The Urban Rifle

Double Star’s Constand Carry Carbine (C3)

In a recent discussion on my blog about the DoubleStar C3 as an “urban rifle, a reader asked me the following:”

Can you please describe the use of a rifle for “urban carry”? Also can you quantify and document the actual incidents where this is used in the USA on a yearly basis?

Actually a pretty good question. First, you’re going to have to grant that I’m paranoid. D’uh! Well, I prefer to think that I’m a realist and that much of my personal philosophy is based on a song by Jim Morrison:

Well, I woke up this morning, I got myself a beer
Well, I woke up this morning, and I got myself a beer
The future’s uncertain, and the end is always near

So, let it roll! Anyway, if I may borrow another quote, this time from Kurt Vonnegut, “Things are going to get worse and worse, and they’re never going to get better again.” Our culture is for lack of a better word broken, and the entire machinery of America is being steered by malevolent, ignorant children drunk on their own power. That creates a high potential for what we refer to in THE BEST DEFENSE as “social dislocations.”

Whether those dislocations come from a great big windstorm that everybody plainly saw coming, a whack job in North Korea actually figuring out how to lob a nuclear missile onto the America heartland, the New Madrid Fault finally giving up the ghost, the children running the country succeeding in collapsing the economy and chumming up enough divisiveness for battles in the street, or the Iranians mastering their low-angle missile launches from cargo ships and succeeding in turning off the lights in lots of America, our security rests on a series of increasingly unstable assumptions.

I travel… a lot. Sometimes I drive and sometimes I fly. My primary imperative on my trips is to get home to my family, as unorthodox as that family might be. Based on my own studies of social dislocations, I believe that a rifle is a huge “force multiplier” in a situation where everything flies into the fan. Therefore, having a rifle seems like a good idea. The rifle becomes an extension of the very idea of concealed carry… I’m not sure when a fire is going to break out, so I carry a fire extinguisher. A rifle is a larger fire extinguisher. The function of that rifle is the GET ME HOME in extraordinary circumstances. Does this happen every week? Nope. Will a major social dislocation ever happen? Don’t know. But everything we do in life is a risk/reward equation… my “risk” here is an additional baggage charge at the airport or one more bag in my car… not a very big risk against a very big reward.

As far as quantifying on a yearly basis, whatever for? I do know people who quite literally survived Katrina because of their hardware. I have spent a lot of time with first responders, military “war gamers” and experts on major social disasters. Sometimes I have nightmares about stories I’ve heard from those experts.

I guess it comes down to yet another saying… things don’t happen, until they do.

So when I can carry a rifle, I do, for the same reason I carry a trauma kit.

Make sense?