Tacticool Prepping? Just Don’t

Tacticool. There’s a big difference between prepping with equipment that is used in a “tactical” nature by military and law enforcement and trying to be “tacticool”.

I see a lot of preppers loading all kinds of heavy, expensive junk onto weapons and calling that prepping, when really it’s just being tacticool… so let’s take a couple of minutes and talk about “kitting out” gear such as AR-15’s, personal defense handguns and other items.

What exactly is tacticool and why should I avoid it?

Urban Dictionary‘s definition:

1.) A derisive term for cheap knockoff versions of real, high-end tactical firearm accessories such as red dot sights, holosights, flashlights, lasers and scopes. Such accessories are highly popular with Airsoft players, since they look cool, cost much less and don’t need to be reliable enough for them to actually stake their lives on. A few morons put them on real guns though, which usually results in the cheaply made devices being destroyed by recoil.

2.) A derisive term for the use of an excessive quantity of tactical firearm accessories whether they are real or not.

I personally would add things like excessive military-style clothing worn not for utility but rather to show off. 

I’ve gotta be honest, if I show up at a public range and see somebody dressed up all tacticool, I don’t even bother getting out of my vehicle, I don’t want anything to do with that person and firearms, because he (and it’s ALWAYS a he) is the type of person who I don’t trust.

But what about if he’s in the military? I’ve got a good friend who’s a decorated marine (currently a recruiter) , been to the sandbox twice, I’ve seen him at our local range several times shooting… wearing blue jeans, a t-shirt and cowboy boots.

So what brought this to mind today?

I stopped by my favorite local gun shop to pick up an extra magazine for Spice’s S&W M&P .22 handgun and there was a guy in there tricked out all tacticool. Dressed in all black like an extra from a TV SWAT team, he was looking at a EOTech Chinese knock-off scope to put on top of his personal AR. He had brought the AR with him in a case. The AR appeared to me to be a DPMS Sportical from the look of it — it didn’t have a dust cover and it didn’t have a forward assist.

Look, I’ve got nothing against DPMS or budget-friendly AR’s, I’ve shot one of their Oracles and it was fine… but man, I just wanted to get as far away from that dude as I could. 

The Sportical had Magpul MBUS knockoff sites on it, it had a bi-pod mounted to the bottom (he’d put an aluminum picatinny quad rail) and it had a flashlight mounted on it as well. 

How to turn a 7 pound AR into a 12 pound pile of junk

This reminded me of a story (one I wrote about here once in the past, but I’m updating today).

I was at the range a couple of fall seasons ago, and a casual friend of mine was there shooting his AR. The thing was absolutely loaded with “accessories”, it had a combo flashlight/laser, an EOTech holographic sight with magnifier, a Magpul front hand grip, an AR-swing out bi-pod,  a pistol grip with storage compartment stuffed full of extra batteries, quick release multi-configuration sling, iron side-mount backup sights, a bi-lateral safety switch, the whole kitchen sink.

The gun weighed about 12 pounds, and he invited me to check it out.

I felt like a Mall Ninja* when I picked it up.

I had the ultimate zombie killing machine (well, I supposed it needed a grenade launcher for that), but what I didn’t have was a weapon in my hand that I would actually carry and use.

The 9-Pound Rule

Salty’s rule of thumb: AR’s should weigh less than 9 pounds unloaded. WELL less than 9 pounds. Eight pounds is better. Less than that? Better still.

Back in the day when I actually used AR’s (we have transitioned over to Tavor X95’s), I kept my guns light and simple. I had the AR, optic (Nikon P-223’s with Nikon mounts), polymer backup sights and that’s it. Unloaded weight 8 pounds 4 ounces with sling. 

Our current rigs are Tavor X95’s with EOTech XPS3’s, they weigh in at 7 pounds 15 ounces unloaded. 

I get it. I subscribe to several magazines including Shotgun News… oops, scratch that, Firearms News… and I love to see all the fancy must-have toys. When I look at them, however, the first thing I want to know isn’t how cool it us, but rather how much it weighs.

Pick Two

Bicycle Racer/designer Keith Bontrager famously said “strong, light, cheap… pick two…” and while that’s totally true for bicycle components, it’s also true for AR-15 accessories. The simple truth is that if you are going to add quality, lightweight but strong accessories to your weapons platform, it’s going to cost a LOT of money.

What we tend to see at the gun shows are a lot of heavy/strong/cheap (at best) or light/weak/cheap gear. We don’t see nearly as much light/strong/expensive because that doesn’t sell.

I keep coming back to the weight thing, why is it so important? If your are going to do nothing but use your gun at a gun range, shooting off of a rest or your fancy pull-down bipod, it isn’t. 

If, however, you are buying the gun as a prep to use in an emergency, it’s critically important for several reasons:

1. Every ounce is a burden if you have to walk/hike, and a gun is pure dead weight. 
2. Each additional ounce on a firearm affects the speed and stability of quickly readying and aiming your weapon
3. Every once affects the overall center of gravity of your firearm.
4. Most accessories are added in front of an AR’s natural center of gravity, and most tend to make the front of the gun heavier.
5. Front heavy guns are harder to hold steady, harder to maneuver with and harder to raise and lower.

It’s OK to be somewhat tacticool if you do it for function, not looks

The main reason we switched to the Tavor bullpup platform isn’t that the gun weighs less than our AR’s did, but rather that the weight distribution of a bullpup is MUCH further back down the axis of the gun, which makes the gun a LOT easier for a 5’4″ woman (Spice) to whip around, aim and shoot accurately, as well as to hold on target. 

Even thought our Tavor rigs are almost exactly the same weight as the guns they replaced, they feel lighter because the weight is centered much further back on the long axis of the gun.

They are, coincidentally, very high on the “tacticool scale”, especially when kitted out with EOTech holographics… but for us, the tacticool factor is entirely coincidental. 

OK, now… some fun stuff…

*What is a Mall Ninja? 

There are several definitions, but in prepper terms it’s somebody who puts an emphasis on piling up really cool looking tactical gear and showing it off to their friends and associates, rather than concentrating on what is really needed for a job. 

As the website RationalWiki puts it in their Mall Ninja entry: “A Mall Ninja is a type of weapons and combat enthusiast that is characterized by being so ungrounded in reality as to make even the most hardcore gun nuts shake their heads. Equal parts naïveté, delusion, and obnoxiousness, the mall ninja contributes to countless ill-informed online debates concerning arms, armor, and warfare, and is a common consumer of assorted paramilitary woo, broscience, and shared misconceptions about history and the world.”

The entry continues “The term “Mall Ninja” is pejorative; no one self-identifies as such. More often, they self-identify as weapon “experts,” martial arts aficionados, and otherwise Really Cool Guys. The first widely-known use of the term came from the gun enthusiast forum GlockTalk, where a clown asking for tactical advice claimed to be the sergeant of a special security team in one of the nation’s largest malls, as well as a master of ninjutsu; his claims only got more ridiculous from there.”

Here is a link that contains the backstory of the original Mall Ninja from the early days of the Internet. 

http://lonelymachines.org/mall-ninjas/

Sadly, I think most of us who like and enjoy weapons have an “inner Mall Ninja” tacticool lover lurking around inside the recesses of our brains. I know I do. 

Does this Tacti-Cool Helmet look good on me?

Inner Mall Ninja avoidance strategy

So… what steps can we take to keep that “inner Mall Ninja” in check? Here are 5 things:

• Concentrate on weight – when putting together your weapon system, concentrate on keeping the weight down. Every single thing that you put on a gun ads weight, so think hard about if you really need it. Spice and I have Tavor X95’s which are very, very Mall Ninja-leaning guns, but all we have on these guns are a holographic optic. No lasers, nothing hanging off the rails, no monopods, bipods, rangefinders, flashlights, nothing Tacti-Cool at all.
• KISS -Keep It Simple, Stupid. Walking the dog around the neighborhood while you are wearing a ballistic tactical vest with 8 30-round magazines, a Glock in the chest holster with 8 spare magazines, an IFAK, kevlar helmet & night vision goggles is a bit much? I think so. How about you just grab your CCW and call it good?
• Eliminate failure points – This is something we learn in technical diving. If it can fail, it will fail, so the more stuff you carry, the more chance you have that something is going to die on you when you “need” it. For example, depend more on non-electronic optics and iron backup sights than fancy lasers. Even with our holographic sights on our Tavors, if there is a failure it only takes about a second to pop up the Tavor’s built-in iron sights, and they work just fine without even removing the EOTechs (they are co – located)
• Blend in, don’t stand out – We buy commercial hunting camo instead of “Tacti-Cool” black or military digital patterns, simply because we want people to ignore us. Mall Ninjas want attention. Anti-Mall Ninjas want to be invisible. 
• Don’t show off your stuff – If you buy some gear and the first thing you want to do is show it off to all your friends, you are letting your inner Mall Ninja take charge. We arm ourselves to protect ourselves and our families, not to be the “cool kid” with the best toys. If you want to do that, buy a hot car or something. 

This article also contains some information previously published on 3BY, which this article supersedes.