiley Valor

I’ve been using Wiley for many years and recently started using these. If you can, get the polarized version. They are worth the small price difference.

Zippo Crusade Victory
"Deus Vult!"

Monday, February 19, 2018

5 Best Small Knives for Survival & Self-defense?

Hi Fernando!
I found your website a couple of days ago, but I already like it very
much. I also signed up on your youtube channel, but I have a question
I hope you will be able to answer. I live in Hungary, where the legal
size of a knife is if the blade and the cutting edge is maximum 8 cm
long unless you can prove it you need longer knife, like fishing,
hunting, hiking. I am looking for a fixed blade knife for EDC,
defence, and survival.
Thank you for help!
-Attila

.
Hello Attila.
You have some good options even with an 8cm blade limit.
These are the knives that by far I recommend the most:

CRKT Minimalist $25.44
Neck knives are surprisingly handy and this is one of the best options. The grip allows for good control and retention. This is a knife that is well suited for everyday utility tasks and you could use it for defense as well.
KA-BAR TDI Law Enforcement Straight Edge Knife
Kbar TDI $36.36
This is one of the best defensive use knives within your blade length limitations. It is surprisingly devastating in spite of the short blade length. It allows great blade retention and the angle of the blade allows you to stab with basic punching strikes. This isn’t as practical as a utility knife although it could be used of course for cutting, but it is clearly intended for a defensive role.
Spyderco Delica 4 Lightweight Blade Combination Edge Knife, Black
 Spyderco Delica 4 $84.47
The Delica 4 has a 7.3cm (2.87")  blade, well within your maximum allowed blade length.
I know you said fixed blade but in my experience people eventually get tired of fixed blades and start leaving them behind. A small folder in your pocket when you need it is infinitely better than the fixed blade knife you left home.
The Spyderco Delica4 is very well made, uses quality VG10 steel, its surprisingly tough for its size and often chosen by experts that want or need a minimalist folding knife. The pocket clip can go in four positions, tip up or down, left or right pocket. For a small EDC folder, this is as good as it gets. If you want an assisted opening afordable folder, consider the Kershaw Cryo.
Don’t forget to get some basic knife fighting training. If you already bought my first book "The Modern Survival Manual" check the chapter on knives where I explain how to use one for self-defense. Knowing how and where to strike turns a knife into a devastating weapon in close quarters, especially at contact range.
Best of luck!
FerFAL
Fernando “FerFAL” Aguirre is the author of “The Modern Survival Manual: Surviving the Economic Collapse” and “Bugging Out and Relocating: When Staying is not an Option”

Thursday, February 15, 2018

School Shooting in Florida: Why yet another one?

Image result for Nikolas Cruz father died

So yet again we have another school shooting.
What can we say that hasn’t been said before. I could post again about tips and tactics to be used during an active shooter scenario. Hide, barricade, fight. Heck, learning disarming moves and practice them. Trying to surprise the shooter around a corner or when going through a doorway. All last resort, desperate moves when facing an insane armed attacker while being unarmed yourself.
At the end of the day there’s nothing a kid can do if while focusing on algebra someone opens a door, point an AR15 to his face and pulls the trigger.

So I thought this time we could do something different and ask ourselves, why? Why do these things happen? And no, this isn’t Liberal Survivalist, we know it’s not the guns.

America has had modern guns for a number of years and yet you didn’t have kids stealing dad’s Thompson submachine gun and rain .45 slugs down the cafeteria. Mass shootings have happened before in America, but never with the frequency and viciousness we’ve seen in the last few decades. Other countries have more than enough guns and these things don’t happen, or at least don’t happen often. They are rare, once in a decade kind of event. There’s plenty of South American hell holes flooded with illegal guns, machineguns and grenades and they STILL don’t have these problems.

So if it’s not guns, then what is it?

So what’s the difference between America and other somewhat similar developed countries with a high number of guns per capita? What’s the difference between America today and America from a few years back when kids kept their gun in their truck and went hunting after school without ever worrying about some lunatic opening fire.

Mental illness would be one of the things you think of first, and there certainly is something very much wrong in a mass murderer’s head. The healthcare situation in America is certainly fragile, especially mong poor so there’s something there for sure.

Also, we look at the families of these kids, or even the adults. They are dysfunctional, messed up families. Divorced, missing a parent, abused children. There’s always something wrong, even if in some cases you have to scratch the surface a bit to find that the picture perfect wasn’t quite so.
But you know what, there’s plenty of messed up families in other countries and they have guns and these things still don’t happen (as in not happen with the frequency seen in US).

I think we have to go even deeper and here is where the case of Latin America helps clear things up. There’s guns in Latin America, more than enough for anyone that wants to get one. There’s millions of illegal guns, meaning its even easier for criminals or unstable people that just want to get hold of one. In fact I remember well that in Argentina kids from poor neighbourhoods would often carry guns and knives to school. Every now and then there would be an accident, someone wounded, but it was always due to negligent handling of the gun (showing it to a friend, accidentally firing it).It just doesn’t happen with any given frequency that a kid goes nuts and starts shooting down fellow students, even when hundreds or more of them pack heat to school! But if Latin America has guns (mostly illegal ones) and has its fair share of broken families, then what is it, what’s different?
I think that the problem is within the family, as often seen in these mass shootings, but also within society itself. The family is the building block of society, when that starts failing everything else falls apart. When you have broken families you have a hard time building a healthy society. But there’s a point where broken or dysfunctional families becomes the norm, when society itself doesn’t care anymore. Then that’s when you have this kind of large scale social problems. Even with families where parents aren’t divorced you have too many people that are cold, distant, dysfunctional parenting and simply don’t give a damn.

For all my criticism to Argentina and Latin American countries in general, and by God I doubt many people have been as critical as I’ve been about them, I do admit that family and friendship are still very much important. In Latin America, family and friends MATTER. It’s not ok, it’s not normal not to have family or friends. I’ll give you an example, which I suppose is hard for my American friends to understand:
American Joe and Marry have two kids. They are divorced, they both work. The extended family? May as well not exist. The kids are excess baggage and no one spends much time with them and they may end up shooting a school one day.

Latin America Maria and Jose are divorced too. They also have two kids, work and spend a lot of time away from home… but they do make time for the kids when around and don’t escape being with them. They spend weekends with them. The extended family, grandparents, uncles, cousins, they are all very much involved with one another. Even if Jose becomes a violent drunk, a terrible parent, but someone in the family will care for the kids. Maybe an uncle or grandparent but within the fabric of society itself it is understood that family, friends, people in general, matter.

I think that’s what’s been lost lately in American society. And I think it wasn’t always like that, that at some point for some reason, the idea of not only family, but of relationships with people in general just wasn’t important any more. Maybe it has something to do with excessive mass consumption, with more “stuff” mattering more than human relationships. Maybe it’s that instant gratification “fix”, the idea of you and you alone being the most important person in the world and the one that matters the most because you’re a super special one of a kind snowflake and what you want must always come first.  In Latin America culture it is understood that while you’re special and unique as well, it is still very much important that you are part of something else. Either your family, your group of friends or even your neighbourhood. But you are part of something bigger than you at a social level.
This kid in Florida that killed 17 people, Nikolas Cruz, he’s a 19 year old kid that lost both parents, lost his dad when he was 6 and his mother tried to give him away to their neighbours. They didn’t want him either. He was held back in school twice, with obvious mental problems.

This 19 year old didn’t just turn into a mass shooter from one day to the next. There was something very much wrong with him when he was 15. There was something wrong with him when he was 10 too. You don’t just wake up one day and do something like this. You have to be VERY disturbed, for a VERY long time. This kid grew up knowing he was scum, that he had nothing and no one wanted him. There was no uncle, no grandparent, not even a neighbour or a distant family member or friend that took him under their wing while he still had a chance to become something else other than the monster he is today.
FerFAL
Fernando “FerFAL” Aguirre is the author of “The Modern Survival Manual: Surviving the Economic Collapse” and “Bugging Out and Relocating: When Staying is not an Option”

Monday, February 12, 2018

Venezuelan Refugees Mass exodus from 'Mad Max violence'

These incredible images show the thousands of desperate Venezuelans trying to flee the crisis-hit country by pouring into neighbouring Colombia

We already know the situation in Venezuela is bad to say the least but it is now reaching what truckers call “Mad Max” violence. Trucks with food are being attacked on the road before they reach the stores. Cars with armed, desperate people attack and close around the trucks like “wild animals”. What are these people stealing? Potatoes, sugar and milk, basically any kind of food.
The situation has been critical for a long time and people are now just desperate, escaping the country along the borders any way the can, forcing the countries next to Venezuela to tighten the border controls. Over 2 million have already escaped the country.
In a desperate attempt to keep people from leaving, the Venezuela government is making it increasingly difficult for people to get their passport. They claim lack of paper and other nonsense. The truth is that a passport can go up to 6,000 USD. Given the out of control inflation, this is something most Venezuelans don’t earn in years.

The INCH bag list for your average Venezuelan?


1)Passport
2)Money (USD or Euros)
3)A place to go to.

What else would you wish you had if you were stuck in Venezuela? maybe trying to escape?
I know we have readers here from Venezuela. Please feel free to leave your comments below.

FerFAL
Fernando “FerFAL” Aguirre is the author of “The Modern Survival Manual: Surviving the Economic Collapse” and “Bugging Out and Relocating: When Staying is not an Option”

Thursday, February 8, 2018

South African Crime Documentary

Message:
I saw these videos on South African crime on Lauren Southerns YouTube
channel and remembered that you did some post about this very thing. I
placed a your link in her comment section and thought you may want to
see the documentary she is doing on South African crime. I have been
watching her content for a while now. She has good content and a good
head on her shoulders, like yourself. It is tragic that this is not
reported in international news more. Thanks for all your good work,
 -P


Thank P, those are worth watching.

It actually remind me of Argentina a lot. Driving by and seeing all houses with reinforced doors + bars on every single window and gates all over the place. Many have electrified fences as well. On poor neighbourhoods you see barb wire, broken bottles on the top of walls. Gated communities with heavy private security, neighbours hiring their own security, or in some cases organizing themselves.
These are the solutions people just try to come up with when the government fails and people have to fend for themselves. Out in the country its hardly better with people getting killed like we see in those clips.

I had the pleasure of meeting some young South African expats many years ago. They were young people like myself back then and they were simply fed up and looking to leave SA. They didn’t want to live their lives like that and I can fully understand that.
Finally, something interesting said in one of the videos, about your life being spent “indoors” when crime is that bad. Again, reminds me of Argentina. You rush from one house to another, or to a mall or gated community with security, always worrying about being safe.  You’re living in South Africa (or South America) but the time you spend doing outdoors stuff is seriously restricted by how dangerous it is.

FerFAL

Fernando “FerFAL” Aguirre is the author of “The Modern Survival Manual: Surviving the Economic Collapse” and “Bugging Out and Relocating: When Staying is not an Option”

Tuesday, February 6, 2018

Mom shoots intruder: Is a 6 shot revolver enough?



The clip below is about a mom that hid in the attic with her 9 year or twins as an ex convict broke into their home.

In the dramatic audio we hear the husband instruct his wife to shoot as he taught her. The woman shoots the intruder as he enters the attic, hitting him 5 times in the face and neck with her 38 special revolver. The intruder escapes, goes back to his vehicle and crashes near by due to blood loss. He is captured by the authorities and expected to survive.


One of the most common discussions among firearms enthusiasts regarding self-defense is how many rounds do you need and what caliber should it be.
This story is in fact a great piece to analyze and explain what happens in real life.


Was the 38 revolver enough?

Depends.

Enough to dissuade the intruder? Yes it was. It saved the woman’s life because five of those six shots made the bad buy change his mind. But it did not stop him. The man was still able to exit the house and drive. Had he been armed or more determined to cause harm he might have been able to do so.
We often hear that six rounds is more than enough because the average gunfight is 2-3 rounds….
Well, no. Those statistics often include everything from homicides to suicides and certainly are a poor representation of what actually happens during violent confrontations, even more so when it involves multiple attackers.

You see, this woman was effectively out of ammunition in this situation. She shot all 6 rounds in her revolver.  If there had been another attack with the will to fight, she would have been unarmed. In fact she didn’t have enough ammo left to effectively stop the one intruder she did shoot 5 times already. Sometimes things work out, but sometimes they don’t and we can’t plan on being lucky.
Was 38 enough? 5 shots in the face and neck is more than what most shooters can hope for in a gunfight. Clearly none of them were direct hits in critical parts of the anatomy but it is safe to say that a more powerful round (or maybe better 38 ammo) would have performed better. 357 magnum rates considerably better than 38 regarding one shot stops. The recoil is also more powerful and not everyone is comfortable with it.

A revolver is an excellent choice for shooters than won’t be training much and may get confused with the somewhat more intricate manual of arms of auto pistols. 38 special will work within its limitations (and it certainly did in this case) but 357 magnum is preferable if at all possible. Keep in mind that a person that isn’t comfortable with the blast and recoil of a magnum may hardly notice any of it under stress during a confrontation, even if back at the range it was more of a problem.
My advice still remains the same. For anyone that will put into it the necessary training to be proficient with a firearm, take a defensive shooting class and practice with certain frequency then a Glock in 9mm (or bigger) loaded with good ammo is certainly the way to go. For the person that wont go beyond the basic firearms safety handling, then a revolver is more simple to use, less prone to confusion when handled under stress and it is still far better than being unarmed.
FerFAL

Fernando “FerFAL” Aguirre is the author of “The Modern Survival Manual: Surviving the Economic Collapse” and “Bugging Out and Relocating: When Staying is not an Option”

Friday, February 2, 2018

My favorite: Easy Improvised Fire Starter



Funny thing is, I use this fire starter all the time yet never thought about bringing it up here. I suppose it’s so simple and obvious I thought everyone did it (or some variation) but apparently that’s not the case.
This is by far the most common fire starter I use. I have more commercial stuff for kits but for a BBQ or to start a fire around home, start the fireplace or during a picnic this is what I do. Whenever there’s a BBQ party this is very convenient because the materials needed are already handy. People often act completely surprised as if you’re McGyver or something.
I bet there’s several variations but what I do is press one paper napkin into a ball and wrap it with the other, making somewhat of a cup.

Then I simply pour some vegetable oil inside. The paper ball absorbs most of the oil and the paper napkin acting as a cup keeps it from pouring out.

Place it in the fireplace or grill with the wood piled around it and light it up.




That’s it. It burns for a good few minutes, the more oil it has the more it burns, and it burns very hot too.
Give it a try next time!
FerFAL
Fernando “FerFAL” Aguirre is the author of “The Modern Survival Manual: Surviving the Economic Collapse” and “Bugging Out and Relocating: When Staying is not an Option”