Glen Tate - 299 Days - The Preparation

At Capitol City Guns, Grant saw a .22 conversion bolt for an AR. Just by popping out the bolt and putting in the .22 bolt, an AR became a .22 rifle. This allowed cheap and realistic training, and provided a lot of fun.

Manda didn’t know about Grant’s guns. She knew he had some but had never seen them. He needed to get her proficient on the AR. “Every girl needs to know how to use one nowadays,” Grant told her.

Cole was still a little spooked by loud noises so Grant would wait to get him shooting. The .22 conversion bolt would be perfect for Manda’s training. It had no recoil and was quiet. What better way to introduce a fifteen year-old to ARs?

“Hey, Manda, want to shoot a real live Army gun?” he asked her one day.

“Are you kidding?” she asked. “Do you have one?”

That was the beginning of Grant and Manda’s Sunday afternoons at the shooting range. She quickly became very good with the AR in .22. The light recoil made it perfect for training a new AR shooter. Shooting the AR with the regular 5.56mm ammo after that was no big deal for her. She even learned how to field strip the AR. She loved the fact that she had a thing to do with her dad, and she could keep it secret from her mom. Lisa would have spazzed out if she knew Grant was teaching Manda to shoot an “assault rifle.”

Next, Grant got her shooting the AK. She was good at that, too, but it had more recoil for the fifteen year-old and the folding stock made it harder to aim. However, she could shoot an AK no problem, and she loved it.

It got even better. The AK-47 had a cousin, the AK-74, which was the rifle the Russians used. The AK-74 shot the smaller 5.45 x 39 cartridge, which, like the AR’s 5.56 x 45, had little or no recoil. And AK-74s were light, about half as heavy as an AK-47. On top of all that, the AK-74 had a short “European” sized stock for smaller Europeans.

Light, short stock, and virtually no recoil. The perfect gun for Manda, and any other smaller person. It was a “wives and kids” gun.

The AK-74 was cheap. The Russians made millions of them, and they were about $400. A person could put a cheap red-dot sight on and have a fine rifle with an optic for about $500. Magazines were dirt cheap, about $10 a piece. And, to top it all off, ammo was absurdly cheap. A person could get a metal tin, called a “spam can” because it looked like one and was opened with a can opener, of 1,080 AK-74 rounds for $120. All of this meant that a prepper could get an AK-74 with a basic red-dot sight and over 1,000 rounds of for half the cost of an AR-15 without an optic or any ammunition.

Since they were so cheap, Grant got two AK-74s — one for him and a matching one for Manda. She loved shooting it. One time she said, “Daddy, I did all my homework. Can we go shoot the AK-74s? Please.”

Grant got one spam can at a time with the expense-check envelope money. Pretty soon, he had four spam cans (over 4,000 rounds) at home and another four at the cabin. He got ten magazines for each rifle. It was the cheapest SHTF battle rifle to be found. And it was so much fun to shoot.

Now it was time to tell Manda what was in all those green square cans in the garage marked “5.56” “7.62” and now “5.45.” Grant was glad he gently and slowly broke the news to Manda that her dad was a “survivalist.” He could only imagine if he had just announced one day, “I have stored a bunch of food and guns. I think the world is ending.”

He now considered Manda a full partner in prepping. They talked about the details of their prepping and planned it out together. They also talked about how the country was disintegrating. At least he could talk to one person about this. Too bad it was a fifteen year-old instead of his wife and friends.

Grant had to make sure there was a check on his emotions and that he was making rational decisions. He was dealing with such heavy thoughts — the collapse of the country, food shortages, protecting loved ones from uncontrolled violence — that he had to have something in place to make sure he didn’t overreact. Fear should never rule decision making. Grant figured Manda could be his reality check. Looking to a teenage girl for emotional clarity wasn’t the best option, but given that she was the only one who he could tell about all this, it was his only option.

One day at the shooting range, he said to her, “Manda, I want to make sure I’m approaching prepping rationally. I don’t want to get emotional and buy a bunch of food or guns every time there’s a dip in the stock market. Prepping isn’t a crutch; it’s a logical plan to handle bad times. So here’s the deal. Any time you think I’m not doing something logically, you have permission to say, ‘Dad, you’re wrong.’ But you need to be able to then say, ‘Here’s why.’ Deal?”

Asking a teenager if she wants permission to tell her parent when they’re wrong?

“Of course Daddy,” she said. “Nothing you’ve done so far has been weird.”

It turns out lots of other people, a few million, were having the same concerns as Grant.

Capitol City Guns was lucky to have opened its doors when it did. During the various recent ammo scares, customers felt they needed more guns, ammo, and accessories. They would return to the place where they got their first guns, as they responded to the Federal Reserve’s continued printing of absurd sums of money, the increasing crime rate, and all the other signs of what might be coming scared more and more people. They kept buying guns; lots and lots of guns.

During this time, an estimated one to three million AR-15s were manufactured, sold, and put into American civilians’ hands.

Some thought that there were about as many civilian AR-15s, or maybe more, than the military’s stockpiles of military-version M-16s. Americans bought hundreds of thousands of tactical shotguns and millions of pistols during this same period. Billions of rounds of ammunition were also moved from warehouses to Americans’ gun safes, ammo cans in garages, storage sheds, and sock drawers. All of this didn’t count the tens of millions of scoped hunting rifles and hunting shotguns already existing in the United States. Estimates were that there were over 100 million firearms in the country. They were in closets, night stands, and attics all across the nation.

Not only guns and ammo, but sophisticated gear was flying off the shelves. Stores like Capitol City were stocked with night vision scopes and body armor. There were millions of extremely well-armed American civilians. Most of them were not trained as soldiers, but they had decent gear and could train later.

The military and law enforcement knew this. The vast majority of them never thought about trying to take over the country. However, a tiny percentage of them — the political ones who wanted to get promoted — planned out how to do it under the guise of “contingency planning.” Those planning a takeover realized that it wouldn’t be a cakewalk. It would be a nasty, brutal civil war with guerillas killing them for years and years. No army — not even the U.S., which had the most powerful military in the history of the Earth — could possibly take over and occupy the country.

Another reason it would be hard for the military to totally take over is that many in the military and law enforcement hated the politicians who would order them to try to take control. It would be a hard sell for a politician to tell a soldier or cop, “Go kill your neighbors and stand a good chance of getting killed yourself — all so I can have more power.” Of course, some in the military or law enforcement would use the “crisis” as an excuse to grab their own power. It had happened for all of human history; America was no exception to the laws of human behavior and history.