Confessions of a Former Apocalypse Survival Guide Writer
motherboard.vice.com
motherboard.vice.com
The "prepper" version of this usually confuses an actual EMP attack (which requires an atomic bomb) and solar magnetic disturbances. They're totally different. An electromagnetic pulse is a big RF pulse with a rise time in nanoseconds. A solar magnetic disturbance results in DC currents being induced into the ground over a period of hours.
An EMP attack is a threat, but if someone is firing atomic bombs at you, you have a bigger problem. That's the military view. It's mostly a threat to things which have long wires attached to them. Mobile devices are too small to be affected. It also doesn't affect fiber optics.
A solar magnetic disturbance is mostly a problem for AC long-distance power transmission on circuits which use a ground reference. This is a big problem for power grids, and they have ways to deal with them. There was a big event in 1989 which caused a blackout.[2] It appears as DC in AC circuits, causing partial transformer saturation. If this isn't detected, it can cause transformer overheating and burnout. But the big grids have detection for this, and reduce power levels in some transformers when necessary. This happens at a low level a few times every year.
[1] http://americanpreppersnetwork.com/2016/07/emp-electromagnet... [2] http://www.pjm.com/~/media/training/nerc-certifications/re6-...
> being subject to nuclear fallout.
Well, it is a high altitude blast, so fallout will be minimal. The point is after a such a blast the next likely step is icbms start flying. If your toaster is working or not, make a huge difference after that.
> you can have your gadgets fried without being subject to nuclear fallout.
Yes on a small scale they can have "your gadgets" fried. But others' gadgets will still be working. You can go to a hotel to another town and still get your morning toast there
I guess a lot of this is "what's your threat model". I can well imagine: 1) Survivalists planning for continuity of bread toasting in remote areas following a nuclear exchange. 2) Survivalists defending against Them(tm) targeting the camp with a conventional EMP, to disable radio communications and power generation etc.
I don't claim to have done extensive research, but I got the distinct idea that we really don't have any idea what the effects of a large-scale EMP attack would be. Nobody's bothered to try to figure out how to create a small-scale EMP without a nuclear blast and then tried subjecting modern cars and computers and phones and such to them. As far as I can tell, it tends to affect things with long antennas and lengths of wire most strongly. Would we expect it to disrupt a modern car? Cellphone? Cellular base station, broadband base station? Hard to say for sure.
I have worked with shielding electronics from EM interference, where interference can sneak in through unexpected routes. Not sure if EMP style effects could penetrate in the same way, though. Cars seem like kind of a tricky case - there are some moderate length wires, like 6-8 feet probably, but they may be somewhat shielded. Could they pick up enough energy to damage essential electronics? I don't think anybody knows.
Part of the book's premise was also that the weapons were launched on rockets loaded onto anonymous cargo ships and timed to detonate at the same time over the continental US and Western Europe. Sounds pretty implausible to me that anybody could pull off a complex attack like that without a lot of mistakes and/or obvious preparation work. How long did it take us to get SLBMs working right? And I don't think even the rouge states would be willing to use a untested Rube Goldberg delivery system to launch an EMP attack whose effect on the target nations will be unknown.
More of that was done during the Cold War. In my aerospace days I used to get reports on things such as tests of AUTODIN nodes using a truck-mounted EMP generator. One observation was that if you welded together the wire mesh used in reinforced concrete, before pouring the concrete, you had a rather coarse Faraday cage. That was enough to attenuate EMP to the point that the switching equipment was unaffected.
L-3 Services makes an EMP generator now for testing US military equipment.[1] The US military does pay some attention to this. But the general military view is that EMP effects are secondary to blast effects of nuclear weapons. The blast effects will knock out more than EMP does. If you're going to harden something against EMP, it also needs to be blast-hardened.
[1] http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/74M-for-an-EMP-Generator...
>Nobody's bothered to try to figure out how to create a
small-scale EMP without a nuclear blast
Targeting power grids 'the old fashioned way' in Desert Storm, Lockheed F-117As dropped a cluster bomb full of carbon graphite filaments (BLU-114/B). This shorted out power lines/transformers and destroyed 85% of Iraq's power grid. Later used in Serbia and accidentally in SoCal during testing [3].
---
[1] http://www.boeing.com/features/2012/10/bds-champ-10-22-12.pa...
[2] http://mil-embedded.com/3908-air-forceboeing-emp-weapon-movi...
- Weapons of Mass Casualties and Terrorism Responce Handbook - Charles Stewart MD FACEP
https://books.google.com/books?id=7ZnXZfwWwgcC&pg=PA221&lpg=...
referencing a Boston Globe article: May 4th 1999 page A27
---
I recall reading of another accident, but can't easily find the source.
I was astounded to check out the copypasta near clone books on Amazon. Much as its impossible to buy real cables or real chargers on Amazon we're getting to the point of there's going to be 1000 copypasta for every real or original ebook as per the linked story.
There are five interesting points about the original book and the copypasta phenomena and EMP in general.
1) I've done the EE stuff and read the QST/QEX articles about hardening radio gear for EMP and some of the professional stuff and I guarantee nobody writing or talking about the topic has done even that much research. From a commo point of view its harder, faster rise and fall lightning and you have to do lightning protection anyway, so... People who fail at lightning protection like to claim nothing can be made lightning proof; their either pedantically correct that you can only reduce the rate of damage by a factor of a million or so which is usually economically useful, or they're bad or non- engineers and they don't know what they're doing.
2) To the technical illiterate its all magic so its a variety of technobabble with no relationship to reality. For example actual (simulated) nuclear EMP testing of modern cars is pretty much a bust. In the genre all diesel electric locomotives burn out which is technologically speaking, hilarious. Its almost like zombie fic where the zombie stands for anything but actual zombies. This hand wavy magic IS how the general public sees EE or telecom stuff. Sure to people in the know their idea of magic is all ha ha funny alchemical but the fact remains there is no reason or rationality involved in the general public vs EE stuff.
3) The prepper - survivalist community is not by any means unified and this kind of fiction sells very well to a very small subgroup although most are interested in surviving hurricanes or blizzards while living in rural areas or living thru likely economic collapse (along the lines of 1930s, 2007, etc). I would guess the average city slicker wouldn't last more than a year in the country, so some prepper stuff is very much "back to the soil" propaganda. I guess I'm a prepper because I have a decent first aid kit in my car (and some training to use it and up to date CPR cert etc) and I have a fire extinguisher and some MREs and stuff in case I get stuck in a blizzard (which has in fact personally happened to me, and because I was prepared its an incredibly boring story, also I've been trapped in a house with no electricity during a blizzard and that was also very boring, oh and I was trapped in a cabin after tornados went thru the area and covered all the roads with trees, but I'm old, this stuff doesn't happen every decade, etc, none the less you can prepare or you can prepare to suffer, your choice...)
4) Most prepper fiction is highly escapist like bad sci fi. Real societal collapse looks a lot like Venezuela, Brazil, "the middle east" during periodic wars, Somalia, West Virginia (only halfway kidding) etc. Everyone's not gonna die although a lot will, and its gonna suck a lot worse than you think no matter how pessimistic you are. But we come from a long evolutionary line of survivors and even in the worst case its mostly not that big of a deal.
5) Some of the tropes are just funny. Outlaw cannibal biker gangs. The retired Marine who either saves everyone or is a complete PITA or both. Hillary is gonna take all our gunz.
I've noticed that. There are many antenna towers on mountaintops and high buildings that routinely take lightning hits without damage. Solutions are well understood.[1]
What seems to bother some people is that the parts for lightning protection are so massive. You need big grounding rods, heavy copper cable, and big spark gaps to handle the lightning current. Everything else in the system is miniaturized. Lightning protection components look like 1920s technology.
[1] https://www.timesmicrowave.com/products/protect/downloads/mp...
Frankly my main concern if I lose power for an extended period in the winter is my pipes freezing. Personally, I'll be fine.
Thanks for the real-world info, though. You're saying that modern cars are pretty much unaffected by EMPs, in addition to trucks, locomotives, and other major infrastructure? Does this cover all realistic strengths of EMP effect? Are we talking like the only way the EMP effect could hurt anything is if the bomb is close enough to physically destroy it anyways? So no realistic likelihood of damage from the orbital nuke scenario, no matter the power level of the bomb?
FWIW, I associate "prepper" with wildly impractical and poorly thought out levels of preparation for wildly unlikely disasters. Being prepared for things that are realistic and have actually happened in the recent past is just common sense.
Check this URL around page 115 of the report or page 131 of the PDF
http://www.empcommission.org/docs/A2473-EMP_Commission-7MB.p...
Or google around for "Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack"
The TLDR version is cars are pretty much EMP proof, although its a central tenant of some survivalist belief system that "EE is magic therefore all modern cars will stop running in any attack at any level"
A good way to protect electronics from an EMP is to make it physically small and in a metal cage either insulated from ground or really really well grounded. Like a car, or a diesel locomotive. Train engines will survive. Their signalling and billing systems, maybe not so much, so in practice that's as good as knocking them out. I would think an electric locomotive or trolley would be a hopeless situation.
Whats usually missed in survivalist type lit is a "mission kill" does not mean opfor is completely physically vaporized. Knocking out 10% of cars on the road is almost as effective in the long economic run as vaporizing 100% of them. You're going to get China to make replacement parts for cars that haven't been made in years delivered in six months and meanwhile those cars can sit abandoned clogging the roads for weeks until they're all towed plus or minus 10% of the tow trucks being broke and you're gonna do this during the riots? 10% of the population including police fire and doctors just aren't going to go to work for weeks until they arrange transport? Sure. Or, you don't need to vaporize every SCADA system at every chemical plant and refinery, just a couple will be quite enough to make a dent in the industrial safety record. So yeah, after an EMP event, of whatever source, if 95% of cars or whatever are unaffected its still a HUGE problem, because 5% of "the modern world" is pretty large indeed.
Its possible to generate an electric surge locally stronger than the ionosphere could ever generate, and people are forever trying to sell semi-portable microwave based weapons to the police and army. They don't work very well even at strengths higher than EMP level.
Below thermal levels its unusual for transmitter sites to knock out cars. 99% of cars and service trucks laugh off a mere 50 KW broadcast transmitter. There's a 750 KW UHF TV transmitter in my area, you're not supposed to, but employees can drive up to it while its transmitting and cars are like "whatever". Supposedly a coworker burned out his car radio antenna input driving to a mountain top tower site, although the rest of the car was unharmed (its always a friend of a friend story, never happens to anyone first hand). Mountain tops are covered with extremely high powered transmitters. A lot of skyscraper buildings have some remarkably high power transmitters on top. Even if the building is an antenna null, the neighboring skyscraper certainly isn't in a null, LOL.
Kinda goes into the "dog whistle" concept. I notice that Liberal activists are constantly claiming that Republicans are racist, sexist, homophobe, etc due to vague reinterpretation of comments and positions that are supposedly subtle signals to racists. Meanwhile, the Democrat politicians routinely say that they want "common sense gun control". A little digging usually shows that their real goal is to ban and seize all guns, even if they know that they can't do it right away. But that doesn't stop the same Liberal activists from calling gun-rights advocates crazy for saying that those same Democrat politicians want to take their guns.
This was two years ago that I had this conversation, and I'm not sure when the actual exercise he was referencing took place. My understanding is that there has been a lot done to prepare the grid in the past 5 years, so we may be in better shape today. I hope so.
If it makes you feel better compared to lighting strikes which regularly hit power lines and are DC this is locally much less of an issue. Sure, if this happened tomorrow it would make the news, but other than some extremely local events where things failed it just the right way it's a non issue.
OTOH, every time I've tried to do 1 mile + wifi on a tower (e.g. 20 meter antenna tower) it's always been the lightning that killed the AP!
Then don't make a claim.
They do say the worst case scenario would have a major impact--perhaps especially in the Northeast of the US--and affect about 10% of the US population. But there's nothing like "90% die-off" even if, as stated in the report, having "major implications for the insurance industry."
> A study last year estimated that the cost of a solar storm like the Carrington Event could reach $2.6 trillion worldwide. A considerably smaller event on March 13, 1989, led to the collapse of Canada’s Hydro-Quebec power grid and a resulting loss of electricity to six million people for up to nine hours.
Its not going to kill alot of people. It is going to knock out the power for a few hours.
"The total U.S. population at risk of extended power outage from a Carrington-level storm is between 20-40 million, with durations of 16 days to 1-2 years. The duration of outages will depend largely on the availability of spare replacement transformers. If new transformers need to be ordered, the lead-time is likely to be a minimum of five months. The total economic cost for such a scenario is estimated at $0.6-2.6 trillion USD."
And if you look at the appendix:
"The economic costs of the outage scenarios are estimated by calculating the percentage of residential, commercial, and industrial customers without power by state and using the average amount of electricity consumed by each segment in each state per hour. The total amount of electricity "lost" for each sector in each state is then the product of these items."
In other words, 0.6 - 2.6 trillion isn't the economic cost of the power outage, it's the amount of money the electric utilities would lose on sales during at extended downtime.
In general, the author seems to believe that these storms are not likely to cause national-scale extreme hardships like the ones you mention. The experts admit being unsure, but nothing like 90% casualties seems probable.
There are some much more problematic scenarios, such as the ever present rogue asteroid one, and the often overlooked super-volcano one. It seems Yellowstone is a likely trouble spot.
Later, in ~2009, I attended a NIST workshop for "smart grid" standardization right after Chu was nominated to lead DOE. It was mostly incredibly boring, with IT people from power companies talking to product managers from smart grid companies. Except that it seemed like every working group had at least one rando who was in no way associated with any actual smart grid concern who kept asking us to discuss EMP issues.
I think the generalized concern is, we're living in "an increasingly technology-dependent society", and if technology is suddenly taken away from us, we'll collapse into anarchy. It's the same narrative as Y2K.
This is a flavor of the Y2K narrative that seems, for some reason, to be heavily politicized.
Is that actually inaccurate though? From everything I've read, our food/water supply is entirely dependent on oil and electricity, so it's hard to imagine how there wouldn't be mass deaths if that system suddenly got disrupted for an extended period of time.
Obviously there are ways of getting food and water outside of the commercial system, which is partly what the prepper movement is about.
Our tools, household items and clothes are built with planned obsolescence, can't be repaired by consumer and thus require frequent replacement.
Former CIA director estimates 2/3rd of US population will die in EMP [1], others 90% [2]. In US it would be so much worse because we used to comfortable consumer only life, and most wouldn't be able to adjust. Is that really that outlandish?
[1] http://www.offthegridnews.com/grid-threats/former-cia-direct...
[2] http://www.powermag.com/expect-death-if-pulse-event-hits-pow...
The only reason these preppers focus on it, is because it's one of the few extreme scenarios they can imagine which they could reasonably survive. A nuclear holocaust isn't something you prepare for, it's something that you hope to either avoid, or be in the hypocenter of. Some kind of mythical "infrastructure killer" that doesn't actually physically alter that infrastructure too much... that you can imagine yourself seeing the other side of I think.
So, if you want to conquer, not destroy, this seems the perfect weapon? Even better than a neutron bomb?
That's my take on it. EMP of that kind implies large nuclear detonations at high altitude. One or two will cover a good part of country. Military already tests their hardware for EMP resistance ( know someonw who worked at such a facility, it was really a fun job! ). So the idea is they'd be hardened enough to retaliate but after that it is probably game over and in large with major cities destroyed or population killed.
But if that didn't happen during Cold War, there is probably less chance of it happening today. So one should be more worried about slipping it the shower or eating too many twinkies, than say buying cooper faraday cages for their toasters.
[1] https://prod-static-ngop-pbl.s3.amazonaws.com/media/document...
https://www.google.com/search?q=wsj+emp&oq=wsj+emp&aqs=chrom...
When we were getting married and all the extended family arrived at the house for the big do, some relatives turned out to be preppers and were fascinated with the setup. One phrase I kept hearing was "We read in this book that if you do this, then..." and my father-in-law would respond with "Well, when we were actually without power during the 93 blizzard we learned that..." Basically experience trumped mass produced prepper books.
Every time a storm comes we get the usual advisories to stock up on a few days of food, check flashlight batteries, fill a clean tub with tap water for drinking, etc. Those things are drilled into your head from grade school and are repeated on news broadcasts before every major storm.
What's interesting is the unexpected byproduct of outages. Particularly here in the South home construction techniques have changed over the last 100 years. Older homes have lots of large, screened windows, whole house fans and vented attics to help move large amounts of air and help with heat. Even without power you can open all your windows and get a cross breeze. New construction is heavily insulated, has fewer windows and makes no concessions for mass airflow outside the air conditioning system.
Hurricane Katrina was an epiphany for many home owners down here as power was out for weeks afterwards; previously comfortable homes became sweltering hotboxes. The effect on local generator supply was immediate and obvious: sold out everywhere. I heard through the grapevine of entrepreneurs driving down truckloads of them to make a quick buck.
Even so gasoline-fueled generators can be difficult to keep fueled after a hurricane - people leaving the city have a tendency to deplete supplies and gas stations may not have power to pump. But natural gas tends to stay on even when power fails since gas distribution systems can have their own generation and some use the fuel they're moving to maintain pressure.
All the anecdotal evidence I have points to a heavy uptick in natural-gas-fired whole house generator sales after Katrina. In fact there was a trend for a while of new construction actively advertising whole house generator inclusion. I think it happened to a lesser extent again after Ike. Life really stinks down here without air conditioning. I guess my point is most preppers seem to concentrate on food and water, but at least down here electricity is high on the list. :-)
I'm sure the reliability of the fuel supply in the aftermath of a disaster is a factor for the nat gas generators, but if you are going to install one permanently, not having to deal with deliveries and stale fuel are also pretty big advantages.
I'm not particularly paranoid (I suppose that's what paranoid people say...), but I do think there's a certain fragility to our civilisation that we're happy to overlook.
https://www.amazon.com/Back-Basics-Complete-Traditional-Skil...
It's sort of a homesteading guide, starting with what sort of land is suitable and discussing the construction of buildings and farming and various crafts. It has a lot of information that would be handy in a world where energy is no longer incredibly abundant.
A 2 year prep isn't going to mean shit if the oil stops flowing.
He (and I, who started becoming a nuclear war survivalist in 1968-9 in 2nd-3rd grade when my mother became a Civil Defense Block Mother, I still have the sign) recommend you read another book on expedient nuclear war survival, which is a lot more timeless. It's based on serious research at Oak Ridge, up to and including handing a set of printed instructions to an "average" American family, video taping them trying to follow them, and iterating on them. Oh, yeah, in the traditional fashion, the author(s) tried out this stuff themselves: Nuclear War Survival Skills
Check out the official on-line copy here: http://www.oism.org/nwss/ but if you're worried about a nuclear weapon event, get the dead tree copy, for the Kearny Fallout Meter needs better precision than you'll get from digital -> computer printer.
For that matter, you almost certainly want dead tree (or microfiche, there's a company that used to do that) copies for when the light go out.
After that, there's a lot more, but I don't have time to go into it (in the middle of renovating a house built in 1910), check my previous postings on the subject if you can find them, 5 minutes with Google and the built in search engine were useless and I have precise search terms, e.g. the obscure Bad Times Primer by C.G. Cobb. Or email me for more (address is in my info).
In this case, writing for the "prepper" audience seems to fall near the line of providing content relevant to the consumers' interests and enabling/encouraging paranoid 'end-of-times' behavior that at best prepares the consumer for a natural disaster and at worst entrenches distrust of society in the audience.
Is it possible to ethically market a product that relies on a belief system or set of values you disagree with?
Here's a vaguely on target real world example: There are doctors who perform surgeries for people that refuse blood transfusions for religious regions. Presumably some of the doctors disagree with the belief, but they perform the surgeries anyway.
In that situation it isn't a huge conundrum, choosing to engage the patient on their terms can be better than letting them suffer or die (so while your predicate is true, it's also the case that there is strong alignment of interests). It's had an impact on how medicine is practiced otherwise: http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-jehovahs-witness...
Anybody have any better real world examples that more directly get at the tricky part of the question?
That said, your question was "is it possible?", not is it the right thing in this or any particular case. Just be wary of thinking than anyone who doesn't agree with your ethics is unethical, for there be dragons.
For the record, my belief is in a non-specific collapse based on the increasingly built-in fragility and complexity of civilization as espoused by Joseph Tainter[1] in his book "The Collapse of Complex Societies"[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter
[2] https://monoskop.org/images/a/ab/Tainter_Joseph_The_Collapse...
https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Complex-Societies-Studies-Ar...
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xnwpsp_veetle-connections-s...
(Even more sobering is that, nearly 40 years after this series was filmed, we have a new layer of technological dependence: telecoms networks and data services. This would greatly amplify a lot of the things that Burke describes.)
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/a-huma...
I will also say that I've wondered how many of the people prepping are capable of spending a day hiking in the woods with a decent pack on their back. Having a ton of stuff may not be very helpful if you don't have the physical capabilities to adapt to unexpected circumstances.
The actual amount of physical stuff you'd need to survive some sort of post-apocalyptic scenario really isn't more than a few hundred bucks, e.g. a year worth of crystalized iodine for purifying water and a flint & steel fire starter costs all of $25. What's more expensive is learning the edible plants and mushrooms in your area and their medicinal properties, plus whatever other miscellaneous survival skills you'd need.
There would be a huge number of people in the area and no prospect of feeding all of them. They would all be very determined indeed, and many would have their own guns. Everyone would either starve, die at the hands of raiders/thieves, or become raiders and thieves themselves, and thus have plenty of supplies from whoever did prepare. Having a gun would help, but more important would be to have a large group with military-like organization strong enough to stand up to the stresses involved in surviving such an apocalypse. If you already have that or can make it/become part of it, you'll survive. If you don't, then your guns probably won't help you much, no matter how fancy they are and how much ammo you have.
So IMHO, to realistically prep, you'd have to either live way, way out in the boonies already, already be part of some kind of warlord militia in our current mostly peaceful world (a street gang might do it), or just accept that this is basically never going to happen anyways.
I'm currently in NYC, where clearly there are way more people than edible plants. Even if you look at only the 1% or whatever who know which plants are edible, there still wouldn't be nearly enough plants to feed them.
But in any sort of post-apocalyptic scenario, the first thing that would happen is that people would be unable to mow their lawns and the parks. So within two or three weeks the amount of edible plants would go up 100x. Still not enough food to make staying in a city viable for the longterm, but probably enough that you could feed yourself while hiking or biking to a more remote area.
Actual wheat takes months before it's ready to harvest. If, on the day of the apocalypse, every single person in NYC dug up the lawns and parks and planted every inch with edible grains, they'd all starve to death long before getting any bread. If they planted before the apocalypse so that the harvest came in just before the shit went down, they'd still starve to death, because a city doesn't have enough arable land to feed even 1% of its occupants. The amount of land required to keep NYC fed is larger than the city itself.
That's putting aside the fact that there's nothing in lawn grass that humans can get enough calories out of to even make up for the effort of harvesting.
Everything you've mentioned there is just greens except for the plantains and onions, which will certainly be stripped bare in days. The rest might liven up a salad, but it definitely won't give you the protein and calories to stave off starvation.
I don't think that knowing which plants are edible will help much either. You'd also have to somehow not die from robbery, disease, etc, and be able to protect your "garden" from millions of desperate starving people who will probably put anything green in their mouths no matter the real nutritional value just because they're desperate. Don't underestimate what a parent will do when they watch their kids starve to death.
I don't think owning guns will help much in such a dense urban area. There's just too many people. Even if you have effectively unlimited ammo and a very defensible position, you'd probably still get overwhelmed in short order. Even if you don't actually have much of anything, people will assume that anyone with that much protective firepower must have a lot of stuff to protect. Maybe if you're already set up to be a warlord king with a few hundred people under your command. That you can feed somehow, and also have the ammo and position for.
IMHO, anyone who really thinks that anything like that is going to happen should just move to rural Montana or something now and get started with the farming and such. I moved here, so you can guess what I think.
Until you're not gaunt enough from lack of food, who's to know you have stored a lot of grain? Water access is a much bigger issue (why aren't you out scrounging for it, showing up at the military water access points if your city is lucky enough to have some, etc.), but if no one knows you're even there in your dwelling, assuming you can store enough water, you might be able to wait it out.
Ah, bigger issue there is probably a general fire forcing you out of it. In which case you're screwed, and should have bugged out long before the first mass wave of refugees.
Well, maybe not impossible, but difficult enough that you're doing yourself a grave disservice.
> there is basically no way to survive for any period of time without a gun
How do you jump to this? In fact on any medium-to-long scale, guns are going to rapidly become useless. You'd be better off with a compound bow and a good supply of hunting arrows. Even without a projectile weapon there are plenty of other options: Fishing, trapping/snares, herding, captive smaller food-animals (chickens/rabbits).
This book claims otherwise, and without resorting to grains (note I've only skimmed it a bit, starting a garden is a next year thing for me): https://www.amazon.com/Grow-Die-Guide-Survival-Gardening/dp/...
Nuclear War Survival Skills says you can almost get by with grain, but that includes sprouting it for vitamins (and making yeast might be better for that). BUT children will not thrive without fats.
As for hunting, I am not only a gun owner, but my father's favorite/only hobbies are hunting and fishing (the latter of which I don't like, whereas hunting was OK, if he offered to take me on a hunt I'd go).
While we didn't hunt anything that we didn't eat, it's generally not an efficient way to gain high quality protein or fats. To do that, you need to cheat with methods that as I vaguely recall don't involve guns, e.g. use big nets to catch fish (or raise your own catfish, for example, although as I recall most fish we in the US catch aren't good oil sources). For animals, "poaching" and trapping methods, e.g. snares: http://www.snareshop.com/departments.asp?dept=14
As for not being able to label yourself as a prepper, I'm an old school nuclear war/economic collapse 60s-80s survivalist, and as others have noted, if you aren't able to protect you and yours, including the stores of materials and food you'll be needing to survive, well, why bother unless you live in a completely rural low population far from the big cities areas where you can depend on others in the community to do that in general for all.
(And, hey, try one out some time, they're lots of fun and not very dangerous if you follow the 4 Rules (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Cooper#Firearms_safety) and for your first time or three, have a formal or informal coach.)
With drunk driving specifically, if you're driving at just over the legal limit then you're 5x more likely to die than if you're driving sober. So if you buy into the idea that you're 5x more likely to die in a post-apocalyptic scenario than in a car accident, then it follows that even if you only drive while drunk then you're still more likely to die in a post-apocalyptic scenario. (Since approximately a third of all car crash deaths involve an intoxicated driver, and the 5x automobile death figure includes both sober and intoxicated drivers.)