Articles by Paul Helinski

You know what really chaps my ass? When I see a supposed “gun reviewer” bash a product online based on very limited experience. It is almost as bad at the ‘tubers who review a product positively, after putting a dozen rounds through it, because…drum roll please, they got a free one. As you’ll see in the video, my topic for this week is a followup review on a problematic Black Aces Tactical DT short shotgun. On first blush, the gun is junk. But at the same time, we’ve had a prior gun in that worked great. I’m not personally a huge fan anyway. It’s clunky and hard to rack. But I think that whenever you encounter a problem with a gun, it is important to try to figure it out, especially before you spreading bad information around the internet.

The point of this article is for when a friend who works at Starbucks asks you how cheap they can carry. Do you answer $300-$500 for a Taurus revolver? $250 for a Kel-Tec? Or do you answer just over $100 for a Cobra derringer?

Some survival topics seem to be a little more “out there” than others, and one of those is definitely canning food in steel cans, otherwise known as tin cans.

This one is a real head scratcher.  As many of you know, we have an extremely comprehensive Prepping 101 section here on GunsAmerica, and it isn’t to capitalize on the hype. If you look at the full picture of what is going on in the world, you just have to ask yourself, how long can [...]

I’ve recently learned something new that I think I should share with you. It is survival computing. In general I am not a big fan of power inverters, and I think you should run as much off of 12 volts as possible, but there are a lot of benefits to having a laptop available, and phones and tablets are priceless if you have kids. I’m also going to cover a $25 low voltage/low amperage computer solution that is currently being used to build perimeter security systems, remote listening posts, and even balloon lifted radio relay antennas. This is pretty cool stuff.

The most difficult part of writing this column has been to condense down everything I have learned into small, bite sized chunks, but when it comes to radiation, I think I have failed. Everyone wants to talk about nuclear bombs and EMP strikes, but getting someone to pay attention to what happens next is nearly impossible. Radiation, whether it be fallout from those initial nuclear strikes that may or may not happen, or from the nuclear plants that will melt down shortly after **whatever** burns down our current reality, will be a part of survival. If you are unprepared for it, you are going to die. I don’t see how I can make it more simple.

This week I’m returning to the subject of beekeeping, because the last one didn’t go as I had planned. If you watched the videos for that article, it turned out that one of my hives had gotten extremely aggressive, and I’m sure it turned a lot of people off to beekeeping. In this video I am rewinding to the beginning, where most people start, by “installing” package bees into a brood box. As you can see, I am bare armed in the video, and up until I discovered that one of my hives had become aggressive, I had worked my bees exclusively with bare arms. And that includes removing frames and extracting honey.

Some of you long time readers here may remember that I found a killer deal on a copy of a 100 round Beta C-Mag at the height of the Sandy Hook gun boom in 2013. It was at the Sportsman’s Guide. Other sporting goods retailers were price gouging and SG was selling that mag for what was at the time less than suggested retail price. I thought it was pretty cool. These days that mag is even $50 cheaper, but that isn’t the point of this article. I’m on the SG mailing list now, and just sitting around today I opened their current flyer and found a few prepping products that I have actually reviewed, at really low prices, and a couple I haven’t, but that I know are also really great deals. I’m going to be light on this column for a few weeks because my kids are out of school for Passover, so I figured I would just share this information, and give you my coupon code. ;)

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
-Mark Twain