The Kindle Store at Amazon has Taft's Weapons available for pre-order. Search for Rick Kester.

We have learned that previous sinkholes to La Brea have sealed themselves. This means the visitors may be living in 10,000 BC for the rest of their lives.
While Levi brought some much appreciated Meals Ready to Eat, it would be prudent to send the visitors a few thousand pounds of supplies from the surface to build self-sufficiency. 
Some durable camping equipment and perhaps some clothing such as the Army's Extended Cold Wet Weather designs will be appreciated. Tools for wood working, blacksmithing and books on other arts and crafts should be sent. The natives of Tasmania and the Tasaday of the Philippines lost the ability to make fire and clothing. Books can transmit learning across the gap of an uncaring generation.
Of course I have ideas about weapons for the half-dozen existing gun owners in La Brea and the remainder, who may have little experience. Rifles in .375 caliber are the minimum in some African countries for hunting elephant. Bolt actions are available in the Los Angeles area and fairly easy to maintain. Ten millimeter caliber automatics would serve in emergencies with both hungry megafauna and hostile fellow inhabitants. Double barrel hammer shotguns with double triggers would be easy to maintain, intuitive to operate and offer a reserve firearm if one lock should  break. With the hammers down, the springs are relaxed so there is little risk of parts failure in the ready mode. Brenneke 12-gauge slugs have taken elephant and buckshot have been prescribed for African lion.
Double action revolvers share the same safe storage and operating virtues. The hammer need not be cocked to load, unload or check the cylinder status. While most writer suggest the .38 Special for new shooters because of controllable recoil and moderate revolver weight, I suggest the venerable .45 Colt. The big cartridge can be loaded with round ball bullets (146 grains) for training and defense from human attackers. This approximates the .44 Cap & Ball load used in the U.S. Civil War. Megafauna should use heavier bullets as the 260-grain standard load was intended to halt a cavalry horse. The black powder load was our most powerful revolver load prior to the .357 Magnum in 1935.
A few M-4 carbines in 5.56X45mm might also prove useful in trained hands.
Dr. Sam Veles would welcome some medical supplies such as bone saws, antibiotics and anesthetics.
Pioneer tools such as axes, saws and shovels may prove as useful as knives, swords and spears. Heritage seeds adapted to the Los Angeles climate would shortcut millennia of plant breeding. Domestic animals might avoid the cannibalism reported by the Spanish. A full size cow would be tough to transport but a milking goat just might be possible. I can't wait to see.

Why would anyone want to buy a home compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act? What if we all got older each year and are more likely to have trouble in homes designed for Olympic athletes? What if we have an accident, like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window Rear Window (1954) - IMDb and are confined to a wheel chair for a just a few weeks? Can we live and take care of ourselves in our own homes? The alternative of a convalescent hospital starts at $1,500/month with a shared room the last time I checked.
The book Building for a Lifetime Building for a Lifetime: The Design and Construction of Fully Accessible Ho: Wylde, Margaret, Clark, Sam, Baron-Robbins, Adrian: 9781561580361: Amazon.com: Books discusses that great many factors to consider whether building a house or remodeling a kitchen or bathroom.
Yes, the lever style door knobs allow us aging dinosaurs to open a door even when our hands are sweaty or wet from shaving or washing dishes. Designing a door that can be opened from either direction and passed through by a person in a wheel chair might be considerably more challenging. A pocket door that slides into the wall might be easiest to build from the ground up as opposed to retrofitting later. My medium size bedroom has a regular door that could not open very widely with a double bed in the center position.
Gentle ramps should lead to the home from the drive. Electrical outlets should be reachable from the seated position. Kitchen ranges might be placed so knees can fit underneath. I can't stand all day like when I was twenty.
When my mother started burning pots (by going to sit down), I cut off gas to the stove and bought special cups for cooking her breakfast egg in the microwave. When I figured out she was having trouble with the over-stove microwave and it's tiny numbers, I bought her a counter-top model with a dial timer she could just twist to the proper time for heating coffee.
The book goes on to discuss everything from the easiest windows to operate to which appliances are least confusing to operate. When your pot is burning, you don't want to reach across the flames to turn off the burner. You might also want a frying pan hanging handy to cover the flames.
Your home is likely your biggest investment and you should be able to live in it for a lifetime.

The second episode of La Brea opens with wife Eve Harris, Doctor Sam Velez and Psychologist Ty attempting to outrun a saber tooth cat.  Eve informs us she runs ten-miles every morning to build stamina but an Olympic four-minute mile is just fifteen miles per hour. Bears can make 35-mph and lions can cover 100-yards in three seconds. Also predators might overestimate your size due to your upright stance, but if you run, they recognize that as prey behavior and give chase. Taking shelter in the Hollywood Hills Ambulance would have been my preferred tactic.
Eve compared the silhouette of the ambulance logo with the skyline behind them and declared La Brea was in Los Angeles geographically.  When is the issue. The vaper, who works at the Page Museum, rescues eight camels from the tar pit in La Brea and recognizes them as a group trapped in the tar 10,000 years BC. This matches the date Dr. Peter Chin extracts by radiocarbon dating Eve's gold wedding ring.
Radioactive carbon 14 is produced by cosmic rays in the atmosphere and has a half-life of 5,730-years. Plants absorb carbon from the atmosphere all their lives while animals absorb carbon from plants they eat. When plants or animals die, carbon absorption ends and the proportion of radioactive carbon 14 decreases. I hear the original calibration was done with a brick size piece of wood from Cleopatra's barge. The piece was stolen when Egyptian authorities declined to co-operate. The process works well on wood and bone date back  50,000 years. I don't see how a gold ring would absorb carbon in life.
We learn more about the visitor's technology when Louisiana peace officer Marybeth attempts to start a few cars in order to charge her cell phone. The auto batteries and starter motors both work to crank over the engines but none start up for her. Perhaps a pre-computer auto from the nearby Petersen Automotive Museum will prove operable? In any case, the museum will supply metal working tools. Even hammers may prove useful as self-defense weapons. We also see friends Billy and Tommy share an MP-3 video with 'mute' Lilly. Not all electronics are fried in La Brea.
Fire has proven a powerful technology an La Brea has ample fuel from tires for signal fires to tar for torches. There is a Ralph's market about two blocks east of the Page Museum. Beer and liquor should prove popular trading stock with the locals, if the locals can't just take what they want (the traditional method of resource re-allocation). 
On the surface, husband Gavin Harris has convinced Dr. Sophia Nathan and Major Adam Markman to send a piloted craft into the sinkhole. We learn Homeland Security is aware of another sinkhole that opened in the Mohave three years ago. I didn't hear that site was still open. DHS has built a ducted fan aircraft to explore the sinkhole, now that Gavin has given his testimony of survivors below. Obviously, this was funded before DHS heard my diesel helicopter proposal. I intend to tune in next week and keep you informed of my thoughts.
Returning readers will recognize the Coors 'churchkey' for opening beer cans and the pull tab recovered from my rural estate. Notice the user considerately wound the tab around the pull ring to avoid harming the barefoot before discarding on the ground. Pull tabs were used from 1963 though 1975 when the Sta Tab we use now was adopted. I think hippies would fashion chains and belts.

Bradford Angier opined that shotguns were a poor choice for wilderness survival because they use heavy ammunition to hunt small game. I will touch further on this and also mention a few things about home defense. The United States Air Force, as early as World War Two issued .22Long Rifle/.410 shotgun over/under shotguns for crashed aircrewmen to forage small game. Military survival expert David Canterbury extolls the virtues of the single shot 12-gauge for carry after the world ends and lonely survivors are scavenging the hills.
Relatively inexpensive for the working person to own. Easy to clean and unlikely to break. Versatile ammunition choices for game from birds to bison. Brenneke slugs have been used to slay elephant, if that is a hazard. I must mention that the USA hosts more tigers than India, and they sometimes escape or are let loose. Relative light weight and the ability to fold into a pack are plusses in my book. David goes on to show how a single shot can be loaded with black powder (or substitute), some rags and BB shot or fisherman's split shot. He has videos on you-tube.
I currently have a single-shot break open shotgun on order (for over a year now). It comes with replaceable, screw-in, chokes to adapt to various game. I don't anticipate going after less than turkey or goose and have hosted a black bear on my kitchen porch. The gun will be fitted with the Metrogun barrel that quiets the report to that of dropping a phone book or shutting a car door. If I must hunt for meat, this will be less likely to attract envious attention. The Japanese holdouts on Guam hunted during rainstorms, but it can go for months without rain in California. To be clear, I live in the mountains and may have a good supply of shells in the cabin.
Jeff Cooper touted the virtues of the short barrel hammer double shotgun for home defense. The hammers can rest down for decades with no spring pressure to cause metal fatigue. This virtue is shared by double action revolvers which is vital for gun owners whose first shot is to save their own lives. The wasp nests should be cleaned out of the barrels fairly regularly. The double shotguns with double triggers can loose the use of one action and still have an operating firearm. These guns are called lupara or wolf guns in Italy and loaded with #3 or #4 buckshot (called loopers).
000 triple aught buckshot is .36-inch diameter and weighs 70-grains each. This is roughly what was fired by the Colt Navy Civil War six-shooters. They have proven lethal to a hundred yards, so I use the smaller #4.
We see where police officers, involved in shootings, are fired even before they can report the incident. Home defenders are prosecuted for brandishing firearms while rioters are freed without bail. These situations mirror those we have seen in Chile, Argentina and Venezuela. Sometimes, it has proven prudent to use Less-Than-Lethal ammunition to fend off looters without getting slapped with a murder charge. All our physical, social and legal situations are different and subject to rapid change. I will be getting some rubber ball or bean bag shells in case the bear comes back. One can sometimes ricochet lead shot off pavement into the ankles and shins of rioters, but I haven't heard of this being used since the 1960's. Ricochets off paving tend to deform and follow the ground rather than bounce like a basketball. 
The Los Angeles Police Department issued pump action shotguns before the Watts riots. They faced snipers and found that pumps could not be operated as easily from the less exposed prone position as easily as autoloaders. Shots should not be made into a mob of mostly peaceful demonstrators, but only at exigent threats such as individuals with firearms or fire bombs.


 

 the NBC gave me a second look at the La Brea premier on Friday night. Now I clearly see wife Eve Harris lose her gold wedding ring at the distinctive boulder. The gold ring is recovered by her husband, Gavin Harris, who digs it up thousands of years later. Gold does not corrode easily. We know it is time travel.
What did I think the shiny object was that Eve left behind, the first time I saw it? It looked like a pull tab from a beer or soda can. Back in my ante-diluvial youth (shortly after La Brea), beer cans were made of steel lacquered on the inside to prevent rust.  Steel cans for other products were sometimes tin plated. We used a hand punch with a triangular beak to create twin holes to let air in and beer out on opposite sides of the can top. These punches were often referred to as 'church keys' to youthful inquirers. Then aluminum beer cans became the norm and the new way to open them was a ring attached to a teardrop tab embossed in the top of the can. One simply levered the ring up, pulled the tab sharply and left it where it dropped for the unwary to step on. There is a song about that happening in Margaritaville, I believe. It happened often enough the removable pull tabs were soon replaced by pull rings with the captive tabs we all use today. No reason to see such a relic in La Brea, but that is what the relic brain told me it was.
While discussing weapons any rescuers should bring with them, I neglected what the new visitors should do to protect themselves and their food from the dire wolves and other natives. Locking the food in a van or other vehicle will keep out the dire wolves (maybe not bears) and make it easier to guard. Rolling the vehicles into a circle will provide a sleeping/cooking area that is harder to overrun. 
Stan C. Smith would tell our visitors to use available straight or forked saplings to make wooden tipped spears. Stan writes the butt can be placed against the ground or tree trunk to fend off animals larger than ourselves.  Richard Currier asserts that carrying spears is the reason mankind learned to walk upright.
Bolas might be made with fist size rocks in fabric pockets. The ambulance may have suture needles or our Angelinos could use the sharp tips of agave leaves with the attached fibers for sewing. Capturing live animals with a bolas can create a meat surplus without refrigeration or may allow milking (after taming).
Water may be brought to camp with scavenged soda bottles. The water can be pasteurized in sunlight with an aluminum foil reflector (or boiled in a more heat resistant container).
The fact that La Brea lies in our past raises the possibility of contaminating our timeline with anachronistic material. I understand that roughly 1/3 of steel objects rust away in 100-years. The Titanic is likely to collapse in a few years. Stainless steel, titanium knees and hips, ceramic knees and hips, aluminum engine blocks and zirconium crowns might endure to the present day and create questions if found by gold rush prospectors.  I look forward to what the writers bring us next Tuesday.