For the past 8 months or so, I’ve been working on a new AR15 build, intended to replace my current SHTF gun. Inspired, of course, by recent political developments here in the states and the downright hateful rhetoric targeting multiple loved ones of mine coming from the current regime.
My old SHTF gun was a fairly straightforward build. It was kind of a generic AR, with common accessories and the only parts that weren’t bog-standard were the ambidextrous controls (which are actually pretty common on brand-name guns these days). It was a 16″-barrel Radical that I bought for about $300 and built up to my spec with another ~$700 worth of replacement parts (a better-fitted BCG, ambi controls, H-buffer, aftermarket stock) and accessories (3X prism optic with a piggybacked micro-red dot which has since been replaced with a gigantic 1-10X LPVO from Monstrum Tactical, a company I cannot recommend enough to anyone building a rifle under any kind of budget constraint, a weapon light and a VFG).
My new gun has a shorter barrel and a few additional parts that one lacks that I bought because they were quality-of-life improvements, or because they actually had a tactical purpose. I’m not going to go into detail on it here. If you’re in my discord and I trust you enough to give you access to the gun channel, you already know exactly how that thing is set up.
I’ve always been a tinkerer. I tinker constantly with my rifle and my gear. My battle rattle (of course I have battle rattle, I’m half-expecting a civil war in the next few years, and I’m not a REMF, the only way I know how to help is turning bad Nazis into the only kind of good Nazi that exists; a dead one) has gone through multiple iterations, only to end up in the same configuration I ran it back in Iraq. A mostly-slick plate carrier with a chest rig sized to fit over top of it, the smallest assault pack I could get away with, a camelbak laced to the back of the carrier (meant to sit under the assault pack), knee and elbow pads and a battle belt that holds a second (smaller) IFAK, a couple of mags, a sidearm (which I never really used as a backup, only as a much smaller primary than my rifle for indoor work) and a dump pouch for my empty mags or whatever else I needed it for.
I’m fairly zen about having tried out the latest hotness and ending up right back where I started, because battle-rattle configuration is really kind of a timeless thing (once you account for the invention of parts of it, like the dump pouch and plate carrier).
But the more I work on my current SHTF gun, the more I’m coming to realize that I’m just recreating the M4 that I used for most of my deployments to Iraq. I actually used a bunch of different rifles, including an LWRC Six8 when my whole team got permission to change primary calibers as an experiment. It was a failed experiment, but having bought the guns ourselves, I did get to keep mine and selling it years later got me out of a serious financial bind. But I used that particular M4 more than any other. It was a 14.5″ barrel with a Knight’s Armament suppressor, a broomhandle-style VFG (the only VFGs we even knew about at the time, though I can’t say with any certainty that there weren’t others out there), an AN/PEQ-15 and my own personal optics on top: A Leupold MarkIV HAMR with the piggybacked Deltapoint red dot. Like this one. (On a side note, I was tickled pink to see that same optic being used in the fairly-recent film, Extraction.) I had jerry-rigged my safety into an ambidextrous one, though I kept the right-handed-only mag release because I never just dropped my mags like they do in the movies. I even had a tan dishrag wrapped around the quad-rail to insulate my hand (even a gloved hand) from the heat when I did a lot of shooting. And guess what? I had a tan dishrag wrapped around my current MLOK rail until very recently, and am very likely to put it back on there.
(Don’t @ me bitching about heat buildup: either you’re not shooting enough to have to worry about heat shifting your POI, or you’re shooting enough that it’s going to happen anyways. I rocked that shit in hotter temps than we see in most of the US and was fine.)
And I honestly don’t know what to think about that. Am I stupid for building an (admittedly highly upgraded version of) an old GWOT-era weapon for (to be clear: defensive) use in a potential future civil conflict here? Should I be following the current accepted consensus and build an SPR, or is that just the latest fad, the way super-short-barreled rifles chambered in .300 Blackout were, 5-10 years ago? Is my own knowledge of urban conflict outdated or just not applicable to conflicts here in the states?
And of course, that leads me to a more abstract line of thoughts. Am I getting old enough that I’m actually getting set in my ways? I’ve always been one to adapt well to the times, adopting Millennial and Gen-Z slang and humor, staying current on technology (I still do software development, and have even developed novel deep learning systems and contributed to open-source development of DL tools) including playing video games right alongside my kids. After my wife left, I ended up very briefly dating a couple of 20-somethings before I realized that was just too much of an age gap for me (my current girlfriend of over a year is only a few years younger than me).
But at the same time, there’s a lot about modern sensibilities and trends that don’t appeal to me. The way a lot of younger people don’t understand media, for example. Homelander is an over-the-top bad guy who is a satire of patriarchal cis-het white men of power, Helldivers 2 is a satire in the exact same way (and the exact same vein) that Starship Troopers was, and Geralt was actually proven wrong in the first episode of The Witcher after he said “Evil is Evil. Lesser, greater, middling… Makes no difference. The degree is arbitrary. The definition’s blurred. If I’m to choose between one evil and another… I’d rather not choose at all.” But that could be explained as youthful media illiteracy. Young people lack the experience to really understand a lot of subtlety in media. But there’s more to it. Conspiracy theories are more popular now. I’ve even seen Millennials who work with younger Gen-Z and older Gen-Alpha kids talking about how wild some things these kids believe is. “Epstein didn’t Epstein himself” was one of those things that made the rounds of the culture, and while it’s a lot more plausible than others, it’s still a conspiracy theory. On top of that, you’ve got elements of incel culture making its way into mainstream culture, with ideas like looksmaxxing and even transmaxxing becoming a part of regular discourse. Some of this stuff is so ubiquitous now that it’s not even obvious that it’s taken from incel culture. Rizz being one such word.
(The word ‘incel’ literally didn’t even exist when I was a teenager. If it did, some people definitely would have called me one, though I always had the self-awareness to blame myself for my shyness around women, instead of blaming the women.)
But it’s not just that kind of worrisome stuff, it’s other things. Goth used to refer to a subculture centered around a music genre and all the fashion, ideology and thematic elements were derived from it. If I had to sum it up, it was the intersection of romanticism, romance and rebellion. Goth people were outcasts, drawn into the subculture after being rejected by mainstream culture. But these days, it’s become something more like a descriptor for anything dark or depressing. Young people have ‘goth phases’ after they get broken up with, and it’s more closely associated with depression and helplessness than it is with rebellion and romance.
Even in the tactical space, things are different. “Are those plates level 4?” is a common joke (with the punchline being the report of a 30.06 rifle). “Flamethrowers don’t care about your level 4 plates” is another. Both of those show how ubiquitous the idea is that the purpose of body armor is to keep you in the fight. But they both hint at the truth that was widely known in my day (at least, it was widely known in the Army, and perhaps it still is). The purpose of body armor is to give the docs and nurses back at the MASH or brick-and-mortar hospital a better chance of saving your life after you get taken out of the fight.
(Trust me, you don’t want to get shot in your level 4+ plates, not even by a 9mm. Maybe a .22LR would be something you could tank, but there’s only a few inches difference between your face and your plate, and if you don’t think a .22LR will go straight through your face and bounce around inside your skull at a hundred yards, you’re gonna be in for one final shock if you try to burglarize Deewayne from the holler.)
So I find myself feeling a lot of the same disconnect that I so often witnessed in older people in my youth and swore I would never fall into. Kids these days don’t know what goth really is, they don’t know how to read satire, they think a couple hundred bucks worth of armor makes them invincible, they talk like incels.
Or is that the usual cyclical older-generations-bitching-about-kids-these-days rearing its head? I sure didn’t have a lot of media literacy in my youth, (though I never had any doubt that ”Starship Troopers” was satire) and until I ended up getting jaded by war, I certainly never found a conspiracy theory I didn’t at least ”want” to believe in. I was a creationist, not because I was raised to be one (my childhood church was fairly agnostic on the evolution, even at its most conservative), but because the idea of a cabal of scientists suppressing The TruthTM appealed to me so much. And some of this stuff isn’t even that bad, from where I sit. Goth fashion is goth fashion, and yes, it can evolve over the years (Sorry, Amber, but change is a fact of life). Level 4+ plates are better than level 3+ plates which are better than no plates, no doubt (though steel remains superior to ceramic for multi-hit performance, spalling be damned).
I honestly don’t know. Sometimes the jokes my kids tell each other just completely miss me. I get the joke, I don’t need it explained, I just don’t find it funny. Other times those little dudes will utter something that will leave me cackling for a while.
Is this just what it’s like to get old? Probably. I am getting older, pushing 50 as I write this. My glory days are almost certainly behind me, unless the fates decide one of my books is going to go viral, or I’m going to end up a war hero in the Boog (there’s another example of extreme-right-wing culture that’s made it’s way into the mainstream). I gave up on packing back on a bunch of the muscle I lost when I settled down into dadhood (though I did get rid of that beer gut and I plan to avoid it as long as I can). I’m too old (and broke) to actually get that advanced degree I always wanted to get. I’ll most likely never own my own home and my retirement plans consist of hoping my kids are successful and don’t resent me too much.
So maybe that’s it. Maybe I’m trying to recapture something I feel is lost. Maybe I’m building a modernized GWOT rifle because I used to rock a GWOT rifle and I want to bring them back. Maybe I’m forgiving of the kids talking about being goth with no idea of who The Cure even is because I want goth culture to spread and be easier to find in the wild. I know I definitely feel a bit of a high whenever I see some barely-twenty making a video on TikTok set to the sound of Alice in Chains, or making fun of Eddie Veder’s nigh-incoherent singing.
Or maybe we just got it right during my day, and all the kids are wrong.
I should probably buy a couple of cheap drones and some explosives anyways.