Clever line from Michael Z. Williamson’s The Weapon. It’s kind of like a cross between Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and Friday and Haldeman’s There Is No Darkness, but really long. With the UN as the enemy, not aliens. Oh yeah, and the hero ends up creating a cell of sleeper agents on Earth, then destroying Earth’s infrastructure and billions of people when Earth attacks his homeworld. But he’s not a terrorist, oh no.
Well written, and getting a lot of buzz in the blogosphere, but a very odd book.
Update: the author (!!) has a post this morning about weapons caching on Survivalblog. And The Weapon is apparently the author’s attempt to show the war from the “other side” of the one shown in his previous novel, Freehold. I’ll have to check that one out next.
Some good and useful ideas on utilizing sealed storage containers in that article, but the article and comments seem to leave the impression that open-ground caching is a good idea. I don’t like that.
If the open ground changes hands while you have the weapons cached, you may not be able to get to it in time to remove the cache. Let’s say you buried your weapons a meter deep. If the next owner of the land added more overfill, you might not be able to retrieve them even if you have an operational GPS that can pinpoint the location.
ON the other hand, the weapons-in-drywall is a GREAT idea! I might even learn drywall application for that reason!
Also a good idea is examining your vehicle for places to cache a weapon. Vehicle examinations for weapons pretty much have to be done by eyeball (and enhanced by mirrors, small TV cams, etc). The trick is to hide a weapon where such viz devices can’t see. I’ve seen some complex and tricky dashboards that hinge down, some very ordinary-looking center consoles that have a place for a medium-frame pistol in them, but my fave spot is the spare tire. It’s VERY easy to hide quite a bit of weaponry/ammo inside the tire. You have to have PRIVATE access to a tire mounting/demounting machine (or the know-how and muscles to do it manually), but the manual models that use pedals instead of compressed air, and long bars to remove the bead from the rim are cheap to buy used, or new for that matter. You just have to remember that you can’t use the spare to drive on afterward, because it’s imbalance wouldn’t let you drive over 3 mph.
The spare under a pickup is useful too. Wrap up the weapon carefully and duct-tape it to a cleaned rim on the spare. Crank up the spare back to it’s stored position, then go find a wet dirt or gravel road and drive about 10 miles on it to restore the dirt layer on everything. I’ve been through lots of vehicle security checks and have operated a few of them, and I have NEVER seen any inspector crank down that spare to look on the upside of the rim. What they will do is slide a mirror under the chassis, but all they see is the bottom of the wheel, not the part where the cache is.
A search-warrant team WILL find that cache, but then they are also going to take out the interior panels, etc, and 99.9% of these warrants are executed for drug smuggling anyway.
Currently, anyone looking for arms is looking for them by the truckload, and not for individual, well-concealed small arms.
The SHTF-preparer needs to consider the whole idea of the SHTF situation, and what the authorities will be doing when it all goes down.
I don’t see this happening as a gradual thing, which will allow the authorities time to develop plans to search for weapons. I DO see it happening as a sudden event, with only a few weeks at best to prepare. On such short notice, the authorities are NOT going to be prepared to seize 300 million weapons from 60-90 million owners.
Even if they take the easy route, and use your gun-purchase records to pay a visit to get the weapons, the ones that aren’t recorded will get through.
So, my guess is that they will get everything (or ask for it anyway) that you’ve bought legally, and NOT get anything that you bought 20 or more years ago or from private sale.
The authorities, having grabbed the easy guns (and this is such a huge logistic effort that even this low-hanging fruit may not be possible for them), will then face gunfire from the ones they didn’t get.
One can only hope that a few of the leaders who might order such a grab know this, and are not prepared to start Armageddon.
Both books are very, very good – very much so if you are a fan of Heinlein. He’s also a fairly prolific poster over on The High Road, a major gun forum.
I like the weapons-in-drywall thing too, but for perhaps a different reason: I understand that with modern surveillance tech, buried metal objects can be located even from the air.
But in a house, you’ve got metal conduit, pipe, electrical boxes, etc., etc. to clutter up the signature of the weapons in the wall. It’s even better if it’s one of those new houses made with metal studs.
Freehold is one of my favorite books of the last 5 years or so…
Read it first….
K
Mad Mike is a pretty interesting guy. He also hangs out, along with other MilSF writers like John Ringo, at Baens Bar. Go through http://www.baen.com (who is also the publisher of the two books).
MM can often be found at SF Conventions selling sharp pointy things. He’s always great to have at a Con range day because of the unique iron he brings. Scares the crap out the bed wetting leftist SF fans. It’s great.