About That Other Topic Sucking Up My Attention

In a comment to my post about concealed carry insurance, John Galt posted this link to a graphic created over at Sniper Country that compared most of the plans.  I used that graphic as the starting point for my own spreadsheet, which was not done in as pretty a format as Sniper Country's.  I checked as much data as I could on their graphic because it was dated December of '19 and I wanted to make sure it was still accurate.  Then I expanded their graphic.  That was because they only listed one option from the providers that had several tiers of coverage to choose from.  In all cases, it was the company's top of the line (most expensive but highest benefits) coverage.  It didn't take too long for me to realize that it would be a ton of work to list every option from every seller.  On top of that, not every provider lists their coverages in a straightforward way that makes it feasible to get the information I want.     

Without further setup, let me show you a screen capture of the full spreadsheet; click it to embiggen it:

This is a 1568x924 sized jpeg so hopefully legible to everyone interested. I've expanded the original four columns to eight, adding a second column for a lower level service at CCWSafe, a column for 2nd Call Defense and two columns for USCCA, expanding it from one to three. 

Interpreting legalese and advertising isn't the most straightforward thing in the world, but I tried. 

There were questions that I simply can't answer.  The very first question, by BladeRunner1066 was:

Is this "insurance" listed with your state insurance commissioner? Do you have a legally enforceable contract?

I believe the only company in this list that's an insurance company is 2nd Call Defense, although the USCCA might be insurance as well.  The others are agreements for law services.  They seem to work (extrapolating off the end my data, so beware!) much like cost sharing services that have sprung up for medical costs.  They pool the monies they get in fees for membership and whatever else, then use that to pay for the services.  The companies all have lists of excluded states they can't operate in.  That question is probably closer to the bottom of the ones I'll ask.

An anonymous comment asked:

- Would Zimmerman be covered?
- Would the two lawyers in St. Louis be covered?
- Would Rittenhouse be covered for going and looking for trouble and finding it?
- Would whatshisname the recent restaurant owner be covered?

All I can tell you is what I've read.  As I always I say, I'm not a lawyer, I'm some dood with a blog.  I saw nobody bragging about covering Zimmerman and I'd think the other cases are too new to be in their ads.  If I'm remembering properly, Zimmerman was acting as some sort of unofficial guard (that is, not a "real," licensed, bonded, private security company) in his community and that has got to change the odds of his having an armed encounter.  I can't imagine workers in a security company would have the same insurance and pay the same rates as armed civilians. 

My impression, because this is the way the companies seem to talk, is that their model is the one on one interaction where someone is on their property in some way (house, car, yard, you name it) and another person or persons tries armed robbery, armed home invasion, something like that.  Those are relatively straightforward classic self defense cases.  It seems to me that anything going on in these riots has to be pushing the boundaries of what any of our insurance plans pay for, from homeowner's to car insurance to anything. 

Another Topic Sucking Up My Attention Span

While the temptation to wax eloquent over the Notorious RBG is at least as tempting as jumping headlong into a patch of poison ivy, growing in a fire ant mound, while nekkid, I have other things on my mind.  After watching or reading someone's take on the new environment we find ourselves in, I find myself trapped in the morass of looking into self defense/concealed carry insurance policies.  

You might expect there to be a spreadsheet involved, and there should be.  I just haven't progressed to that point because it's not even clear enough to me how to compare some of the plans.   

Let me give a short summary of what I've found, and if any of you have worthwhile input, please fire away in the comments!  Same goes for if you know of options I don't have here.  With any luck, this might prove to be helpful to others. 

To begin with, there seems to be a couple of approaches to the whole business.  One appears more like conventional insurance; they have a list of benefits and expense amounts that they'll cover up to like you might read in your medical insurance plan.  The example that I found first is Second Call Defense - as in the number you call after you call 911.  They plainly list out coverages, like this:

Immediate Cash for Bond up to $5,000*
Immediate Attorney Retainer up to $5,000
Aftermath Site Clean-up up to $1,000
...
Legal Protection - Criminal
Criminal Defense Protection up to $50,000
...
Legal Defense & Indemnity - Civil
Accidental Shooting Protection up to $50,000
Civil Suit Defense Protection up to $500,000
Civil Suit Damages Protection up to $50,000

That's a snippet, not everything they say.  There are different levels of protection for differing premiums.  I don't see anything about a deductible, but I see those limits as hard numbers.  Say you end up getting charged in a criminal case: they'll pay a retainer to an attorney of up to $5,000 and the most they'll pay for your defense is $50,000.  If your defense costs add up to $75,000, the other $25k is out of your pocket. 

The larger number of plans (at least, plans I've found so far) aren't insurance and don't list maximums they'll cover.  The big names are probably CCWSafe and the Armed Citizens' Legal Defense Network.  CCWSafe is endorsed by Andrew Branca of The Law of Self Defense and probably best known for his book by the same name.  CCWSafe's website includes this note in the description of their various plans:

Note that our company is a legal service subscription plan - not an insurance company - and we are therefore not bound to conflicts and issues related to insurance company products. CCW Safe is designed to indemnify the expenses arising from a covered incident, regardless of the final trial outcome.

 Their description of coverage says things like:

• Access to our 24-hour Emergency Hotline
• Critical Response Team onsite response
• Bail coverage to $500K
• Vetting of attorneys by National Trial Counsel
• Unlimited attorney fees covered upfront
• Unlimited investigation fees covered upfront
• Unlimited expert witness fees covered upfront

Again, just a snippet.  

Just as CCWSafe is associated with giant legal name, the Armed Citizens' Legal Defense Network (ACLDN) is associated with Marty Hayes.  They appear to be run by a board consisting of recognized leaders in self-defense training including Massad Ayoob, and John Farnam.   

Like CCWSafe, they say they're not an insurance company, but it's difficult to see exactly what you get for your annual membership.   Yes, they'll help with bail; yes, they'll set you up with a network attorney, and so on, but they're not relatively simple direct statements like CCWSafe's.

If you read here regularly, you've probably seen in the right column that I'm a long time member of Florida Carry, a group dedicated to lobbying and trying to influence the state legislature to do the right things.  Florida Carry recommends U.S. LawShield.  They appear to be a network of attorneys, and I find it difficult to find what their benefits are, too.  Their website simply says:

• 24/7/365 Attorney-Answered Emergency Hotline
• Unlimited civil & criminal defense litigation coverage
• Coverage for all legal weapons

They won't tell me more if I don't register on the website, and I object to that.

Finally, there is a program from the US Concealed Carry Association (USCCA), called SHIELD.  They have several levels of program for presumably increasing premiums/costs: Gold, Platinum, and Elite.  For example their lowest level lists these benefits:

• $100,000 in Self-Defense SHIELD protection for criminal defense, bail bond funding and attorney retainer
• $500,000 in Self-Defense SHIELD protection for civil defense and damages
• Retain your existing criminal defense attorney or choose one from the USCCA Attorney Network
• Protection following the self-defense use of all legal weapons of opportunity
• Up-front funding for criminal defense and bail bonds
• 24/7/365 access to the USCCA Critical Response Team hotline

While I'm not a member of USCCA and this is just a gut feel, I've always gotten the impression that this insurance is one of a couple of their reasons for being.  They regularly have gun giveaway contests to pad their mailing list and I unsubscribed to reduce the amount of SPAM I get every day.  

All of them emphasize education and training.  All of them have some training-related benefits in their coverages including books, videos, podcasts, seminars and more.    

What say?  There will be a spreadsheet, and I promise to post it.  

My summer, shorts-and-fishing shirt carry Sig P238.

Deal Alert - Sog Snarl Knives

The SOG Snarl, is a 4.3" LOA, 2.3" blade length, 1/4" thick stainless (9CR18MoV) steel knife  They sell it as neck or boot knife, a BUK (back-up knife), if you will.  Comes with a nice fitting plastic sheath and a blackened chain.  The sheath has a metal belt clip on it that fits 1-1/2" belts.  I just learned about these knives last week and after an hour or so of research ordered two: one for the Diminutive But Deadly one and one for me. 

Last week, I found prices in the $29 range at Midway, a little more at Brownell's, and bought the two for $23.38 (each) at Amazon.  Yesterday and today, Amazon has dropped the price to $16.89.  That's a deal! 

While I doubt it would affect cutting ability, I noticed that Mrs. Graybeard's knife (luck of the draw from our box of two) was ground asymmetrically.  The V was the right included angle but not centered on the blade.  The ground length on one side was half as long as the other.  The blades were sharp but still showed lots of marks from the grinding.  I sharpened both, and was able to easily reshape her knife, on the Work Sharp knife sharpener.  Even without putting on the finest belt, the Work Sharp puts a shiny edge on a blade and they just look sharper than one with grinding wheel marks.  

I think it's usable out of the box, though, so don't get wrapped up about my sharpening them (when you have sharpener, every problem looks like a dull edge, right?).  If you're looking for a small gift, or just watching prices to buy something for yourself, they're definitely worth considering. 

A Short Review - The Work Sharp Ken Onion Edition Knife Sharpener

Like many (most? all?) of you, I have a bunch of knives.  The first really good knife I picked up was a Cold Steel tactical folder (which I call my light saber because of how it cuts through pretty much everything), followed by a Spyderco Tenacious, followed by, well, a few more than most sane people would have. 

Naturally, they get used for everyday tasks like opening boxes, shredding boxes, occasionally sawing off small branches, and lots of other things, which means they naturally get dull and need to be sharpened.  Like many people recommend, I picked up a Lansky system and got good results with it, but the problem is that it's pretty slow.  For those not familiar with it, these use a clamp and guide rod setup to fix the angle of the edge to the stone, which is absolutely essential for precise sharpening.  The problem is that with a range of knives with different blade sizes it can get tough to set up exactly right, so it becomes a bit cumbersome to do a lot of knives.  You wouldn't want to sit down with set of kitchen knives to sharpen on one of these. 

Since I really do have a set of kitchen knives to get sharpened, I started looking for something with a motor.  I imagine everyone has seen the little motorized "kitchen table" type sharpeners, which are more "one size fits all" in the angle they cut.  I looked at those as a way to upgrade my sharpening, but decided I didn't like that aspect. 

After looking at a lot of options, I settled on the Work Sharp Knife and Tool Sharpener - Ken Onion Edition.  The woodworking supply store Rockler (that link) has been running this special promotion for a few weeks, and I finally ordered one a couple of weekends ago.  It came last week, and now that I've put a dozen or so blades through it, I can say I like and would recommend it. 

The feature of this sharpener is that it adjusts for a handful of knife angles, from the fine edge 15 degree angle of a filet knife to the 30 degree angle of a really tough blade like a meat cleaver at the turn of a knob (in the back at the top of that triangle shaped part.  Unlike the kitchen table sharpeners or the Lansky system, both of which use hard-backed abrasives (wheels or the mounted hones Lansky uses), this sharpener uses abrasive belts as you can see here.  I've seen several videos of knife makers sharpening their work, and I've seen that many of them use sanding belts.  The argument for the belt is that the rounded convex edge the knife takes on is stronger than the angled grind.  The Work Sharp manual explains it this way:

Our blade use and sharpness testing have taught us that a convex edge is a superior edge. The smooth radius edge type does not have ‘shoulders’ like a flat grind and creates less friction or resistance when cutting. A convex edge provides more steel behind the edge to support it, so the edge stays sharper longer. Lastly, our convex method thins the bevel when you sharpen the blade, while flat ground blades get thicker and thicker as you re-sharpen.

Before deciding to go with this sharpener, I read several reviews on knife makers' forums and found it well accepted.  There were a few minor comments against it, but the vast majority was positive.

I started out with a CRKT knife I probably abuse the most and put a wicked edge on it pretty quickly.  After another couple of pocket knives, I went to a Rapala filet knife I've had since (guessing) 1972 and quickly put a great edge on it.  Today I sat down with a half dozen knives: one kitchen paring knife and the rest tactical/outdoors folders.  I put a good edge on all of them in a few minutes.  I queued up all of them, and did all of them on one belt before moving to the next belt.  One knife took a while because it had dings in the blade that had to be ground away, but if the edge was in decent shape, it probably took a minute to sharpen one.  

If you've got knives, you've got to sharpen them.  The Lansky system has the advantage of working with no external power, so if you have a cabin in the woods, or you're out camping or if the S has HTF, it's a good backup plan.  As long as the power is on to help, the Work Sharp system is a good way to approach sharpening every knife you've got.  As the name implies, it's also a tool sharpener and will sharpen axes, hatchets, lawnmower blades, not to mention kitchen scissors (I did a few of those, too, and brought them back from the dead). 

Note to the FTC or whomever:  I paid for it with my own money.  Not a gift.  I get nothing for recommending it.

Now This Is Knife Making!

I have a Pinterest account, which I mentioned here when I first started playing around with it.  To be honest, I don't quite know what Pinterest is good for, except maybe sharing recipes or something, but occasionally I do stumble across something cool.

The original links to a post on DeviantArt by Raudan Valmistus, where you'll need to go to really see this image at the right size.  The post follows his project from mining the local iron ore from the bottom of a lake, through refining that ore, and finally to a steel knife.  Steel?  He writes:

Analysis was made for another blade I made at same time, from same iron. Its carbon content is about 0,531%

The American Iron and Steel Institute defines carbon steel as having a carbon content of 0.12 to 2.0 %.  The carbon in this process seems to be absorbed from the charcoal used to work the iron.  It's one of the most profound and serendipitous "accidents" of the way the universe is put together that the way to make elemental iron more useful is add the element most likely to be added by the simplest ways of melting it: a wood or charcoal fire.  It guarantees that steel, arguably the backbone of civilization, would be discovered as soon as man learned how to control fire, blow air across it to make it hotter and allow us to melt elemental iron. 

But that sounds like the universe was intelligently designed and didn't just happen from an un-namable number of random interactions, and we know intelligent people can't hold that idea, right?   

We're Like All Brothers, Man!

Sorry, my inner hippie - long thought to have withered away and died - had to say that.  Don't worry.  I punched myself. 

Inner hippie was awakened by this interesting story in Der Spiegel, H/T to Small Dead Animals.  The Crow Tribe allowed DNA testing to be done on the body of a young boy, said to be two years old at death, and a special ancestor to the tribe.  Artifacts found with the body trace him to the Clovis people, among the first peoples to inhabit North America,

The characteristic fluting of the stone weapons serve as archeological evidence that the boy, who died some 12,600 years ago, came from the Clovis culture. It was one of the earliest New World groups, disappearing mysteriously a few centuries after the child's burial in present day Montana. From the summit of a hill towering over the burial site near the Yellowstone River, the boy's Ice Age contemporaries could monitor their hunting grounds for mammoth and bison.

Danish geneticist Eske Willerslev did the analysis and was surprised at what he found about the ancestors and descendents of the boy.

(Willerslev) discovered that he descends from a Siberian tribe with roots tracing back to Europe. Some of the boy's ancestors are likely even to have lived in present-day Germany. 

A two year old certainly didn't have descendents of his own, but they find his DNA in virtually all modern American populations. 

Their findings go even further: More than 80 percent of all native peoples in the Americas -- from the Alaska's Aleuts to the Maya of Yucatan to the Aymaras along the Andes -- are descended from Montana boy's lineage.

The Clovis people are associated with a particular type of arrow or spear point made by breaking flint in a particular way. (Clovis points from the Smithsonian)

There's somewhat of a resurgence of making this sort of stone knife/cutting tool, called flint knapping and they say that modern flint knappers consider this a particularly hard technique to do.  I've watched people do this at a rock show and it's pretty neat to watch; I've never tried it myself, though.  One of the factoids bandied around is that a knapped obsidian stone's edge is the sharpest edge known, and some surgeons are using obsidian scalpels to minimize scarring. 

But getting back to the original story, the genetic linking of the Clovis people to Europeans was a surprise to me; not so much the link to Siberia.  It adds credence to the argument that we are one race, the human race, and apparent differences are more from local populations interbreeding than from deep biological differences.  This is what one would expect if all humanity came from one place and spread out around the globe; whether they be Zinjanthropus at Olduvai or Adam and Eve in Eden.  Among humans studied, most genetic variation is within, not between, "races."  Just as a great dane and a poodle are both the same species; the differences in appearances were originally different populations breeding with each other.  A short dive into the comments of that Der Spiegel piece will remind you that this is a minority view, and people love to cling to their group identity, so that they can feel aggrieved and hurt by others.

New Little Sunday Afternoon Project

My weekend woodworking project.  Damascus steel with amboyna burl scales on the handles, brass rivet pins.  12 1/2 inches long.  Wicked sharp.  I didn't make the steel; the blade was my Christmas gift from the lovely Mrs. Graybeard.  All I did was the woodworking.  Not exactly New Yankee Workshop stuff...  

The "Whip it Out" Meme

The "show me your EDC knife" meme seems to go back to Og.  Here's mine:

It's my second Cold Steel knife, and a real gun show bargain.  Very much like the 4" TiLite with Zytel handle here, but with a black finished steel blade.  I've carried several different knives, but this has been my EDC for a few months.  If you're a long time reader, you know I've made a few knives and am studying how to make serious blades. 

Adding Barterable Skills

Over the last week or so, I've made another knife.  It's a very easy kit, that I got from Premium Knife Supply, from a listing on eBay.  They call it their S11 "Hawkbill" or pruning knife.  Got the blade for considerably less than their buy it now prices - $6.50, if I recall correctly.  For a while, you can look at one here.  Visitors to the archives will have to go search eBay. 

When the blade arrives, it's abrasive-blasted or finished to something like 80 or 120 grit abrasive.  I decided I didn't like the look and wanted to sand it and polish it.  That was an intensive job!  The steel they use is very hard and the pits from the abrasive are very deep.  Although I got a decent finish on it, it still bears marks from the sandblasting.  Then I tried to drill a 3/16" hole near the big finger hole to run some cord through, and ruined some HSS drill bits.  They barely made a mark on the steel this is made from.  The only thing I had that would drill that steel was a carbide masonry bit, and you should have seen the smoking chips fly!  I imagine a good quality carbide steel drill, or perhaps really high cobalt steel, would do. 

Polishing it was a little tricky with the curved shape, but it came out wicked sharp. 

The paracord handle is the first time I've done anything with the stuff.  Nice thing about paracord is I can take it apart and try it again later.  At first, I was going to use stones, like the knife I did last summer, but thought I'd try to learn how use paracord.  I have made fishing rods before, and the ways you treat paracord are pretty similar to the way you treat the rod-winding thread.  Only paracord is about 100 times thicker. 

So color me still learning.  Always room to learn, right?  "I'll trade you a big Bowie knife for one of your chickens".