There was a time when preppers used to call themselves survivalists.
But the main stream media took over this term and used it so overwhelmingly negatively, that to call oneself a survivalist immediately branded one as an antisocial, Aryan-nation, racist, government hating, tax-evading, fundamentalist, a dangerous extremist who was plotting to overthrow our country’s government by force. (Did we leave any negative adjectives out?)
Here’s one example from 2013–Peter Keller allegedly killed his wife and daughter then hightailed it to his hidey-hole in the woods. But does the newspaper headline describe him as a murderer on the run? Nope, the headline calls him a survivalist, and the lead photo shows a picture of his underground lair’s main entrance door.
The clear implication – ‘survivalist’ and ‘murderer’ are synonymous terms.
So we now call ourselves Preppers – people who prudently prepare for possible problems in the future. How long will it be before the main stream media starts painting all the extreme loony-toons types as preppers rather than as survivalists (most journalists haven’t yet realized we’ve changed the name we use to describe our beliefs, values, and actions)?
The thing is that the people who were, from time to time, sensationally described in newspaper headlines and breaking news reports on television as survivalists never were ‘real’ survivalists.
Good survivalists might have some disagreements with the present government and some of the social engineering it conducts, but they’d never dream of actively resisting the government other than at the ballot box and through lawful lobbying.
Also, any good survivalists might occasionally have arguments with neighbors and also family members, but they’d never dream of murdering them.
Good survivalists might plan, prepare, and even construct a retreat somewhere as a refuge subsequent to a massive collapse in society, and they’d even hope it to be a place of comparative safety in such a situation, but they’d never in their wildest dreams think it to be a place they could hide away in at present, and resist being found by the lawful authorities. Furthermore, they’d doubly never dream that if they were found, they could safely hunker down and not get captured.
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But anti-social loony-toons will do all these things. Why does the press then over-generalize and say ‘this guy planned for future disasters, and was a loony-toon. Therefore all people who plan for disasters are loony-toons?
That’s the same as saying ‘This guy votes Democrat (or Republican), and he also murdered his wife and children. Therefore, everyone who votes Democrat (or Republican) also murders their wives and children too’. Or, for another example, that’s the same as saying ‘This guy had a fatal accident and killed another motorist because he was drunk while driving his Toyota car. Therefore all people who drive Toyota cars are dangerous drunk drivers.’
The flawed logic is the same in both cases. But even though thousands of Democrat supporters commit murder each year, no-one suggests all Democrats are murderers. Even though Toyota cars are involved in thousands of fatal accidents each year, no-one suggests that all Toyota drivers are dangerous.
Any sensible person understands and appreciates the need to conform to the laws of the society they live in because they are also sensible enough to understand the consequences. All sensible people realize that it is totally impossible to win against a confrontation with the country’s law enforcement forces. This is as inevitable and certain whether it is the lone murderer written about in the article linked above up against a mix of 50+ different SWAT team members, or the entire 112 Branch Davidians in Waco Texas up against many hundreds of ATF, FBI, Texas Rangers and Texas National Guardsmen, with armaments up to and including two M1A1 Main Battle Tanks.
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Furthermore, we suggest that Preppers are more sensible and more prudent than the average person. If a person builds their life around being prudent, being cautious, being sensitive to future potential possibilities and negative outcomes, aren’t they the sort of person who is least likely to embark on risky and unlawful behavior that is absolutely guaranteed to lead to negative outcomes?
One more thing. You may or may not choose to incorporate some prepping into your own lifestyle, but you should welcome the presence of preppers in your neighborhood, and you should befriend them. When your food and water runs out, while delicious cooking smells are wafting across to you from your prepared neighbor; when you’re shivering in the cold and dark, while their lights are still on, aren’t you going to want to be best friends with the preppers next door?
It is unfortunate that the MSM has taken over the word ‘survivalist’ and re-purposed it to mean ‘crazy wacko violent loony-toon’, but now that they have, and now that we have a new term of our own – ‘prepper’, we probably should accept the difference. Preppers are good, survivalists are bad.
With that being said, let’s move to the next part of this article.
Why Do Preppers Have Guns?
As you can see, being a prepper often attracts unfair negative media attention.
Perhaps one of the reasons that the concept of preparing for disasters attracts so much automatic negativity is because non-preppers feel a semi-conscious mix of guilt and envy at seeing other people prudently preparing for emergencies.
But rather than admit this truth, non-preppers seek ways to sneer at and denigrate their more prudent fellow citizens, and one thing which they love to attack is the fact that the preparations many people undertake involve – along with hundreds/thousands of other things – purchasing a number of firearms and a quantity of ammunition.
Why do preppers usually own guns (and sometimes what seems like a ridiculous number of them)? Are they all gun freaks? Or is there a more logical reason?
We suggest there are two reasons why preppers have guns. The first is to secure food by hunting, and the second is self-defense.
If one is in some sort of circumstance where there is no food coming into the supermarkets, what does one do? One does one of three things.
The first option is the least appealing – one simply starves. And – yes, it is true one doesn’t need any firearms in such a case. To be blunt, this is the option that, like it or not, non-preppers risk if there is a major disruption to our food supply (although see the third option below for their other alternative).
The second option is the most positive – one goes out hunting and fishing. For sure, fishing doesn’t require a gun, and again, for sure, growing fruit and vegetables don’t require a gun either, but raising fruit and vegetables is not something that you can instantly start anytime you wish, and start harvesting food the very next day. Most crops are seasonal, and some trees take years to mature. Getting fruit and vegetables might take a year or more to come on-stream.
Although fishing and growing crops do not require any firearms, hunting does. So, people who are anticipating the possibility of running out of food, or who wish to augment and extend the supplies they have stored, need firearms – and ammunition for their guns – to go hunting.
Which brings us to the third option people have when they find themselves without food. This is one that, alas, many people will have no choice but to adopt. If they don’t have food, and if they have no way to hunt or otherwise gather food, and if they don’t want to just sit down and die, what will they have to do?
Yes, they’ll attempt to take food from other people. And, in fairness, there’s no time for morality when a person’s life is on the line, is there, so one can understand why they would do this. Not only can one understand why people would do this, prudent people will also anticipate such occurrences and plan and prepare for them.
Which puts the people who prudently prepared for food shortages in a difficult position. They probably barely have enough food for themselves – why should they have to share their food with the same people who formerly would jeer and sneer at them, and who refused to similarly stock up and prepare for future problems? This question is even more relevant and hard to answer if, by sharing their food, they then risk their own ability to survive in the process.
Even in cases where people aren’t risking death by starvation and attempting to beg or take food by force, other ugly encounters are likely to arise. In any type of social disruption, looters quickly appear and seek to pillage and destroy property.
Preppers become prime targets for looters as well as for starving people seeking food wherever they can find it.
And – guess what. Most preppers probably don’t want to be victimized and to passively allow all their time, effort, energy and money invested in their preparations be destroyed or stolen from them.
So – why do preppers have guns? Simple. For survival – both in the form of hunting for food and in the form of self-defense.
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How Many Guns Are Enough
If you are preparing for such challenges yourself, you will quickly determine that you need to have more than one gun. You need two rifles for hunting – a small-caliber rifle for small game and varmints, and a larger caliber one for full-size animals such as deer. You also might want a shotgun for ducks and other birds, and a pistol for convenient ever-present self-defense. Your shotgun and your larger caliber rifle would also be used for self-defense purposes too.
So that is four guns for one person, as a minimum – and if you’re preparing for an extended period of emergency, you might want to double up in case a gun fails and needs to be replaced. So now we are looking at eight firearms for one person, and remember this is still a minimum quantity (even though it sounds like a huge number to some people).
That sure sounds like a lot, until you understand the reasoning behind it. Guns are tools, with different guns being better for some tasks than others. For a comparison, how many knives do you have in your kitchen? All knives cut, just like all guns shoot. But different knives are better or not so good for different tasks, so a professional cook typically has a ‘set’ of many different knives, from tiny boning knives up to huge meat cleavers. Plus he has a few old knives that still stay in the drawer, even though they are no longer used, and he probably has a couple of other knives he bought but never uses because they weren’t as good as he thought they might be.
It is the same with guns – indeed, it is safer to have multiple guns, because then you can best select the most appropriate gun for each task and use it most appropriately.
So, if one person has eight guns (four main guns and four spares), how many for two people? Two people would want to have eight guns plus maybe just one (rather than two) sets of four spares – 12 guns for two people. Three people might call for 16 guns, and so on. Happily, there is no law against owning multiple firearms and no restriction on how many guns anyone can own, so why not get as many as are prudently needed for a range of different future tasks.
Next of course is the question of ammunition. Ammunition is small and compact so doesn’t take up much storage space, and lasts a long time (definitely in excess of ten years, usually in excess of twenty years if stored reasonably well) and is reasonably inexpensive.
Ammunition is also an excellent trading good. If two people meet during an emergency, they might decide to swap things that they each respectively either have spares of and need some of in return, and ammunition in common calibers is definitely something that has huge value as a trading item in troubled times. So how much to store?
That is one of the big questions preppers have to confront with everything they choose to stock up on, of course. In the case of ammunition, one single bullet might represent the ability to fell a deer, providing enough food for everyone present for a week, or to save a life in a confrontation, and by the same token, the lack of a bullet might mean starving or being overrun and subjugated by lawless marauding hordes of looters.
Each of the four guns will require a different caliber of ammunition, and within that caliber, there will be a range of different bullet shapes, weights, and styles.
It seems prudent to lay in a stock of some thousands of rounds of ammunition accordingly, in a mix of the four different calibers, and with a range of different bullet types (and shot shell types). Ammunition isn’t a large cost item, doesn’t take up too much space, won’t need to be thrown away unused due to short storage life, and is a key component of assuring the ongoing safety and survival of the group of people owning it.
Are Too Many Guns Dangerous or Threatening?
The media love to talk about ‘survivalists’ having huge caches of weapons and hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition as if this implies some degree of crazed intent on the part of the person owning the guns and ammo.
There is an unspoken implication that a person with two guns is twice as dangerous as a person with one and that a person with ten guns is ten times as dangerous. The same strange math is applied to ammunition – a person with 1000 rounds of ammo is ‘obviously’ more dangerous than a person with 500 rounds, and a person with 5,000 rounds is even more dangerous again.
This is nonsense. The reality is simple :
A person can only shoot one gun at a time, and the gun they are using can only shoot one bullet at a time.
Having two or ten guns doesn’t make a person any more dangerous than having only one gun. If it did, our professional soldiers would be equipped with dozens of guns. Professional soldiers only have one or sometimes two guns (ie rifle and pistol); the same is true of most police officers too. If owning more guns did truly make a person more dangerous, maybe there would be laws against it.
It is the same as cars and petrol, perhaps. A person can only drive one car at a time, and the one car he is driving only goes at a certain speed with a certain amount of power, no matter if the tank is full of gas or nearly empty.
Also read: The Key To Surviving Any Crisis Is To Have The Right People In Place, And To Be Far Away From The Wrong People
After The Collapse Series
Summary
While guns hopefully and happily play a small part of our ordinary day to day lives, if there should be a disruption to our lives and the society in which we live, we may need to return to the ways of our forefathers and rely on guns more than we need to at present.
Prudent people, preparing for possible problems in the future, will include guns in their preparations both for the ability to hunt food and for prudent self-protection.
If you’re not a prepper, you have nothing to fear from preppers with guns. They won’t need to use them against you because you, as a non-prepper, by definition, will have nothing they want or need and to be honest you will die long before they would need to re-supply. You should instead be concerned about other non-preppers with weapons, who might believe you have something they want or need, whether it be something essential for survival such as food and shelter, or something as irrelevant as a big screen television.
Throughout my life, I have been caught unprepared several times and while nothing seriously bad happened, it easily could have. I managed to get myself out of each situation, I thanked God and tried to learn from my mistakes. I have also tried to learn from the mistakes of others so as to not learn everything the hard way.I aspire to be more prepared the next time. My preparedness includes many different aspects. In my opinion, the most important thing I have done is to learn as much as possible about what to expect and how to deal with those situations. The most comprehensive and accurate reading in the preparedness field I could recommend is The Lost Ways. If I had read this book 10 years ago I could have avoided these situations or made them much less unsafe and worrisome. Reading this book, made me more aware and prepared than ever. Click the video below to get a better understanding of what The Lost Ways really is.
