Camp Liberty- A Call To Help Those Who Have Served

A gentleman came in, saw my Wounded Warrior Program shirt and asked if I was involved in WWP. I said I gave money, but was not active in other ways. The WWP shirts we proudly wear in the store were purchased for us by our owners to show our collective support for these soldiers.

The gentleman asked if I had heard of Camp Liberty. I had, just the other day in fact, for the first time.

I like to try to help those who have served our country.  Maybe we agree or disagree with our leaders in relation to our foreign policies, but these men and women didn’t make these policies, they just did their jobs as best as they could and are suffering from injuries as a result.

WWP helps returning veterans on a national level and that is gratifying. But we often do not see the local, close-to-home help that goes on.

Camp Liberty is a Manchester, Michigan based project on 137 acres of land. I could try to explain it here in detail, but they have a website that will give you their info directly. In a nutshell, they have teamed with a leading cognitive therapy organization to provide rehabilitation services to those who have “hidden injuries” like concussions.  It easy to see and recognize injuries such as paralysis, amputations and burns; but internal, cognitive injuries are a hidden problem.  Camp Liberty exists to help those with these hidden injuries and Camp Liberty needs our help in order to do so.

Check them out here…  www.camp-liberty.org.

Please consider donating generously of your time and/or money. Lastly, do not forget to include our soldiers in our daily thoughts and prayers.

Hunting- The Chi Energy Blog

“That’s so cruel!”

It is a response that any hunter has heard many times from others when the others find out that the hunter kills animals.

And let me digress a minute and talk about Killing game v taking, harvesting, bagging, etc. I kill game. That is what it is. To sugar coat it by saying I take game, harvest game, bag game, reduce game to possession (honest, I actually read that last one somewhere, WTF?) is a dishonor to the animal. If I am not willing to call it what it is, then I am ashamed of what I do and am not giving the proper respect to that which I kill. Similarly, I do not do buck poles nor do I parade the buck around on my hood for all to see doing so shows a lack of respect for the animal and can be offensive to those who are not comfortable with hunting..

Now back to the issue at hand. Is hunting really cruel? No. Not when done ethically.

What is ethical hunting? Hunting is ethical when; you use a weapon which is capable of a quick kill, you practice with said weapon until your skill is sufficient, you do not take shots that you have not practiced (and how many deer hunters actually practice shooting moving targets?), you make every effort to find any game that does not drop where shot, and you use as much of the animal you kill as you can.

Is ethical hunting any more cruel than Mother Nature?

The other day I heard a cacophony near the boulder wall behind the house. Investigating, I saw a mother wren and a not-quite-ready-to-fly youngster on the gravel. On the wall I saw another youngster with its back end partially in the jaw of a snake. The young bird was carrying on mightily as the snake held on. The snake was unable to swallow the bird and was holding on until the bird became too tired to fight so it could turn the bird around and swallow it.

Yep, this is more humane than shooting a deer.

I saw part of a time-lapse video of a pack of wolves killing a mother bison and her calf. The mother fought to protect the baby as the wolves circled and slowly wore her down. It was an all-day affair to finally bring down the mother. The terrified calf succumbed sooner. The wolves took bites and tore at the animals as other wolves surrounded and distracted them. Finally, as the animals were down, the wolves started eating on them as other wolves were still finishing the kill.

Yep, this is more humane that shooting a deer.

What about store-bought meats? Are the animals raised in a good environment? Are they treated well? Are they penned and unable to move freely?

I get teased while playing volleyball. I tell people that when I hit a spike I try to project Chi energy into the ball. Others laugh. I am serious. Part of Chi energy comes from food. I have read, and tend to believe, that meat from poorly treated animals has poor and/or less Chi than free range, well-treated animals’ meat. I think a deer or other animal that is killed quickly and then handled well will have better meat than will a mistreated cow.

In the end, there are some people who will never agree with me. This is America and I love that they can have their own opinions just as I have mine.  I only ask that they do not try to impose their beliefs on me just as I try to respect their beliefs by not parading the dead buck around.

Hunting season will soon be upon us. I hope you all get a chance to get out into the woods and that you have a safe, successful, and ethical hunting experience.

Frog Lube- The Barry Manilow, McDonald's Blog

“Hey,” Mrs. Blog Sarge exclaimed. “Why do these muffins smell minty?”

I tried to ignore the question. I didn’t want to admit that I had baked my guns with Frog Lube on the cookie sheet. She persisted and I finally came clean. Maybe I should have lined the cookie sheet with aluminum foil.

It did not go well.

The directions said to heat the parts to maximize the metal treatment by the product. What better way to do that than by stripping the parts, baking them at 150 for a few minutes, wiping them down liberally, re-heating and then buffing dry? I suppose that letting them sit in the sun would have worked also, as would have simply employing a hair dryer.

Anyway, I was listening to Barry Manilow and it made me think to blog about Frog Lube. So you wonder, how in the hell I got to Frog Lube from Manilow. Easy. Barry wrote a jingle for McDonalds that got him his big break.  (I bet you remember it. “You deserve a break today, so get up and get away…”) That lead me to think of greasy food, which lead to lube, which lead to Frog Lube. Easy enough, right?

Still, the fact remains that the Frog Lube stuff really works. Tactical Corporal and I did a scientific experiment. I frog lubed a phosphate finished AR bolt group and left a nickeled one alone. Then, we shot the heck out of both. The Frog Lubed phosphate BCG cleaned up as easily as the nickeled one. Plus, it smelled minty fresh

The product is advertised as being non-toxic and made of USDA food grade ingredients. It does have a minty smell as stated, and is much less offensive to those to whom Hoppe’s #9 smells bad.

I’ve been using it now for several months and have found that it is all I need. I use it for cleaning in the normal fashion. I then wipe the gun as dry as I can; following with a thin film which I let sit on the parts in the sun for a few minutes (or take a blow dryer to them). After letting them heat a bit, I simply wipe the part dry with a towel.

The lube treats the metal and apparently wicks into the pores. When firing, the Frog Lube will seep to the surface as the gun warms and will keep the gun running, but the surface retails a dry feel. Dry metal will be less prone to accumulate grit and other contaminants.

Better yet, the more you use Frog Lube, the easier it is to clean the gun the next time. As the surfaces get treated over and over, they become less prone to having crud stick.

Frog Lube also sells a solvent product. I use it for initial cleaning to help get the old petroleum lubes off guns and after that I only use it when the gun I am cleaning is really dirty. The solvent is great for this, but is not normally needed for routine cleaning of parts that have already been treated with Frog Lube.

We have the solvent, lube, paste and cleaning kits in stock now.

Happy shooting!

Paracord- The Jimmy Buffet Blog

I felt like Jimmy Buffet. I had blown out my flip flop.

We were on Ambergris Caye, Belize. It was early in our two week vacation and I hadn’t packed a spare pair of footwear since my Tevas were brand new. But damn, my ankle strap broke. The stitching just plain gave out.

I checked around the resort. Nobody had any heavy thread or a needle.

Now, I’m fine barefoot on sandy beaches and all, but this was a mix of coral, sand and shells. Not my idea of a good barefoot area.

So I re-checked what I had with me. I had paracord. I had a Swiss Army Knife. I channeled MacGyver.

Yeah, I know MacGyver was a pretty anti-gun show, but I couldn't help it. It was the Swiss Army Knife that did it.

So, to the point… paracord is good for more stuff than you could imagine.

 Need a field expedient clothes line in your rental condo? No sweat, string a length of paracord. Need to provide first aid for a sprain or a break? Paracord can be a part of a sling or can help immobilize a broken arm or leg. Stuck without food in the wilds? Paracord can be used as a snare or the inner strands can be used for fishing line.  Need to tie up the hoodlum you just immobilized with the 10% OC spray we sell? Yep, a few loops of paracord will handle that, too.

At A3 we now have bulk paracord and as always we have a good stock of paracord products.

For a close range defense item, check out the thumper. It is a paracord key fob with a steel ball bearing woven into the opposite end. A solid whack with it to the noggin of a hoodlum would certainly make him reconsider.

Available also are non-thumper key fobs for those for whom the thumper might be too much.

We have paracord woven bracelets as well. They’re great for wearing as adornment, but equally well-suited as a means to always have a few yards of cord on you.

So, what are your favorite paracord uses?

Calling 911 vs. Self-Reliance - The Yoga & Black Lab Blog

I was gasping for breath.  Trying to reach the phone to call 911. Alone.

Well, not quite alone. That was the problem.

I was on the back deck about 20 minutes into a yoga set. I was somewhere after warrior II blissfully heading toward relaxation pose. Off the deck was a perfect yoga atmosphere; a bucolic vista with deer grazing, turkeys doing what they do in the spring, frogs sounding off in the pond and a purple martin checking out the martin house.

I was on my back just finishing a bridge pose when the lab puppy had had enough. She had been spayed a week earlier and was restless after a week of forced inactivity. Restless and full of attitude. Downright pissed off might be a better description, actually. I was too tempting of a target so without warning she hurled her 90 pounds onto my chest and throat. Kind of like a fuzzy, wiggling bag of concrete mix landing on me.

I gasped. Searched in vain for the phone to call for help.

OK, I didn't really need to call 911, but that makes a nice lead-in to the blog.

Ann Arbor Arms’ tagline is, “Defense... Now It’s Personal”. Still, some ask, “why worry about self defense when we all pay taxes for police”?

Simple. As I am fond of saying, “when seconds count, the police are only minutes away.” In many rural settings especially, a call to the police might not yield their presence for quite a while. Even in my township, which has a great response time record, there were times when responses were long.

 I remember a panicked homeowner calling because she thought someone was breaking in to her basement. The woman was home alone with the children and had neither a plan nor the means to defend herself and her children. They were in a far corner of the township and it was a miserably foggy night. Emergency response was a white-knuckled, adrenalin producing 10 miles an hour. Response time was over 10 minutes for me, and even longer for the second car. Fortunately nobody was breaking in. It was what we call a W.H.A. call. (Yes, I see your hand raised in the back with a question, but I’m not gonna tell you what that stands for. Work on it, you have all the clues you need.)

Face it, there can’t be a cop standing by on every corner in case we need help. In truth, would we really want to live in a police state where cops are so numerous that they are always just seconds away? I wouldn't, and I was one of them.

So, defense is personal. Wait. I’ll go farther. Defense is a personal responsibility.  Citizens need to make a decision to either be victims or not be victims. If you choose to not prepare yourself I wish you well. But please reconsider and don't plan on relying on the cops with the ever-shrinking budgets and cutbacks.

If you have made the decision to stand on your own, we at A3 can help. We offer tools and training for self-defense and we are not just talking about firearms. 

Cop training deals with what we call a “Force Continuum”. It is a response guide that escalates responses based on the bad guy’s actions.

Example; in most cases, an unarmed threat from a crook usually would result in an unarmed or at most a pepper spray or taser response, but not deadly force. A crook with a weapon on the other hand, could, and probably should, be met with much greater force.

A3 stocks items for civilian use that cover the continuum. We have defensive key chains, pepper spray,  more pepper spray, defensive pens, and, of course, guns. Also look for our expanding classes where we teach tactics to avoid becoming a victim as well as what to do when confronted with an attacker.

Stay Safe

Dad's .22's

Sending big caliber, center-fire rounds down range is quite gratifying, but sometimes a little less is more. So it came to be that I was heading to the range with two "dad guns," my Highwaymen CD cranked, a cold Mountain Dew in my paw and a brace of .22 rifles in the truck.

Two of my three dad figures were shooters to one extent or another. Step dad not so much so, but dad and dad-in-law had owned guns. All three are long passed away but remain dear to me in their own ways. Shooting their guns is like spending time with them.

I had an hour or two to fritter away. Got up too late to do much around the house and had volleyball at noon. So I figured it was a good time to go plinking with some dad guns. I selected two old .22 rifles from the gun vault.

One, a beat-up Mossberg 152, was dad’s. As a kid, I spent untold hours with this gun on the eternal quest for bunnies and squirrels. With it I learned to use peep sights and by taking it apart started my armorer hobby.

The other had been dad-in-law’s. I dearly loved the man and still enjoy time with his guns. He had more expensive taste than my dad. His rifle is a Weatherby XXII. He was an old-school southern gentleman and, in a moment of weakness, had proclaimed, “Son, for a Yankee, you ain’t half bad.”

Kris Kristofferson was starting to sing “Desperados Waiting for a Train” as I started an hour and a half of plinking away. Groups were pretty good, even with the mish-mash of differing ammos I used. Rattling tin cans was as fun as ever and the reminiscing wonderful.

.22s rock for a couple of reasons. They’re not too noisy. Ammo is generally cheap and easily available. Recoil is nearly obsolete and, generally, accuracy is pretty good.  They also excel for casual plinking and putting some small game into the stew pot.

Moreover, many of us started our firearms shooting with .22's that had been given to us by a dad-figure with whom we shared a bond. A .22 remains a great tool to use when introducing a new shooter to the sport; it can create bonds that endure.

Years from now, the son, daughter, nephew or whomever will go to the range to shoot the .22 you gave them and will remember you as they shoot. I had pleasant memories as I shot; they will too.

In the store we have several brands of .22's, and optics to go with them.  Rifles are from Remington, Mossberg, Chiappa, Henry, Smith & Wesson and Ruger.

Any time is a great time to introduce the next generation of shooters and the .22 rifles are the perfect platform for that.

Memorial Day

Just after the end of the Civil War Decoration Day a day was set aside to memorialize our fallen soldiers by decorating their graves. The tradition of what is now Memorial Day has continued and is now celebrated on the last Monday of May.

One of the first celebrations was held at Arlington cemetery in 1868. Both union and confederate soldiers alike were honored by strewing flowers over their graves, singing hymns and reciting prayers. The tradition continues today and has expanded to include our fallen heroes from all of our country’s wars.

We at Ann Arbor Arms offer our gratitude to those who have served our country and made the ultimate sacrifice for it. Please take time this weekend to join us as we offer our heart-felt thanks and prayers for those who have passed away, for those who have been injured and for the family and friends of these servicewomen and servicemen.

Blessings,

Holli and Bill Pinon