The R.O.P.E. Bag*

I have a pair of married students who have been gracious enough to give me a Yule gift every year for the last few years. Last year there was this squat little sling bag in the box. I kept it in my office for a while trying to figure out what to do with it.


I normally keep a Deadpool-inspired duffel bag full of magazines handy for range trips. It will hold more than I want to carry. I took a few mags out one day to lighten my load and set them beside that slingbag inadvertently. When I came home and started refilling my empty mags I had a " You got chocolate in my peanut butter" moment.  I might as well throw some mags in there.


Since I already had a bag with mags in it, I still needed a purpose. So I added a few more things and designated it as a kit for my friends, teammates, training partners, students etc. At a Study Group, we brainstormed an acronym.

R.O.P.E. - Replenishing Other Peoples Equipment.

The bag fits 7 AR mags in the main compartment. That was a pretty good start. I didn't want to go buy stuff to fill this bag, I just wanted to refill a buddy for stuff out of a single package. So I looked around my shelves and closets to see what I had extras of that dudes might need.

I settled on a Patriot Smoke in the top, and a couple of Road Flares and some 123 batteries in the bottom. This isn't a bag of "You may need this" which is why there is no medical gear in it. It's a bag of "since you used yours up, here's some more" If a dude used all his med gear up, we need to be taking him, not giving him more bandages.

As I was going through my stuff, I found a couple of old AK mags full of Tula. I don't own a 7.62 AK any longer so they got shuffled behind some stuff for a long time. I put those in there too. We still get some die-hards for metric guns, so I can show them some love too. (I'm just funning with the AK dudes, relax).



I didn't put pistol mags in there for a couple of reasons. Since the most usable mag would be a G17 mag. It's the most popular caliber for the most popular brand that fits some of the most popular models. Problem One: the bag only has so much space  and if a dude has gone through his pistol mags too, for sure he wants some more rifle mags. Problem Two: I only own a small handful of G17 mags, I didn't really have "extra" to stow in the ROPE bag.

So there you have it. A nifty little Yule gift that got turned into something pretty handy to have around. The ROPE bag.

* No actual rope is stowed in this bag.