A Product Whose Time Has Come

I was pouring over the latest issue of Tactical Knives and I noticed an interesting ad on one of the pages.

Tactical Grilling offers the discerning griller the ability to make dinner using the same quality gear that one would use in the woods, paintball field, or in a tac-law enforcement-combat-action scenario.

Talk about upping the ante. I had no idea that I was at a tactical disadvantage while outside on my grill. Currently they only offer extra shingles for beers and/or a spatula, but I am sure the loops on the apron will work with most Molle and PALs gear, so that you can add on a mag or two - just in case those damn neighborhood zombies decide to attack while you are out flipping the brauts.

Any gear-nerd worth his codura should immediately head over to the site and check it out.

Tactical pistol . . . and tomahawk?

For those who have ever taken part in a tactical match, you know the value of being able to improvise . . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XT9-L808dKc

Ninja Attacks on the Rise?

I was doing my normal AM browse of the news and noticed this little sidebar on one of the articles:

'Ninjas' Rob Tourist, Clerk At Hotel

Authorities in Central Florida are searching for two men in full ninja costumes who robbed a night clerk and a tourist this week.

Investigators said the men, who were in black ninja outfits, crept into a Hampton Inn in Davenport, Fla., located just south of Osceola County and surprised the victims in the lobby.

The victims were forced to the ground and robbed, police said.

During the incident, the clerk was shot in the leg but was expected to survive the injury. It was not determined who fired the shot.

The ninja-dressed men then vanished. More.

That's the problem with ninjas - they commit their nefarious acts and then vanish. The article made no specific mention of a smoke bomb or trap door, but we can well assume that one or both was used in this assault.

The shot that hit the clerk may have come from a stray bullet from a Ninja Eradication Team (NET) or may have been a throwing star injury that was misinterpreted by an eager police reporter.

Using our knowledge of internet search engines and our big stack of Ashida Kim books, we've come up with a visual profile on one of the potential suspects:


Never attempt to capture a potential ninja yourself. They are very dangerous and tricky.

For your own safety, contact your local law enforcement or NET specialist.

The Action Compound Bow

A few months ago we were having dinner at one of our favorite local hamburger joints. It was someplace we had been to pretty frequently over the past few years, so you get to know the waitresses and staff – and we happened to have a gal we’d chatted with off and on over the while. I think I was wearing a shirt with a hunting theme or maybe it was the conversation, so she casually mentioned to us that she was very anti-hunting.

I took my usual approach to this familiar scene with my well-researched opinions on conservation being led by hunters, the rampant deer population of Texas, CWD, lack of wolves to balance out the populations, the fact that I hunt with primitive, blackpowder weapons, and my Native American-inspired approach to utilizing the whole animal, etc.

She caved a little after our short talk and then added in that she did have a cousin who was a hunter – but that it was ok because he was a bowhunter and that was more sportsmanlike.

Er . . . wha?

No disrespect to bowhunters at all. It’s a very difficult sport – nay discipline – to go out into the woods and harvest game with a primitive weapon. I just find it ironic that the average anti-hunting hippie can think that hunting exclusively with a bow somehow justifies hunting.

First of all, the arrow shot from a bow kills via hemorrhage. That means "bleeding to death" folks. When a rifle bullet hits a target or game animal, a huge amount of force is transferred to the target. In many instances, this force alone is enough to kill an animal. The good news on the ethical hunting front is that it means the animal is more likely to die quickly and humanely – even if the hunter isn’t the world’s greatest shot.

It's really hard to get a clean kill with a bow. This is why many bowhunters practice and hunt at very close ranges – often times within 50 yards or so. Many bowhunters spend a lifetime perfecting their craft. It’s not the kind of weapon you can just go pick-up down at Cabela’s and then expect to go out into the woods harvesting game all Robin Hood-style.

Which brings me to the gist of all of this – why do so many action movies love the compound bow?

Deliverance certainly had its bows (not compound, however), but Rambo really was the start of it all.

Who can forget the great scene when John Rambo, divested of most of his high-tech gear from his ill-fated para-drop into NVA-held territory, whips out his folding compound-bow set – complete with explosive-tipped arrowheads? Eat your heart out Duke-boys and your lame, backwoods dynamite-stick-on-an-arrow trick.

After somewhat of a hiatus, things have come back full guns – or should I say full bow? (I make no apologies for puns) Two recent films – Elektra and The Punisher – both feature the compound bow in full-on action style. Even the deplorable Blade Trinity featured some kind of odd, compound bow/laser hybrid device.

Elektra was especially silly in this regard. In the scene featuring the bow she was going to assassinate her mark via a compound bow from a few hundred yards’ distance - across a nice, placid lake. She was shooting the target through a window (not open – so there’s glass) and then aiming at the victim’s head.

If the arrow did manage to make it the few hundred yards to hit the window and go through the glass without yawing off at some crazy angle, then it would be a hell of a shot to actually cause a fatality at that point. I must also add-in that the bow and arrow featured a scope. Sniper Bows - sheesh.

In The Punisher, Frank Castle – thankfully not played by Dolph Lundgren in this one – uses a bow as a sentry-removal weapon to enter the lair of the antagonist. I will grant that this is probably a more realistic use of a compound bow in an action sequence, but I still think it’s a little far-fetched that someone would decide that a bow and arrow was the right weapon to bring the fight to the enemy. Especially an enemy armed with assault rifles and sub-machine guns.

Haven’t these folks seen Wild Geese? Hardy Krueger showed us that a crossbow was the right tool for the whole sentry removal job.

Recent history always has had its share of proponents of the bow and arrow. Ben Franklin, when faced with a shortage of ideas on how to best arm the colonists against the British aggressors, famously suggested that the Continental army train soldiers with bow and arrows.

It may not have been the best approach against a battle-hardened army, but I certainly would have given them 10 points for coolness.

Now I do have a bow, love to shoot it, and have taken it on several unsuccessful hog hunting trips. Unsuccessful in that the little piggies decided not to show up, not that I went and wounded some poor animal with a well-placed shot to the rump. I am no Ted Nugent, but I can usually hit what I am aiming at most of the time.

Now if I was going to use a primitive weapon to infiltrate the lair of some villain or other nefarious character, I certainly wouldn’t use a bow.

No, I’d fall back on my well-practiced and battle proven Brick-In-The-Sock.

Patent pending.

The Red Dawn Culture

It all started with the Wolverines.

Maybe there were some hints of it that started earlier – like the car wars of Road Warrior or watching John Rambo use his hollow-handled survival knife. But Red Dawn was the nascent example of “what if?” scenarios before TSHTF became the nom de jour of locker room and campfire discussions of our youth. It was the watershed pop culture event that really got folks thinking about what would happen if America was invaded by a foreign power.

It was familiar and yet something we had never seen before. The scene in the high school with the airborne invasion kept us looking up towards the skies for opening parachutes. I’ll never forget the time Big Mike and I were riding bikes at the elementary school and saw two Apaches going overhead for the first time – we were convinced they were Russian Hinds – or at least some kind of scout ‘copter for the upcoming invasion.

The Chair Is Against The Wall. The Chair Is Against The Wall.

It was empowering to be a kid and see the kids able to hold off the Russian threat from their campsite up in the Rocky Mountains. We knew that we were going to be the ones that would have to repel the invasion forces – hiding out at our hunting leases and taking raiding parties into town for supplies. Never mind that we were too young to drive and were miles and miles away from our un-stocked and completely indefensible deer camps.

And then there was the scene where they geared up in the local sporting goods store . . . They were all weapons we’d known from hunting – a deer rifle, pump shotgun, the ubiquitous Winchester 30-30 we all owned or our fathers owned; even the compound bow that was lurking in the closet of some friend’s older brother.

It showed us the value of hunting and living off the land. It spurned a million conversations about who would do what when the Russians came. I remember endless discussions with my middle school friends about who would make it and who wouldn’t– all on the basis of who hunts and fishes and knew how to camp.

John Has A Long Moustache. John Has A Long Moustache.

Years went by and the Cold War ended. The Russians had turned from enemies to allies and were replaced by eco-terrorists, Y2K and when those ideas failed – became the foundation for our shared obsession with zombie invasions. All of it had roots somewhere in John Milius’ grand vision of WWIII.

Looking back, the movie was far from perfect. The concept of a Russian-led invasion of the United States seems almost silly with post-peristroka hindsight, where Russia didn’t seem to be the military behemoth we feared so much in the 1970s and 80s.

Still, the scenario that was painted by Colonel Andy Tanner (Powers Booth) seemed realistic enough at the time:

First wave of the attack came in disguised as commercial charter flights same way they did in Afghanistan in '80. Only they were crack Airborne outfits. Now they took these passes in the Rockies . . . They coordinated with selective nuke strikes and the missiles were a helluva lot more accurate than we thought. They took out the silos here in the Dakotas, key points of communication . . . Infiltrators came up illegal from Mexico. Cubans mostly. They managed to infiltrate SAC bases in the Midwest, several down in Texas and wreaked a helluva lot of havoc, I'm here to tell you. They opened up the door down here, and the whole Cuban & Nicaraguan armies come walking right through, rolled right up here through the Great Plains . . . We held them at the Rockies and the Mississippi. Anyway, the Russians reinforced with 60 divisions. Sent three whole army groups across the Bering Strait into Alaska, cut the pipeline, came across Canada to link up here in the middle, but we stopped their butt cold. The lines have pretty much stabilized now.

I don’t think any of us really fear the possibility of a Russian-led invasion at this point, but the idea of “infiltrators” coming up from Mexico certainly does hold some concerns and parallels for the islamo-fascist terroists we face today.

I am sure that the FBI is not actively looking at airborne terrorists as an active threat, but rest assured, I and the rest of the dudes that grew up watching Red Dawn in the 1980s would know exactly what to do if it did happen.

Wolverines!!

Hunter-Killer – That’s right folks, you heard it!

A fellow TAG'er sent me over this item from today’s issue of US Today:

Bomb-laden 'Reaper' drones bound for Iraq

The airplane is the size of a jet fighter, powered by a turboprop engine, able to fly at 300 mph and reach 50,000 feet. It is outfitted with infrared, laser and radar targeting, and with a ton and a half of guided bombs and missiles.

The Reaper is loaded, but there is no one on board. Its pilot, as it bombs targets in Iraq, will sit at a video console 7,000 miles away in Nevada.

The arrival of these outsized U.S. "hunter-killer" drones, in aviation history's first robot attack squadron, will be a watershed moment even in an Iraq that has seen too many innovative ways to hunt and kill.

My emphasis above

Note that the company building these devices is General Atomics of San Diego and not Cyberdyne Systems, but if the DOD or NORAD starts calling their computer network SkyNet, I think we all should be really concerned.

Is it a case of life imitating art, or something much more sinister?

More here.