Topic

PDW

Personal Defense Writing. Essays and reflections at the intersection of readiness, mutual aid, and the inner life of self-defense. Not just gear. Not just theory. This is the everyday practice of showing up prepared—in body, mind, and friendship.

FOMO: Fear of Mything Out

Why your boots, your pistol, and your AI workflow all whisper the same story I. The Anxiety of the Counter At the gun shop, the script writes itself: "Everyone else has a 'real' 1911, and I'm stuck with this polymer striker-fired thing." "Am

The 5.7×28mm Reality Check

A 2025 Intervention or: "Seriously Chummer, You Really Want to Do This?" Look, I get it. You saw John Wick 3. You played Counter-Strike. You read about NATO PDWs and armor-piercing capabilities. The 5.7×28mm sounds cool as hell on paper. But before you drop $400-1,900

The Gun That Goes With You: Questioning Traditional CCW Wisdom

Or: Why "G19 or stay home" might be missing the point entirely There's a persistent orthodoxy in concealed carry circles that sounds something like this: "Carry the biggest gun you can conceal. If you can't carry a Glock 19 (or an M&

The Armed Civilian Paradox: A Practice in Orbital Analysis

Notes from the periphery of American gun discourse The Orbit We're Tracking Armed civilians in America exist in a state of permanent paradox—and so does every attempt to discuss them. Rather than stake out another position in this discourse, we're going to orbit the existing

When Satire Becomes Science

How a Game About Corporate Crisis Management Predicted Sig Sauer's Playbook Or: The Day Our Fictional Framework Started Writing Real Press Releases The Timeline That Broke Reality Tuesday Morning: We read Open Source Defense's brilliant analysis of Sig Sauer's P320 crisis, which laid out

Without a Paddle: The Sacred Cow of Mutual Aid in the Age of Climate Collapse

"You want extra foma with that latte?" Sarah, a woman in her forties living in Pittsboro, North Carolina, has a plan. When the next storm comes—and there will be a next storm—everyone in her house will wear life jackets. There's a canoe in the

July 18th: Parking Lots and Bookstores

A man died in the Safeway parking lot while I was getting groceries. That evening, our friends talked about The Raincoats at Powell's. My wife played me Kleenex/Liliput when we got home. I worked on a Lasers & Feelings hack about 80's Vegas with four

When Consensus Meets the Range

There's a moment when you're holding a loaded rifle and someone next to you starts getting careless with their muzzle direction. Time slows. Your peripheral vision sharpens. Every instructor on the line turns toward the problem like iron filings toward a sudden magnetic field. What happens

Beyond Repair: Why We're Building Something New Instead

The democratization of destructive technology is making traditional governance obsolete, but the alternatives emerging aren't necessarily better or worse - they're just different trade-offs that work for different groups. The real question isn't which system is "correct," but whether we can build

The Weaponization of Legitimacy

How the AR-15 Became America's Political Compass An analysis of institutional authority, civilian armament, and the fragmentation of democratic consensus in contemporary America Introduction: From Tool to Totem When Hi-Point Firearms announced their entry into the AR-15 market in 2025 with rifles priced under $550, it seemed like

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