Towsley - Prepper guns: firearms, ammo, tools, and techniques you will need to survive the coming collapse

Copyright 2016 by Bryce M. Towsley

All photos by Bryce M. Towsley unless otherwise noted.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Rain Saukas

Cover photos credit: Bryce Towsley

Print ISBN: 978-1-63450-587-1

Ebook ISBN:978-1-63450-967-1

Printed in China

For my children, Erin and Nathan, and for Brendan who married into this mess.
Its their future we are fighting for.

Learning is not compulsory. Neither is survival.

W. Edwards Deming

Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today.

Mark Twain

CONTENTS

AUTHORS NOTE

T here are two terms you will see throughout the book that are in common use with preppers.

TEOTWAWKI: The end of the world as we know it.

TSHTF: The shit hits the fan.

Both are used here to describe the time following any sort of event that leads to a social or economic meltdown. In short, they describe the situation that you are prepping for.

FOREWORD

I n the decades since Mel died in 1980, several writers have asked if they could update Survival Guns. After they explained what they wanted to do, I told them No for one reason: They did not understand why Mel wrote the book.

When a friend whose judgment I trust asked if I would write a foreword to Bryce Towsleys Prepper Guns , I was dubious but said that I would take a look at it, very much aware that time and technology have rendered most of Mels specific recommendations obsolete, but not the reasoning behind them.

My concerns were put to rest when I came across these remarks of Bryce early in the book: Simply put, this is a gun book, not a survival book. It wont teach you how to survive, but it does explore the guns you will need to accomplish that goal. These words delighted me, for they sum up the reason Mel wrote Survival Guns forty years ago.

Bryce certainly knows his firearms and explains why he recommends specific calibers, makes, and models in an engaging style. Heed his advice and you will make smarter choices as you decide which guns make sense for you and your circumstances.

His personality and strong opinions about the direction this country is heading pervade his book, just as Mels did. But whether you agree or disagree with Bryces views, Prepper Guns will make you stop and think. As he puts it, Be mad at me if you want, be offended, be horrified, be whatever; but read the book and be safe.

Mel would agree.

Nancy Tappan

INTRODUCTION

The Inspiration for This Book

While researching this book project, I bought both of Mel Tappans books. For those of you who dont know, he was pretty much the godfather of the prepper movement. They called it survival back then, but Tappan ruled the market in those bleak Jimmy Carter years. Although he died young and unexpectedly, his 1977 book Survival Guns is a classic. After his death, his wife put together some of his columns from Guns and Ammo and Soldier of Fortune and created the book, Tappan on Survival .

I read both of these books back when they were first published, and I never missed his G&A column. It was interesting, particularly the gun stuff, but I didnt take it very seriously. I was young and had nothing, so I figured I had nothing to lose. Today, I am looking at it all with a more mature perspective than I had back in the '70s when I was young, dumb, and bulletproof.

I am amazed at not only the high quality of his writing, but also just how right he got most of it. Of course, the gun stuff is very dated today, but at the time he was right on (as we liked to say back then). In the '70s the world didnt have Glocks or other high-cap, plastic pistols. The semiauto fighting rifle options were extremely limited, and ammo, particularly for handguns, was just starting to claw its way out of the muck of the round-nose, lead-bullet era.

As might be expected with anybody who wrote predictions about the future, almost forty years later some of it has proven incorrect. He has a skeptical warning about global cooling, which proved to be just hysteria. (For those who dont know, global cooling was all the rage with the sky is falling crowd back in the '70s.) I am sure the result is not unlike how todays global warming alarmists will be viewed thirty years from now. Tappan also wrote a lot about the possibility of nuclear war with Russia. It was a big concern then. But the trouble is, we tend to look at things from our current perspective. In recent years most people would have thought that, too, was dated and just past paranoia, until recent events have put such a scenario back on the table. In fact, the RussiaUSA thing is probably a more dangerous scenario now than it was in the 1970s.

Tappan was convinced that there was no way to avoid an economic meltdown. He was concerned about the national debt, which was $650 billion at the time and exceeded the amount of money in circulation. In other words, the government owed more money than existed, which is a bad thing. He also pointed out that the way inflation happens is by the government printing more money, which devalues the currency. If a piece of silver is worth one dollar, by printing enough money to double the amount in circulation the silver is now worth fifty cents. For those of us who remember the Carter years, it was happening, and inflation was 12.5 percent when Reagan took office.

Things are moving so fast now that anything I put in this book regarding economics will be horribly dated before the book is even published. But for reference, there were approximately $1.37 trillion in circulation as of June 4, 2015, of which $1.32 trillion was in Federal Reserve Notes. Federal Reserve Notes have no backing with anything of value. They are printing money at a rate of $560 million per day. Five percent of that, or about $28 million per day, is new money added to the kitty. That means that they are adding ten trillion, two hundred twenty million extra dollars into circulation every year!

The national debt as of today, July 27, 2015, is $18,629,694,522,000. It is increasing at a rate of $2.31 billion per day! That means that our national debt today is almost fourteen times the amount of all the US dollars that even exist, which shows just how much worse things have gotten. Tappan was worried that national debt was exceeding the amount of money in circulation. Now, despite printing money at an alarming rate, we have exceeded the amount of money in circulation by almost 1,400 percent!