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Dec. 13, 2019 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
12:16
Does all your survival and prepping gear REALLY work?
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Do you know whether your gear really works?
All your survival and prepping gear, your firearms gear, all that stuff, do you know whether it works?
The reason I ask is because I recently completed a fighting rifle class.
And for me, it was a lot of review.
It was still fun, but it wasn't the advanced scenario work that I've done in private training over the last few years, but it was fun.
I got to shoot with a bunch of guys and some gals too there.
It was great, but I think we had like 20 students, something like that.
And what struck me was how many of the guns were failing.
The rifles were failing, and there were some ammo failures that were very intriguing that I will mention here.
One that you've never heard of.
Probably I'd never heard of it before this class.
But there was a couple there, and they were shooting a couple of ARs.
Husband and wife.
Great couple, by the way.
And the husband's gun kept failing in this very strange way where the trigger could no longer be pulled.
And he would clear it, you know, he'd strip the mag out, you know, sackle the bolt.
Try to clear it, everything, and then it would run again for a couple more rounds, and then the trigger would fail again.
Like, you couldn't squeeze the trigger.
Like, something was blocking the trigger.
And this was a very odd problem.
In fact, the instructor had not seen this very often either, and he's been teaching for, like, 20 years.
And it turns out that the ammo, this is 5.56 ammo, of course, the ammo had primers that were very poorly installed in the brass.
And the primers were, well, when the round was fired off, you know how the brass is ejected normally with the empty casing of the primer, right?
Because the primer is expended and the powder is expended and so on.
So the brass and that little tiny primer shell is usually ejected from the rifle.
Well, in this case, just the brass itself was getting ejected and the little primer piece was like flipping back into the trigger well.
And that little chunk of primer shell was rattling around in there until it got caught in the trigger.
And you know how the trigger, these two pieces of metal, meet and there's a couple of springs in there and, you know, there's rotating parts.
You put a chunk of metal in that, guess what?
Trigger doesn't work anymore.
And that's exactly what happened.
And it was an ammo failure that looked like a gun failure, but the gun was fine because the next day the guy switched out the ammo and everything ran just fine.
In fact, he had me run some of that ammo.
Because I wanted to see if it would fail in my gun.
And so I think I just shot a magazine full of that ammo.
I didn't have any problems with it, but it could have been just luck.
Seems like it had a failure of one out of every maybe 100 rounds, something like that.
So my point is that...
You might be sitting on some ammo at home.
Maybe you got a thousand rounds stored, or if you're a Texan, you have at least 10,000 rounds stored, right?
And it's possible that maybe one out of a hundred of those rounds is going to jam up your gun and you don't even know it yet because you haven't shot that ammo.
And this guy in the training, if he hadn't started shooting that lot of ammo, he never would have known that that lot was bad.
Don't use that ammo or you might die in a conflict because your gun becomes useless when a little chunk of metal gets stuck in the trigger.
And then there were other failures in the class as well.
People had problems with sling attachments.
People had problems with optics, of course.
Batteries not working.
Flashlights stopped working.
I think Aimpoint, the instructor of this class, really dislikes Aimpoint.
Because he says Aimpoint devices, which are like rifle scopes and lights and things, different kinds of hardware, I believe, that Aimpoint devices just stop working after you put them on a rifle and go through a class.
That's what he says.
I don't know.
I don't really own any Aimpoint stuff.
I own like Trijicon stuff, you know, or like SIG stuff or Holosun red dots and things like that.
So far, everything I've run works just fine.
I haven't had anything fail in the middle of gun training, and I've done a lot of gun training.
But anyway, people did experience failures.
And bolts can break.
You know, you're part of your bolt carrier group.
Things can go bad.
You can have jams, you can have bad ammo, bad slings, bad optics, bad lights.
All kinds of crap can go wrong, and it does.
Oh yeah, and castle nuts get loose too.
The castle nut, those of you who build rifles, you know the castle nut is the primary nut that attaches the buttstock to the lower receiver.
Alright, so the castle nut, it's like a large diameter nut and it screws on there and it cinches everything down.
And if you haven't properly staked that castle nut, and if you don't know what staking the castle nut is, then you should probably look that up because you gotta stake the castle nut, otherwise it will get loose.
You start rattling that sucker around, shooting 500 or 1000 rounds and some training because you're just having too much fun, all of a sudden Your castle nut gets loose and your buttstock falls off.
Essentially, your gun's falling apart.
And if you don't know this in advance, then you're having a bad day when you're trying to defend yourself in a self-defense situation.
I had a situation years ago.
This was actually six years ago where I was at a pistol class.
And that one was called Fighting Pistol.
And I had a Glock that I had been kind of messing around with.
I think I had installed a new trigger bar in the Glock.
So I'd had the pins in and out of that pistol quite a few times.
And the pins apparently were a little more loose than they should have been.
And in the middle of the class, as I was running drills with my pistol, one of the pins walked out of it and the slide came off. - I'm standing there holding the polymer Glock lower in my hand.
You know, like, what good is this?
So you do what they do in the movies.
You throw the pistol at the bad guy, right?
Don't they always do that in the movies?
Of course, they do that when the pistol is still perfectly good, which is insanely stupid.
But I was standing there with basically half a pistol because the slide had just come off.
And without the slide, you don't have a pistol.
So I have, in the past, suffered that kind of a failure.
But again, I think that was my own fault.
I don't blame Glock for that.
I think I had the pins in and out of there too many times.
They might have even been aftermarket pins.
Who knows?
Which is a horrible idea, by the way.
Don't buy aftermarket pins.
You don't need them.
I know guys are like, I have to have titanium pins.
Like, really?
You got to have titanium pins.
Yeah, they're lighter.
Oh, really?
So your pins that currently weigh like.1 grams, now they weigh.095 grams?
Wow, you shaved an amazing.005 grams off your pistol.
That is amazing.
And for only $30, that's amazing.
You don't need lightweight pins, folks.
The pins don't add any significant weight to anything.
If you want to cut some weight, Off an AR, get a slim, like, pencil barrel.
But then again, you can't run it as hard as a big, thick, heavy-duty barrel.
So, you know, a trade-off.
But in any case, check your gear, folks.
Use your gear.
You know, shoot your pistols.
Shoot your rifles.
Check out your ammo.
How about your camp stoves?
You know how to light them?
You know how to use them?
You know how to boil water?
You better check your gear because a lot of gear that you think you have stored away, you're thinking, ah, it's good.
You know, things get bad.
I'll just grab that gear, whatever it is, and it'll just work right away.
And you find out, oh, you have a helmet and the chin straps don't work or they just fall apart.
There's a lot of broken gear.
It's probably in your storage right now.
You just don't know it yet.
So use what you have.
Check it out.
Do a little camping trip.
I don't know.
Camp in your own backyard if you have to.
I mean, keep it legal and everything, but try out your gear.
Otherwise, you don't know what works and what doesn't work.
That's why in my house, I have several go-to rifles, and I know they're good because I've trained with them.
I got thousands of rounds through those rifles.
I know they're reliable.
I don't have to think about it.
It's not some brand new rifle that's a big what-if.
And that's half the reason I train with rifles, just so I know what's going to be reliable when I actually need one.
And that's the best way to do it.
Train with them.
And then you know what works.
Do all the training, you know?
On the ground, on your knees, upside down, shooting under cars, shooting around barriers, bilateral shooting.
Shoot with your left hand, shoot with your right hand.
Shoot at night, low light shooting.
Shoot with a flashlight.
Shoot with night vision.
All that stuff.
If you don't try it, you don't know what works.
So I hope you agree that that's just good common sense advice.
Thanks for listening.
Mike Adams here, the Health Ranger.
I publish a website called gear.news that's all about survival gear.
Check it out at gear.news.
And of course, post your own videos on survival gear and camping and preparedness and firearms at brighteon.com.
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It's called brighteon.com.
Brighteon.
You can join there now and start posting your videos.
Thanks for your support.
Stay safe.
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