Night Knight
January 3rd, 2021What do I Really Want?
It’s a beautiful day. Overcast and threatening to rain. It’s beautiful because I’m on my own farm, far from Miami, closer to God than ever, considering going outside to shoot squirrels.
I just made buckwheat pancakes with dark maple syrup. Wonderful. If you don’t feel loved after a plate full of buckwheat pancakes and a big mug of ginger tea with half and half, you don’t have both oars in the water.
Oddly, while I’m enjoying the sensation, I’m thinking about weapons.
The rapture has not come. I am still here. The Antichrist’s left-wing troops are still moving toward pogrom-style persecution involving bringing mob violence to the suburbs and farms. I need to be prepared.
What’s the answer? Do nothing and accept martyrdom when the enraged millennials arrive? That’s not a crazy option. I don’t like the idea of killing unsaved people, even if the alternative is being killed. Another option is to be armed as well as I reasonably can. If I do that, I can respond with a show of strength, or with violence, if needed. If God shows me the better way is to sit on the porch and wait to have my throat cut, I can still do that even if I’m armed.
I’ve thought about night vision and thermal optics. If you can fight in the dark, you can literally massacre overconfident nighttime home invaders. Yesterday I wrote about ordering an infrared illuminator for a night vision scope which I already own. The purpose of the illuminator and scope is to help me shoot things like coons and coyotes. Maybe pigs. But anything that will help you shoot an animal at night will also help you defend yourself from nocturnal murder gangs.
I keep researching the alternatives. It looks like night equipment for hunters is not necessarily the same as night equipment for the defense of life and property.
There are two kinds of nighttime optics. Night vision and thermal. A night vision optic uses infrared light, which is always present, to give you a picture a lot like a black and white TV. My understanding is that night vision optics come in two flavors: relatively inexpensive jobs that rely on illuminators, and pricey units that don’t need them.
The step in price between the two types is pretty big. I bought my night vision scope, which works okay, for about $600 in 2017 or 2018. A military-style night vision monocular will run about $3500. Why? Because it works much better.
Defensive shooters generally don’t use night vision scopes. They put monoculars on their helmets. The monoculars are mounted so they can swing down for use or up out of the way. Instead of using your scope to show you what’s happening, you use your monocular to look through your scope. Instead of an IR illuminator, you use an IR laser. It lights up the bad guy, you see it through your monocular and scope, and you plug him. He has no idea what’s happening, because he can’t see the laser beam.
I believe this is right. Not positive.
Finding the bad guy (so you can use your scope to shoot him) is different, if I have my facts right. A defensive shooter would want a second monocular next to the first one, with thermal circuitry. You locate bad guys with thermal, which is easier, because they light up like hot pokers, and then you use night vision to take them down.
This is all very different from what I am currently contemplating. I expect to be able to use my night vision scope and illuminator, coupled with a thermal monocular for scanning. Compared to a rig with two monoculars, I believe my equipment would be harder to use in a defensive situation. I would be able to use night vision for shooting, but a scope isn’t as good as a monocular for looking around to see what’s happening near you.
What if they show up during the day?
In the daytime, a thermal monocular would still be helpful because it lights up human beings. The night vision scope works in daylight, so it would be useful, too. I would not need night vision to see what was happening around me, so I would not need a monocular for that. I don’t think a night vision monocular would be useful during the day. It wouldn’t show me anything I couldn’t see by other means.
Actually, it would let me use an IR laser, but it still seems like a bad idea.
I feel like I should get a thermal monocular no matter what. If I want to hunt critters when it’s dark, or I want to be able to spot them more easily during the day, a quality thermal monocular is the way to go. Sadly, they are not cheap. The $500 ones are fine for watching your dog run around in your backyard, but you have to blow a lot more to get something that works well enough to trust for defensive use.
Would I ever get a night vision monocular? I guess it depends on how bad things get. I can’t say $3500 is a high price for safety, but I’ve already taken pretty substantial measures.
I really like hunting and shooting, but that doesn’t mean I want to live in a world where I need to use my equipment and skills on human beings. I know people who live in total harmony and brotherhood right now. They’ve already left the earth. How hard should I work to delay my arrival in their company?
In all likelihood, I will never get a serious night vision monocular. I don’t think I value this life enough to make the expenditure and aggravation worth it.
January 3rd, 2021 at 1:31 PM
A minor (but important) correction: night vision optics use *all* light, not just IR. The difference in price between the two flavors you mention is the presence of effective light intensification tech. The “cheap” ones don’t do much intensification, but they can pick up IR which allows the usage illuminators that are invisible to the naked eye. Most are probably quite overpriced because they’re basically just cheap digital cameras (which can pretty much all pick up IR; try pointing your smartphone camera at a TV remote or other IR source sometime). From a hunting standpoint you don’t lose much with the inexpensive variety because illuminators are cheap and most mammals don’t see IR very well. However, from a defensive standpoint the need for a spotlight is obviously a huge liability if there’s any chance that one’s opponent might also have night vision and/or a digicam of some sort. Lasers are okay because they’re difficult to trace back to their source in most conditions, but anything else makes one a sitting duck.
You should also consider the weather in which you’ll be hunting. Thermal optics depend on the *difference* in temperature between objects. That’s great when you’re looking for warm-blooded targets on a cold day, but the utility will diminish in warmer weather. Given that you’re mainly interested in hunting and don’t seem to be much for hot weather that may not be a problem. But when thinking of things from a defensive standpoint it’s worth considering how often the air temperature will be near/at your target’s temperature. Likewise, humidity and fog will decrease the effectiveness of cheap night vision (the longer IR wavelengths get blocked very quickly by water, think car headlights in fog) while rain will tend to hurt thermal performance (as it cools everything to about the same temp).
January 3rd, 2021 at 1:53 PM
I’m currently researching IR for different purposes. A number of the monoculars warn against using them in daylight. Some allow use with an included cap but still warn against use for longer than 10-minutes.
There’s also the question of emitting some visible light. Some monoculars emit visible light so the user will remember to turn them off. Other illuminators, I believe at 850nm, emit visible light. It appears that you have to get 920nm or higher to have an invisible light source, but some monoculars can’t see that wavelength. Of course the manuals don’t make clear what will work with what.