Tactical Arts and Crafts: Glow in the Dark Dope Card

By | March 15, 2022

I am going to try to start a new series about some of the tips and tricks I’ve picked up. Some might call it “fieldcraft” but since I am not a super secret squirrel who operates in operations, I am not nearly cool enough to call it that.

The first few I’m going to do are going to involve a laminator. I specifically bought one to use on some of the things I’ll be talking about. They’re not expensive, but you could probably just use packing tape for most of these things instead of a full-on laminator so just keep that in mind. The reason for lamination is so that you can use map markers and have a reusable but also semi-permanent writing surface.

First up is going to be the Glow in the Dark Dope (or DOPE) card.

DOPE stands for Data On Previous Engagements. The term actually goes back to when the only way you could really figure out what your bullet drop was at specific distances was to go out and shoot those distances and write down the data. You’d record distance, wind, temperature, elevation, and other environmental variables so that later, you’d use that data from your previous engagement to get a really good idea of what your bullet was going to do.

Nowadays we have doppler radar derived drag curves and ballistic computers that are so inexpensive and precise that you don’t need to spend the time and money collecting your own dope, you just punch in some numbers and the ballistic solver tells you what your drop is.

Which is great and all, but a lot of shooters (myself included) like the simplicity of a card with numbers written down. I mean I love my Kestrel but it’s way faster to look at a dope card than it is to scroll through targets or adjust your range.

So here is what I did (it’s super simple):
I took some card stock and covered it with 2″ glow in the dark tape. An index card would also have worked but I have a ton of card stock left over from a prior project.
Then I cut that down so that it would fit in that in the Rite in the Rain notebook cover that I’ve been using as a wallet for the last 2 years. I had a very wet shooting class in October of 2019 and shortly after that I started buying Rite in the Rain notebooks like Hunter Biden buys crack pipes.
Then I laminated it, obviously.
So now what I can do is I can use my Kestrel to get my dope for the ranges I’m going to be engaging and write it down on my little dope card.
Because the map markers take either an alcohol pen or an alcohol swap to erase, I don’t have to worry about rubbing off the data accidentally.
Then I can “charge” the glow in the dark tape by either just leaving it out all day or shining a light on it before I really need it.

This is what the card looks like after holding it up to a light bulb for about 20 seconds:

It’s advertised as working for 6 hours but I haven’t actually tested that. I does last a while, though.

There are tons of other glow in the dark paper products out there, too, so I may experiment with some other things in the future.

Speaking of upgrades

By | January 28, 2022

I finally changed the backend WordPress theme after something like 12 years.

Atahualpa was good to me, and to Walls of the City, but somewhere around 2 years ago I stopped getting WP visitor stats. That’s fixed now.

The new theme should also be a lot better on mobile devices now.

Fun with Headlines: 2-12-2021

By | February 12, 2021

From the “People only ever die of COVID” department
Headline: Texas GOP rep Ron Wright, 67, becomes first member of Congress to die from COVID after two-week spell in hospital alongside his wife

Story: He died with COVID. He also had lung cancer, and was recently hospitalized for a week with pneumonia. Maybe COVID did actually kill him, but I’m unconvinced after a local mayor “died of COVID” and stage 4 brain cancer but you had to, like, already know the dude had brain cancer because none of the death stories would mention it.

From the woke department
Headline: Student organizations asking UT to terminate professor who used racially charged acronym in class

Story: A black female professor of “Africana Studies” wrote the title of a Tupac Shakur song on the board.

From the “What an amazing coincidence” department
Headline: Mayor Cooper proposes record-breaking $191 million for funding toward education

Reality: Cooper raised property taxes by 34% during a pandemic with record unemployment without ever even considering cutting back spending. Now that the covid numbers are down and he’s expecting a return to 2019 sales tax revenues, he puts forth the largest spending plan in Nashville’s history,

Yeeted for YouTube

By | February 7, 2021

Heartwarming story from my neck of the woods:

Police in Tennessee are investigating after a man was shot and killed Friday night during a robbery ‘prank’ for a YouTube video.

Nashville police responded to the parking lot of an Urban Air indoor trampoline park at 9:25pm where David Starnes Jr., 23, admitted to shooting 20-year-old Timothy Wilks.

Witnesses told detectives that Wilks and a friend were participating in a ‘prank’ robbery.

The stunt was apparently all part of a YouTube video whereby Wilk  approached a group of people, including Starnes, with butcher knives. 

Starnes said he was unaware of the prank and shot Wilks to defend himself and the people he was with.

According to MNPD, no charges have been filed in Wilks’ death. The investigation is ongoing.

Yeah.

That was a bad idea in a state where roughly 20% of adults have a carry permit. This is should be a story that gets repeated a lot in the future, as a cautionary tale against doing stupid things that can get you killed but I’m not optimistic about that.

That’s all I’m going to say about the dead guy. I’d like to focus on the shooter, because he’s going to need some help.

It’s likely that he realizes two things right now:
1. He reacted exactly as he should have, given the information he had at the time.
2. The guy he shot wasn’t really going to hurt him.

I said this in another place, but he’s fortunate that Tennesseans still outnumber Californians in Nashville. The Nashville DA would absolutely love to put the fear of prosecution in to every carry permit holder in the state, but there’s no way he could get a conviction. I’d say I would be shocked if he’s charged, but Nashville is currently prosecuting a police officer for shooting back at a fleeing felon and another officer who killed a man walking towards him while firing an AK pistol at someone else before that officer was hired with the police department. But Starnes is probably fine.

That second one is going to be with him for the rest of his life, though.

In 2008, I had a similar experience with a much happier ending. I won’t go in to too much detail, but a group of teenagers decided to pull a prank on a motorist and that motorist was an armed me. It was at night and I don’t think they ever realized how close they came to tragedy, but luckily I was able to realize it was a hoax before it was too late. And yes, had they actually been doing what they were pretending to do, I would have been 100% justified in opening fire. It’s a very close parallel to what happened here.

I’ve often thought about what would have happened if things had gone differently. Would the group have banded together and say I opened fire “for no reason”? Would the Nashville DA have wanted to make an example of me? I would most certainly have been fired within a week. Would I have had to move across the country to get away from bad press? Would I have ever worked again, even if no charges were filed?

This young man, David Starnes, is going to be going through all of those things I was terrified of.

Some quick thoughts on the Christmas Bombing

By | December 28, 2020

As I write this, it’s been barely 4 days since an RV exploded in downtown Nashville. I’m 15-ish miles away and was never in any danger. Interestingly, I was walking the dog when it happened and I should have heard it, but didn’t.

There’s still a ton of speculation–some in bad-faith, some in ignorance–about why he did what he did, but I’m not going to talk about that.

My day job revolves around being prepared for disasters, and this can be treated exactly like a disaster due to the nature of the target. In fact, some of my colleagues have spent much of the last 4 days implementing disaster mitigation plans due to the failure of the AT&T network. I am incredibly proud of the work that they have done both in the last four days and the last four years in preparation for an event like this.

So, looking at it from a pure communications disaster/widespread failure standpoint, I wanted to note a few things for you to think about.

Know your local infrastructure
When I first saw reports of an explosion downtown, I thought it was a transformer explosion. That has happened a couple of time in the last 30 years so it seemed logical, especially considering the area. Like every other IT nerd in Nashville, I knew exactly what that building was and what it’s purpose is. It needs a lot of power, and it’s been there for a gazillion years.

Once the police said it was “an intentional act” I knew that the AT&T switching station was the target. There was nothing else important in the area (really, who bombs a Hooters?), and a much more politically appealing target–the Federal Courthouse–is only about 10 blocks away. Whoever it was, their purpose was to disrupt communications.

The AT&T network is not as resilient as you’d think, but it is pretty resilient. A lot of people locally are angry with AT&T because of the loss of cell service, 911 service, internet, etc…but AT&T can only do so much to prepare for something like this. It took almost 5 hours from the time of the explosion until the first widespread outage was noticed. My theory–and I cannot stress enough that this is a theory and not based on actual facts–is that the automated systems started re-routing traffic exactly as intended, but that the load was too much for the secondary systems. Essentially, they moved calls from going through Nashville to going through Louisville, but the Louisville system did not have enough capacity to handle the load of the entire Nashville infrastructure going down. That’s why you had outages up that way, too: Network overload and nowhere to go.

Sure, they could have planned for this, but then your $80 cell phone bill would be $200. It’s a calculation that every company has to go through and I’m not going to fault them with less than perfect resilience.

Anyway, the point is that you should know your local failure points. I expected a comms breakdown because I knew the importance of that building. This is important for natural disasters, too. When we had a flood in 2010 and a news helicopter showed footage of the local gasoline depot under water, I knew we were about to have a gas shortage.

At a minimum, you should know the locations of the following facilities:

  1. The power substation that feeds your home and/or office.
  2. The power plant(s) that feed that substation.
  3. The water treatment facility that feeds your home and/or office.
  4. The distribution point that your fuel comes from. Gasoline, heating oil, etc.
  5. The distribution point that your food comes from.
  6. The switching station or local exchange office that handles your phones.

If there was some sort of widespread natural disaster in your area, knowing these things may help you make a decision to leave much easier and much faster. In that 2010 flood, for example, two of Nashville’s three water treatment facilities were taken out. The third came very, VERY close to also being rendered inoperable. If that one had been breached, we would have evacuated within an hour or so.

Communications Redundancy
This one can be confusing but I’ll try my best. I’m not talking about the need for everyone in your family to have a HAM license and a pre-programmed handheld and mobile radio (although that is useful as we’ll see later). I’m talking about the poor folks here who had AT&T for Voice, Data, TV, Cell Service…the works.

Those people were completely cut off from the world for 24 hours+.

The day after my wife and I had our very first date, T-Mobile had an outage that affected something like 8 states. I really needed to call this super-cool girl for a follow-up date because she was leaving town the day after, so I ran down to Target and bought a pre-paid cell phone on AT&T’s network. The day was saved, I got the second date, and now we have two kids, a dog, and a house in the suburbs.

When we got married, she kept her Sprint phone for a while and I had switched to AT&T after the outage. This was important, because Sprint and AT&T used completely different network technologies at the time. There were no scenarios outside of a widespread long-term blackout where both of us would be out of cell service. That’s a communications redundancy.

Today, we’re both on AT&T for cell service and we have Comcast for internet. I have Google Voice, so that gives me VoIP for my “cell phone” number and I could still send and receive text messages during the outage. We had some communication ability, but it was limited.

Then, the day after the explosion, Tactical Dog had a medical issue and had to go to the vet, like, now. She’s fine, but the experience exposed a problem.

My phone worked on wifi, but only on wifi. When I left the house I was completely isolated. If we’d still had separate cell phone carriers, I could have just taken the other phone, but we’d consolidated to one carrier to save money.

Everything worked out, I just had to live in 1994 for a few hours. I remember 1994 so I was fine. But it brings me to my final point.

Have printouts for emergencies
Right now, can you put your hands on a piece of paper with your local EMS/Fire dispatch’s phone number? Or your doctor’s? Or your veterinarian’s?

One of the effects of the bombing was a widespread, multistate 911 outage. Everyone had to call either the non-emergency dispatch number or the local precinct/fire hall/whatever. There were lists floating around twitter and the Emergency Management websites but you had to know where to look. And you had to have internet, which you may not have had.

I was fortunate enough to have been to the vet’s so many times that I knew how to get there without the aid of GPS (which would have required downloading map data since our vet is outside the area we normally roam around in–which is a story for another day). If the way I knew how to get to the vet’s office had been blocked, as might be likely during a more widespread disaster, I’m not familiar enough with the area to have routed around it quickly without the aid of a map.

A pre-printed map, or a paper map with important locations already marked, could have been a literal lifesaver for about a 36-hour period. I bought a good old-fashioned paper map last January just to keep in the car. Something to think about.

The last thing I wish I’d had beforehand was a list of local repeater frequencies, either pre-programmed or printed out. This is amateur radio specific, but as I sat in the vet’s parking lot waiting on them to treat the dog, I realized that my little handheld was way, way out of range of the repeaters I normally use. Again, the vet is outside our normal operating area, but it’s close enough that I really should have put those frequencies somewhere handy.

So that’s all I have for now. Just a few lessons-learned from someone on the ground with a somewhat unique professional perspective.

quickie

By | March 17, 2020

Stopped at Academy on the way home. I can tell you that the reports of there being no ammo on the shelf is over blown. They had plenty of… 38S&W.

I might stop by tomorrow and grab a couple boxes for my Enfield revolver.

A Little Advice

By | January 26, 2020

If you’ve got a table at the local gun show, and you’re trying to sell a Cobra Denali 380, maybe you should charge less than $400 for it.

Seriously. I’ve seen this guy trying to sell that thing for $400 at the last few gun shows I’ve been to.

Here’s the kicker: the guy is also selling some older guns that I’d be interested in, but seeing an asking of 4 times the actual value of that gun has made me deeply suspect of the prices on the rest of the stuff.