TGO David

This made me laugh because I too am often wrong. Thank you!

I think we are primarily sending that message to a few retailers. From what I have seen, the good retailers (like some of our own vendors here on TGO) are keeping the prices sane while limiting quantities to try and provide ammo to the most people possible while keeping the hoarders and profiteering "ammo flippers" away. I forgot to tell my story of a recent visit to a local big-box store to find ammo. It was insightful. I'll start another thread about that.

I am placing this in the Survival and Preparedness forum for what I hope are somewhat obvious reasons. My question to you is, as the subject states, how concerned are you about mass civil unrest after the Presidential election in November? And I will add that if you are concerned, what are you doing now to address those concerns? My pessimistic prediction is that the Election will not be resolved on November 3rd. The push by the Democrats to use COVID-19 as the justification for an unprecedented use of mail-in ballots clearly telegraphs their plan to disrupt the Election. My personal opinion is that they will use every tool of dishonesty and corruption possible to bias the ballots toward Biden, either by discarding ballots for Trump or by falsifying a large quantity for Biden. They will attempt to hijack the electoral process and forcibly instate their candidate to bring an end to Making America Great Again. When this happens, there is a good chance that things will finally come unhinged. Or, Trump will win despite the Left's efforts to stop him, and the Left will do what it's already been doing this year and riot but on a much larger scale. Regardless of which occurs, I don't see peace and harmony occurring after November 2nd and I firmly believe that November to January could end up being the most dangerous time that our country has seen since the Civil War and I think people who haven't been planning for unrest by having supplies of food, medicines, sanitary essentials and, yes, ammo will be wishing they had. I of course hope that I am wrong, but I feel it is better to hope for the best and plan for the worst. So... what are you doing to prepare? It would be good to hear from folks who live in urban, suburban and rural areas alike since those environments could present their own unique challenges.

Eh. Cost of components is going up across the board for manufacturers thanks in part to the EPA regulations and import restrictions put in place by the Obama Administration. We are just now seeing the effects of them because most of Trump's term in office was an enormous slump for the sale of guns and ammo. 2020 has revitalized the industry and then some. Warehouses that were full to bursting with ammo in December 2019 are rapidly emptying. The retail cost of ammo will stabilize, perhaps, after December but it would be unreasonable and unrealistic to expect the prices to go back to what they were. Ammo companies will have to pass the increase of raw materials costs on to us as consumers.

I will have to give some thought to pocket carrying my P365 as a backup.

Your local LE agencies may have officers that are available for 'extra duty' on the weekends during your services. Having one there is a good idea. Asking the LE agency to simply park a cruiser on your property during services might also provide some deterrent unless the potential perpetrator does some reconnaissance and figures out that it's a decoy. A cheap source of security for your church with such a small congregation will be closing the doors and locking them from inside after the service begins. Don't be afraid to turn away strangers especially if some simple profiling tells you that their dress, appearance, demeanor doesn't match the baseline of who your congregation is. Churches want to be welcoming to all, but there is no harm in saying "No Admittance" to someone who sets off that gut instinct that something is wrong.

I haven't embraced the backup gun yet but I always have two spare mags.

We didn't do too bad here but I think we can pump these numbers up. We should be in the top 10 at least. https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/gun-ownership-rates-by-state/38/

Awesome!! How soon until his beard comes in?

I usually carry a Streamlight ProTac 2-LX light. The crenulated bezel wouldn't feel good if you got poked with it, really hard, in the face.

I saw you mentioned IDPA and USPSA. I use my PACT-3 shot timer indoors during dry-fire practice. I set up a man-sized upper torso silhouette target in a bonus room. I move to a spot 7 yards away from it, set a par time on the PACT timer, and then practice drawing from concealment and getting my shot within or under par. I have to be brutally honest with myself during these sessions for it to be of any value. It only counts if I was within par and had a sight picture that would have done the job when I broke the trigger. If I lie to myself here and accept a shot that would have missed, it's worthless. This has been incredibly valuable for me both before and during the ammo shortage.

Watch the security camera footage of the West Freeway Church of Christ (White Settlement, Texas) church shooting from last year. The second member of the church to be shot by the gunman was an armed safety team member who clearly was having trouble clearing his firearm from his holster, beneath his sport coat. The delay likely contributed to his unfortunate fate. Whatever you carry, become very proficient with it. Obsessively and regularly practice drawing from your form of concealment. Figure out what works and what doesn't, and then only use the carry position and carry gear that works. Don't change up your gear or carry method without obsessively and regularly practicing until deploying it is second nature. Free advice.

Chemical sprays are a problematic approach inside of a confined space. Also consider how any parishioners with respiratory problems, diminished health, or how children might respond to inhaling it. Pepper gels are a lot more controlled but still also problematic for the good guys trying to physically subdue a person who has become combative enough to warrant using them. Employing impact weapons can be just as risky as employing a knife or gun. All of these things require training. Tennessee requires a baton certification for security guards who will carry an impact weapon, recognizing that one used improperly can be plenty lethal. The term "less lethal" as relates to these things still has the word "lethal" in it for a reason. De-escalation while moving the threat outside the building is the most powerful tool that a person can attempt to use. If you can't de-escalate and it becomes violent, the dynamics of the situation will unfortunately dictate what the right level of response is.

@Dennis1209 -- I am a member of my church's safety team. We take an "all hazards" approach, meaning we try to be ready to deal with any manner of emergency. Be it a medical issue (the most likely scenario), or a weather disaster, a disruptive visitor or attendee, a domestic squabble (especially involving child custody) and of course the aggressive human actor. Our church carries insurance especially for the safety team and those of us that go armed are held to the same standards as Tennessee's Armed Guard program as far as proficiency with sidearms and regularity of qualification in controlled, administered drills. We choose to push ourselves far beyond that standard in terms of proficiency. My weekly "load out" for church has become close to what an undercover police officer might carry, albeit without body armor and handcuffs. I do carry a handgun, concealed, two spare magazines, a knife, a flashlight, a tourniquet, an Individual First Aid Kit (IFAK) with gunshot / blowout supplies, my smartphone and a two-way radio with earpiece. This is honestly pretty standard for the members of my team. Our church is fairly casual, and all of this hides pretty easily under a button-up, untucked fishing / camp shirt and inside the pockets of camp/cargo pants or jeans. The best advice that I can give you is two things: 1.) Your church should have an organized approach to safety and your primary objective regarding bad human actors should be to keep the threat outside the church. 2.) I would contact Ken Alexandrow at Agape Tactical here in the Franklin, TN area. He and his team do church security consulting and training and he can clear away any myths or misconceptions that you and your church leadership might have heard from well-intentioned but badly informed people in the past. https://agapetactical.com/services/church-security-planning/ Finally, you are right to be asking these questions and to be concerned about the safety of your congregation. This world will only become increasingly hostile to followers of Jesus Christ.

Hey folks. I appreciate the kindness but it's all good and this post was meant to be about the drastic shift in our country's culture since 2001.

I have my own 9/11 that I spend this morning remembering each year. My 22-month old daughter passed away this day in 2002. I get around to talking about the other 9/11 after I've focused on remembering her for a while.

Antifa protesters burn the American flag in Portland, Oregon (2020) Immediately following the attacks on the World Trade Center, Pentagon and Flight 93 back in 2001, you couldn't buy a United States flag in the Nashville area. The same story played out across the country. Store shelves were wiped clean of them as the people united together as one nation and proudly displayed the Red, White and Blue everywhere. Flags flew from homes, businesses, construction sites, fire trucks. Remember when a fire department could put the flag or a flag sticker on their trucks and not be crucified for it by anti-American activists or gutless politicians? You couldn't drive a mile without seeing flags that clipped onto your car's roll-up windows and slid onto your car's radio antennas. Ingenious folks rigged up ways to hoist our country's colors from flag poles secured in pickup truck beds and from trailer hitch receivers. Many of those things found second-life and now get sold to fly college and pro ball team flags at tailgating parties. 19 years ago you couldn't find an American flag to burn. And if you did, you would have needed to go into hiding for your own safety because a multi-cultural, multiracial crowd of people who loved this country would have kicked your ass for it. It didn't matter what color your skin was back then. Briefly, gloriously, we were just Americans. The fact that we have forgotten so much, become so divided, and that a whole generation of lost kids has been taught to actively hate our country since 9/11/01 causes me immeasurable pause. I realize that our society has the attention span of a toddler, but it saddens me that we have fallen so far, so fast.

In preparation for our eventual move to the new 4.5 series of the forum software, I had to make some upgrades and tweaks to TGO today. The most noticeable one will probably be that the "tagging" system used most prominently in the Trading Post forums has been changed to a new software. Tags are the little colored prefixes in front of the posts that say whether the item is for sale, trade, free, wanted, or if the ad is closed. The reason for this change is that the previous software we used had been discontinued and the author was no longer supporting it. Unfortunately this very useful part of TGO isn't part of the default forum software installation, so we rely on these little plug-ins to bring the feature to you. I am also trying to see if I can diminish or hide the black "trading post" tag behind each listing. I think it's annoying. Another change with this upgrade is that the list of tags isn't being shown on the forum home page now. I am trying to see if we can get that feature back or if I've just misconfigured it somehow. They used to show where the red square is in this screenshot. The nice thing about them being there was that you could click a tag, say the "for sale" tag as an example, and it would show you all of the posts inside the forum that used that tag. You can still do that once inside the forum by clicking on any of the tags shown at the start of a post, but that's also kind of annoying. More to come on this as I work through the new plug-in and communicate with its author.

Yep! And now is a great time to buy other things. Magazines, accessories, even some guns. People are focusing so much on ammo right now that some retailers are offering smoking-good deals on the other stuff.

I recently bought some ammo in bulk via a friend at a national distributor. I paid maybe $75 more per 1000 rounds this month than I did back in February. He told me that Winchester and Fiocchi prices were up nearly 30%, however. I say this for two reasons: 1. There is still ammo in the supply pipeline. Where it quickly disappears is at the retail level because people are panic-buying. Remember when morons depleted the national supply of toilet paper earlier this year? Same damn thing. 2. The major price increases are also happening at the retail level. Some retailers are taking advantage of the panic and they are easy to spot (Cheaper Than Dirt?). Reasonable retailers are just implementing reasonable price increases because they are paying more themselves. We may see overall significantly higher prices in the future, though, because eventually the ammo that is still reasonably priced at the wholesale level will start going up in price as well. Last point: This is the next big problem. The ammo manufacturers are already feeling it. We'll see it reflected in retail soon. https://www.gunsandammo.com/editorial/great-primer-shortage-2020/383204

I wish they did. I'm starting to have to do more and more preventative maintenance on my parts.

Like I said, I had to dump them to move forward. <-- Rolling eyes emoji

Ballistic Advantage would get my vote if I was shopping for a complete upper. https://www.ballisticadvantage.com/ar-complete-uppers

Had to ditch the legacy emojis as preparation for the new version of the forum software. I anticipate moving us to it sometime in the next month.