Gun Blog Variety Podcast #124 - Happy New Year!

It's pronounced TWENTY SEVENTEEN. Are you really telling me that when it hits 2020 you're going to call it "two thousand and twenty"?

NO, YOU'RE NOT.

• How can piano lessons make you a better shooter? Beth tells us why it's not actually that far-fetched.
• In a crime that strikes close to home, Sean tells us about three suspects arrested in connection with the murder of a clerk in the convenience store closest to his house.
• Barron is on assignment and will return soon.
• In the Main Topic, Sean and Erin discuss Charles C.W. Cooke's article "Phantoms of Gun Control" as published in the NRA's magazine "America's First Freedom".
• Tiffany saw two videos of women using Brazilian Jiu Jitsu to fight off attackers. She wanted a second opinion, so she contacted Craig Douglas of ShivWorks for his thoughts.
• Do you have prepping resolutions? Erin does. What does she plan to do in 2017? She'll tell you.
• The Brady Campaign had a live Facebook Chat talking about their “Runaway Hit” Miss Sloane. Weer’d was listening in...
• And our plug of the week is for the Surefire CombatLight.

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Listen to the podcast here.

Read the show notes here.

Thanks to LuckyGunner and Remington for their sponsorship, and a special thanks to Firearms Policy Coalition for their support.

Blue Collar Prepping Transcript:

Erin's Prepping Resolutions

By the time you’ve heard this podcast it’s already 2017 -- yes, that’s TWENTY SEVENTEEN, not two thousand and seventeen, ugh! -- and so I thought I’d talk about what resolutions I intend to make prepping-wise.

First, I acknowledge that I am out of shape. I still can’t perform a single pull-up, and that’s something I absolutely need to work on this year. To that end, I have bought an exercise bar from Amazon that installs in any doorframe without screws or other hardware.

Then I’m going to follow the advice of YouTuber Scooby1961 in his video “How to do your first pull-up.”  The entire video is only 11 minutes long, and I encourage everyone to watch it, but the basis of his routine is this:

1. Place a chair between yourself and the pull-up bar. 
2. Climb up onto the chair and grab the bar. 
3. Walk off the chair -- Scooby calls this “Walking the Plank” --
4. -- then lower yourself to the ground as slowly as possible. 
5. Do that 8 times, then rest for a minute, then do it again until you’ve completed 5 sets. 

By doing this, you will gradually build up your strength until you are able to actually start doing pull-ups.

My next resolution is to “Cut the Clutter”. A week ago, my co-blogger Chaplain Tim wrote an article called “Hoarding or Stockpiling?” that talked about the differences between being prepared by having supplies and being a hoarder. It’s a subtle difference, to be sure, it reminded me of a post I wrote in 2014 called The Slippery Slope of Prepping.

If you don’t have the time to read both posts, it really all comes down to this:

• If the preps serve you, then you are a prepper. 
• If you end up serving the preps, then you’re a hoarder. 

There’s a great line from the movie Fight Club, where Brad Pitt’s character says “The things you own end up owning you.” And there’s truth to this, because we so often define ourselves by what we have -- our possessions, our car, our house.

And I’ve come to the conclusion that not only do both of my parents have mild hoarding tendencies -- see the photos in my post of the literal PILES of stuff my dad was keeping in his room -- but that I’m falling victim to it as well.

For me, it’s a combination of not wanting to waste anything -- because if something has value, then throwing it out instead of using it is wasteful -- and also a feeling of “As sure as I throw this away, I’m going to need it.”

However, what I failed to recognize until I read Chaplain Tim’s post is that holding onto these items is still costing me something:

1. First, they take up volume within my room, where space is at a premium. 
2. Second, they cause me emotional distress because I have difficulty finding things, or getting to things, in a cluttered room. 

So what I need to do is find a way to get rid of these things without the associated mental trauma of “being wasteful”. I’m trying to get around this by giving away still-useful items to a good home -- for example, past a certain point I don’t need any more knives, so if I can give them away to a prepper who needs knives, or to someone who collects knives, that’s not “wasting” a “perfectly good thing”.

So if you’re someone I know who ends up with, say, a box full of prepping supplies and you don’t know why -- well, this is why.

My final prepping resolution is to learn more. Too many preppers fall into the “magical talisman” trap that gun owners do by thinking that merely having supplies is enough.

This is of course completely false. It’s not enough to have a gun or survival gear; you have to know how to use it, and that involves training with it so that you know how to use it effectively.

Do a pull-up, learn and train more, and collect less: those are my prepper resolutions for 2017. What are yours?

• Iron Gym Total Upper Body Workout Bar - http://amzn.to/2icOvGm
• How To Do Your First Pullup! (Then 8 more!) - https://youtu.be/mRznU6pzez0
• Hoarding or Stockpiling? - http://bluecollarprepping.blogspot.com/2016/12/hoarding-or-stockpiling.html
• The Slippery Slope of Prepping - http://bluecollarprepping.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-slippery-slope-of-prepping.html