The Surprisingly Solid Mathematical Case of the Tin Foil Hat Gun Prepper
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To extrapolate to a rural/urban divide, the number of times I've lost power and the average length of that loss is massively lower in the city that I now live in vs. the country farmstead I grew up on, both within 100 miles of one another. Similarly, the number of times I've been unwilling to leave my house because of a major snow event or the like is much lower in the city than it was back home because the speed of road clearing is much much higher here. These sorts of infrastructure things build into the heuristic that produces "trust in the system" in a person, and the likelihood that you'll prep for a week without power or three days snowed in. Once you've prepped for that, prepping a little more is easier because you're already storing extra food and toilet paper, keeping a generator on hand to keep the well running since you're not on municipal water or sewer, etc... It all adds up to different populations feeling very differently about how sane/necessary this activity is.
When you take two data points over a period, and use those to establish a linear trend, you get misleading results. I'm nowhere near smart enough to re-crunch the numbers, but I hope someone else on HN will.
Setting aside the scenario of revolution though, there are lots of other scenarios that justify "prepping" even more. Katrina is a great example; those people who chose to stay behind were left without civilized infrastructure in some areas for quite a while. Puerto Rico, too. Here in California, we have the prospect of a devastating earthquake for which we're long overdue, and we're right on the hairy edge of our firefighting resources being overwhelmed each year.
I've taken a different approach to prepping. I'm a search and rescue volunteer and I have basic medical training. In case of major disaster, I hope to be a resource that can be sent into those areas. It's a different mindset from the stereotypical prepper, but we're really both working off of the same assumptions: that there's a significant chance of experiencing first-hand a collapse of civil infrastructure.
Are you saying it's not? Were they cavemen in 1800, and now we are a thoughtful civilized breed?
The United States has been at war most of my life. My parents lived through a war with a draft. My grandparents experienced World War 2. Seems like war is normal and peace is the aberration.
I used to be completely skeptical of preppers, but since earlier this year we got a foot of snow resulting in no fresh food in the supermarket I have been thinking a bit more about supply chains. I still think that bringing guns into the situation is going to make it worse, not better.
That's an odd response to someone pointing to a behavior that makes it likely they when one occurs, it will lead to the other.
That assumes his gun will never be stolen, or that an accidental shooting is out of the question. Some stats:
"According to data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), during the four-year period from 2012 to 2015, nearly half a billion dollars worth of guns were stolen from individuals nationwide, amounting to an estimated 1.2 million guns."
https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/guns-crime/reports/2...
"From 2006-2016, almost 6,885 people in the U.S. died from unintentional shootings. In 2016 alone, there were 495 incidents of accidental firearm deaths."
https://www.aftermath.com/content/accidental-shooting-deaths...
And those stats only consider deaths. Think about survivable injuries on top of that.
Also, keep in mind that even people who receive some sort of basic firearm safety training typically don't receive training related to how to respond to violent confrontations. The NRA, for instance, offers several Personal Protection courses, but typically you've got to take home firearm safety and shooting courses before you can take a Personal Protection course. The problem is that some people take a firearm safety training course and then think they're fully qualified to act in a violent confrontation. And, unfortunately, that misplaced confidence can put themselves and others in harm's way.
In 2015 there were 1250000 incidents of violent crime. No need for further math. I'll keep my guns.
However it's flippant to say that there's no need for further math.
I was punched in the chest on my way to school age 11. I was chased by a gang of kids and punched several times in the back aged 16. I was pelted by eggs while crossing a park twice aged 22 and 23, and was fairly badly mugged aged 25.
Not one of those would have worked out better had I been armed. The first time I was surprised, and the best that would have happened would have been that some guy got shot in the back walking away. Satisfying, but unhelpful. The second might have been stopped if I'd brandished, but then again I might have dropped the gun getting it out and been shot, or overpowered before I fired. I was shit scared and vastly outnumbered. The third and fourth I was both surprised and outnumbered. And anyway, who the fuck pulls a gun in retaliation for an egging? The final and most serious time, I was attacked without warning from the back, and was knocked down to the floor trying to protect my head against my assailants' kicks long before I could have thought to draw a firearm.
Shittons of violent crime is like this: it mostly neither justifies nor provides opportunity for gun use.
Of course, I live in England, so at no point did I have to fear being shot. But I don't think that's in favour of owning firearms just-in-case either, frankly.
Rather than just just comparing the upside to the downside statistically, you have to compare the upside to the downside for yourself as an individual, including the steps you can take to maximize the former and minimize the latter.
Revolutionary War: Unless they chose to fight, the "middle class" of independent farmers wasn't much affected (though I'll admit they were already zombie-prepped). The poor did the dying, and the elites got kicked out.
Civil War: Much more calamitous, but little that could be done about it. If you were displaced, your stocks of supplies were reduced to only what you could escape with. If you were killed violently, well, no point buying a gun when you'll be given one before sent charging into artillery fire.
Russia: See Civil War above. And just for fun, remember that having a large private store of grain wasn't exactly smiled upon during collectivization.
France: While farmers were undoubtedly more food-secure than their urban compatriots during occupation, those who cached guns and joined the Resistance weren't exactly making the safe choice.
China/North Korea/Vietnam: See Russia above
Africa: Is an entire continent, and reducing its 1.2 billion inhabitants to "where to begin" is incredibly insulting to their individual histories and experiences. But if we're talking colonialism, advising people to buy land is a bit out of touch, don't you think?
This, and the related link to his article on "culture war" is a strong signal that indicates to me that this falls into the the Using Pseudoscience to Justify Jingoism bucket.
More disturbing is that somehow large swathes of the population have come to hate and fear their democratic institutions so much in the last decades that they prepare to violently topple them. And while the vast bulk of mankind is bewildered by the US gun culture, they should be very wary that their own people are somehow influenced to hate their democracies too.
> More disturbing is that somehow large swathes of the population have come to hate and fear their democratic institutions so much in the last decades that they prepare to violently topple them.
I recall a series of results recently indicating that democracies tend to have outcomes favored by the elites.[1] This suggests that the democracy isn't functioning and some degree of skepticism and activism is warrented.
> And while the vast bulk of mankind is bewildered by the US gun culture, they should be very wary that their own people are somehow influenced to hate their democracies too.
I am bewildered by many customs of other cultures, and confused what the decidedly odd US gun culture has to do with the dissatisfaction people have with their system of governance and feelings of powerlessness?
[1] - https://journalistsresource.org/studies/politics/finance-lob...
[+] But for all the others.
(Churchill paraphrase.)
Near as I can tell you have: a) people who believe they should exercise their rights in order to not lose them, b) people who believe having a gun or three will better help them if ever they are burgled while at home, c) people who believe that an armed society is a polite society, d) people who believe that an armed society is less likely to become tyrannical, e) preppers, f) hunters/sportspeople... These groups/motivations often overlap. You only need one of these motivations to convince you to own a firearm, but many people will be swayed by just one of these. It seems every week we see a news item about a burglar repulsed by an armed homeowner, for example. And recall that the plaintiffs in Heller (the case that established that there really is a second amendment right to have firearms) were gay people in D.C. who felt unsafe. And recall that during the Civil Rights era (and before! going back all the way to Reconstruction) many black people felt they needed to be armed to resist lynchings (were they wrong?).
I didn't list "dissatisfaction people have with their system of governance and feelings of powerlessness" because, as far as I can see, that's not a common reason for people arming themselves. Fear of tyrannical government is one reason people arm themselves, but I wouldn't say that's a feeling of powerlessness, or of dissatisfaction with government -- it's not at all incompatible with feeling empowered and satisfied with one's government.
It is true though, I think, that if push came to shove, the fact that people are armed wouldn't be likely to make much difference to a determined tyrannical government that can mobilize (and motivate) modern military and/or police forces against rebels. But it sure would be easier for a tyrannical government to have a disarmed population. It's not for nothing that tyrants generally disarm their populations (Hitler, for example, did this). Thus having a well-armed population functions as a canary in the coal mine: if and when the would-be tyrants decide to confiscate firearms, that's when you might start thinking about hopping on a plane to some other place for a while. As a corollary, if the U.S. (federal and/or state) governments don't go confiscating peoples' guns, many people will not think them tyrannical.
For me, as long as we have free, orderly, timely, and clean elections, and as long as the state espionage machinery is not used to twist elected officials' arms, then we do not have a tyranny that cannot be corrected at the next election day. One of the most enduring parts of the American Constitution is that it focuses on process and that those constitutional provisions establishing process are the ones that have least been ignored, maligned, or violated by the institutions it provides for -- the U.S. Constitution is a work of genius, and this multi-century resiliency (while also being flexible enough to be amended, and with a Supreme Court that has enough power to fill in the blanks) is something to behold.
The Constitution is ultimately the biggest reason that the American system is stable, not that the people are armed, but I'm not at all convinced that the people being armed has no role in this, for there is another reason for American stability: its great decentralization and large geographic area. How would one mount a coup in the U.S.? I don't see how. In many countries you see the military (say) take over TV and radio stations, newspapers, shut down the Internet or otherwise impose severe controls on it, and park tanks at key intersections in key cities, and then it's all over. But in the U.S., if someone tried this, they might control one, or maybe two cities, but the rest of the country could easily refuse to go along -- how would one make sure 50 states go along when they all have national guard units, and some even separate militaries as well? It would require a civil war, and no one in the U.S. wants a civil war. In a civil war, the fact that so many civilians are armed would definitely count for something, thus making a coup even less likely.
IMO.
Acknowledging that they aren't currently equipped to adequately cover this in depth is insulting?
You also seem to be ignoring the premise that being armed is a key part of these plans. The goal isn't just to be food secure, it is to prevent being victimized while the crisis is ongoing or you escape the crisis.
Except he doesn't acknowledge ignorance, he plows ahead and puts the entire continent in the same category as Syria and Afganistan. Less than 2% of Africans live in the countries he does deign to mention.
> You also seem to be ignoring the premise that being armed is a key part of these plans.
Good luck singlehandedly fighting off the Venezuelan/Russian/Union/rebel army when they come to appropriate your assets. There's a reason insurgents use hit-and-run tactics, they'd be slaughtered in a pitched battle.
To be fair, military presence is certainly a problematic situation, but it seems more likely you'd encounter other, uh, less-than-savory people out there in an apocalyptic scenario, who are more likely to be dangerous to you than military personnel.
But usually what you typically have is a person who enjoys guns and is trying to think about a situation where it might possibly be useful to own an AR-15. It's a terrible self-defense weapon in an urbanized area (compared to a shotgun or handgun), and they're illegal to hunt with in lots of areas. Owning such a gun requires a major investment of money and time (for practice and training), and encourages this kind of paranoid outlook. So you have interest in guns driving interest in disaster preparedness, rather than interest in disaster preparedness driving interest in guns.
The M1 Carbine and similar weapons basically evolved into submachineguns - first the M3 "Grease Gun", then the M4 Carbine once the transition from battle rifles to assault rifles happened for front-line infantry.
Having lived in SF myself, I had all these things. In the event of a 7+ earthquake I was prepared to ride it out in my apartment if possible or escape to various points across the peninsula.
My wife and I made it a fun hiking game. We'd walk various routes and plan for the OH SHIT earthquake. I sure as hell had my handgun available too in case of an apartment break in or if something big enough hit where we had to flee on foot. The most irritating part was 10 round magazines to be legal in CA. Having 9mm was pointless so I bought a .45 to complement it.
My wife enjoys when we go shooting and we frequently review situations. In the end, it might be for nothing, but I'd rather be half ass prepared than praying for help from someone else.
There were folks who had transitioned off the grid in a sustainable way. The point of these weapons is to protect their families against roving gangs looking to scavenge resources ala Mad Max. A family of four will not be able to fight off dozens with shotguns, even against a large unarmed group they will be quickly overwhelmed after taking out a few - semi-auto weapons though they have a fighting chance.
This is also the primary reason they tend to move far away from cities - it's not that they don't like people or civilization in general (they may or may not), it's just that it thins out the number of people who could reasonably access their homestead.
I feel the vast majority of folks who have these weapons have them because they're 'cool'. But for the hard-core preppers convinced that the world is going to end they're an essential survival tool in a post-apocalyptic future.
In regards to population density, the further groups had to travel on limited resources the more dispersed and weaker they would be, and in turn the amount of resources available would be more dispersed relative to lack to nearby neighbors, all of which would be reasonably well protected.
Basically, you want to be relatively well fortified slim-pickings that are hard to reach.
Yeah, usually. An AR would be effective in lots of situations, but it's just a semi-auto rifle at the end of the day. If I had no guns and wanted something for defense, I'd probably get a full-size handgun with decent capacity before a rifle of any kind. Probably a Glock 17 or similar.
After that, a rifle is a great thing to have, and ARs are cheap and accessible.
> It's a terrible self-defense weapon in an urbanized area (compared to a shotgun or handgun), and they're illegal to hunt with in lots of areas.
I disagree here, completely. A shotgun's penetration is more than sufficient to have all of the same problems an AR has in that regard, while having a much lower capacity, rate of fire, and being much more difficult to employ due to its substantial recoil.
See here for some realistic evidence of a shotgun's penetration through walls: https://www.theboxotruth.com/the-box-o-truth-14-rifles-shotg...
As for hunting, that's pretty much irrelevant to me as I've not been hunting in over a decade. When I did hunt, I used a 1970s-era Colt SP1 Sporter, a relatively early AR-15. I took several deer with it, and had no issues with suitability for that purpose.
There's a surprisingly solid mathematical case for living in the present and near future, and accepting the risk of catastrophe that you'd only have a marginal chance of surviving and thriving in. In WWII Austria and Poland, a huge catastrophe, the people who escaped suffering weren't the preppers, they were the people who saw writing on the wall and moved away.
If the US becomes unstable, it will cause everywhere else to become equally unstable if not moreso.
I think that's because the author isn't talking specifically about the obsessed. There are plenty of levels between doing nothing and being obsessed, and that's where most people exist.
I have many rifles (and many AR-15s) because I like the things mostly, not because I'm trying to build an arsenal for the apocalypse. If I weren't enamored with them in particular I would have one or two, maybe a few spare parts, and the money I've spent on them would be spent on other things.
There are lots of things I do based on this subconscious analysis. For instance - I have a fire extinguisher in my vehicle. It was ~$100, and is certainly not something that most people have. I bought it and installed it because it seemed like something that would be very bad to not have if I ever needed it. In fact, I'm on my fourth fire extinguisher; the first three were used to put out fires on other people's vehicles that I happened to come across.
The thing that I think a lot of people don't understand about this is that it's primarily about mindset. I want to be responsible for myself and capable of handling any reasonable issues that arise in my life without calling upon others unless necessary. For me, from a practical perspective, firearms represent the ability to secure myself and my family and to keep us safe. From here, gun control is an attempt to remove my ability to do that.
You're assuming the very worst case there; there's a wide range of outcomes between "everything's great!" and "there's a supermutant banging on my door". Consider France, mentioned as place where many violent events have occurred, but which most people would still consider a nice place to live.
Prepping for 2-4 weeks of independent survival can also assist in the event of a power outage, major snow event, or any number of other mundane events.
It also has social benefits. It's nice if a small burp in food shipments doesn't produce rioting in the streets because there was no slack in the system. Prepping is putting slack in the system. Even if done for what may seem like a dumb reason, it really should still be encouraged to some degree.
Moving away is a different kind of preparation; it's certainly not doing nothing. Moving is a lot more extreme than keeping some spare food & water in your basement.
Prepping for me is more fun than anything. Although, I'm far less prepared here in Tornado Alley than I was living in SF. A tornado mostly wipes out a mile wide or so, not a vast area, so my concern is only riding out the initial damage. In SF a large earthquake could be very devastating.
So my probability of a tornado hitting my house is much higher, yet I'm prepared less. Some of us take into account more variables.
I grew up with a family that were outdoorsmen (and women). So having guns around was never something odd. They were never toys (except the toy guns) and we respected them. I guess living through the Great Depression jaded my grandparents somewhat. They were prepared to take care of themselves first. Be it with guns, with land for cattle, chickens, stocked pond, and a small farm, they viewed them all as just part of life.
My grandmother offered me any of my grandfathers guns I wanted when he passed. I only took one of the rare(ish) ones as a memento. I have my own handguns and rifles, but nothing on the volume that they had.
Preparing for possible outcomes is actually enjoyable for me and my family I'm sure. They loved shooting, hunting, fishing, even the manual labor of farming. I didn't get it as a kid but as an adult (software engineer & entrepreneur) getting your hands dirty and doing manual work is quite rewarding to me now. Plus shooting is just plain fun!
The financial acumen necessary (edit: that one develops while striving) to prepare (edit: against future disasters) can also lead to greater fiscal responsibility, but additionally, being prepared can lead to peace of mind and prevent obsessiveness.
Disclaimer, I'm LDS, where "Emergency Preparedness" is a thing[1]
Never have I seen it as something stress inducing, but I have often heard stories where "emergency preparedness" comes in handy for some completely unexpected circumstance.
That of course is less applicable to guns than it is to food and monetary reserves.
[1] https://www.lds.org/topics/emergency-preparedness?lang=eng
> obsessed
There are degrees of prepping.
You could set yourself up to survive at least a few weeks "off the grid" with a few hundred bucks' worth of nonperishable food and water and shelter. That wouldn't get you through total societal collapse or a war, but it would get you through a lot of Hurricane Katrina-style disaster situations where help, in some form, is on the way but the food supply is disrupted. That's not obsession by any measure.
After that, yeah, things ramp up pretty quickly. If you're trying to survive a governmental collapse you need a pretty massive stash of food in order to survive months or years and if things go longer than that you'll need to start producing your own food at some point because AFAIK even MREs don't last forever.
Whether or not long-term doomsday survival is a realistic option or not, that's up for debate.
Being self-sufficient like a settler in the American West from the 1850s is absolutely not enough, not by a longshot, because if things collapse tomorrow in America there are going to be 350,000,000 million desperate people and some of them will be hostile... not exactly something they dealt with in Little House on the Prarie. A person would either need to stay completely hidden with a few years' worth of food stores, become a refugee, or.... I guess, band together with others in some sort of natural or man-made fortress. The latter option's a bit laughable unless you're truly dedicated to becoming a regional warlord with the biggest fortress/army in the region. (Good luck with that)
I think that any sort of "standardized" education should include at least a class worth of teaching on how to interpret statistics.
My point is, I know it's simple to notice a problem in society and think that the obvious solution is to make it required learning, but it won't stick unless its reinforced over and over again. It can't just be a class, it has to be reiterated in various forms throughout many classes.
There are countless debates I've been a part of, on various topics, with parties involved cling to outliers as proof of their position, even in the face of actual statistical data. Words like "average" or "likelihood" don't seem to mean anything to them...only narrow anecdotes that are impossible to argue against without using statistics.
Example: I've debated someone that men are on average taller than women. They refused to accept this because they "know plenty of tall women." And their rejection of statistics and the notion of "on average" can be summed up by: "there is no 'average' person."
We believe what we want to believe and we overwhelmingly reject data that doesn't fit our narrative.
This is sort of a fantasy of mine - having every public school teach a brief course on "not getting tricked".
In my fantasy world, it's a several-week guide to common ways people lie and mislead the public. One section is on interpreting statistics. Another is probably on comparing scientific papers to the news stories they spawn. Another on 'paltering' and all the things a given statement doesn't say. The 'fun' section covers cold reads, famous hoaxes, and a general sense of how to not end up believing in every silly story you hear. You could use The Demon Haunted World as a readable source textbook for a lot of it.
It's a pipe dream, of course. You'd need teachers who could teach it, which is a tall order to begin with, and then you'd need to find a way to give out examples without offending half the parents in the school when every examples (astrology, crystal healing, and so on) is going to cross somebody.
But damn, even if it didn't take completely, wouldn't it be nice to at least have a shared framework to talk about this stuff?
“Is a song played on the radio because it is popular, or is it popular because it is played on the radio?”
...it told me everything I needed to know at a young age.
Ten years later I’m introduced to Adam Curtis’ “Century of the Self” and that filled in a few gaps.
I was hoping for the former, because if I wanted the latter, all I have to do is go on Facebook.
NOT mentioned in the subsequent sections about Hydrology, Math, Cheating, Horizon, and a brief mention in Disaster Planning. Then in the 6th major section we talk about guns.
"almost entirely about guns" if that's all you want it to be about maybe.
The beginning of the title is "The Surprisingly Solid Mathematical Case" and the author devotes a lot more space in the article about that than guns. So it's tiring when people jump on the gun bandwagon, than talk about the math of the disasters.
An actual solid mathematical case for gun stockpiling would need to show that 1) disasters are likely enough to prep for 2) the expected benefits of prepping outweigh the costs and 3) stockpiling guns is a better use of your finite resources than e.g. buying more canned beans.
It hits 1 pretty well, then it gives up and just assumes 3. No surprise that the discussion it generates isn’t very productive.
He kind of addresses that when he mentions the "raider" survival plan. "For an unethical zombie prepper, firearms may be all they need, if they can find someone else from whom to steal."
Maybe I'm deep enough into gun culture to see something as implicit where it ought to be explicit, but that suggests that it's worth having a minimum amount of deterrent against hostile parties once you have a few weeks food.
Then there are the people who are lying about not wanting to take all guns they just want common sense gun control (that will ban ar15s, the most popular and available gun platform in America.)
It reminds me of Taleb's Black Swans and mediocristan-extremistan paradigm. We can predict gaussian and binomial events, perhaps even fires and floods if we have enough historical data. But extrapolating from two data points to a totally different time and place is worse than useless, it's misleading. I think Taleb would argue that it's a mistake to use quantitative methods here, but not a mistake to hedge or insure yourself against the possible negative black swan event.
Another issue I have is the assumption that, if there is some revolution in your country, that prepping will be either necessary or sufficient. But that's not about the stats.
Adding a gun to your house increases the odds of successful suicide, of that gun being used against you, and of that gun being involved in an accidental death of a loved one. Gun ownership isn't as simple as "don't shoot anyone with it." Every year that you own a gun, there is a nonzero risk of it being part of a tragedy. You can mitigate and reduce this risk, but it's just as dumb to set it at 0 (because you're responsible) as it is to assume that the odds of a revolution are 0 (because one has not happened in your country in your lifetime).
A more thorough assessment would use the same Bernoulli Process to calculate the lifetime odds that the gun will be involved in a tragedy, and compare it to the odds that it'll save your life in a disaster of some kind.
FiveThirtyEight has a great writeup on gun deaths here, if you haven't seen it. 2/3 of the gun deaths in America are suicides.
People are always conflating population averages with individual probabilities, as if the behavior of other people has some magical nonlocal interaction with an individual's behavior.
The rate of alcohol-related sickness and death is probably much higher for people who keep hard liquor in the house. But I can fill my cupboards with whiskey and never take more than one drink a day. Know thyself.
Assuming that you're not going to change and that your life will be exactly the same, forever. Do you think there's ever been someone that thought there's a 0% chance they'd ever kill themselves and eventually did it? What's wrong with those people? Are they just stupid? But you're not stupid, right? You're smart, and in addition to there being 0% chance of you ever killing yourself, there's also a 0% chance of you being wrong about that.
It's dishonest to make those kinds of statements with absolute certainty.
And many people have spouse and kids.
My friends who are Into Guns are into feeling tough and powerful, like they've always got an upper hand in any situation. When they go into the great outdoors, it's to drink beer and shoot their guns into the woods. (Yeah, it's stupid and dangerous and shitty. I stopped camping with them some time ago.)
My family members who hunt never talk about their guns, they just hunt with them a couple times a year and fill their chest freezers with deer.
AR-15s are like toy light sabers for adults.
If the SHTF .223 is probably better to barter with if nothing else
AR-15s are by far the least expensive they've ever been right now, and are substantially less expensive than any reasonable alternative.
You can get a complete AR-15 for <$500, easily. If you're willing to put the parts together yourself, you can do it for ~$350.
You're certainly not going to get a new hunting rifle of similar quality for $70-$100.
> AR-15s are like toy light sabers for adults.
Sure, they can be. It's a fairly common cliche that they're "Barbie dolls for grown men" - but I fail to see how that's relevant. The article was about preppers, not firearms enthusiasts.
Personally, I’m not someone who will survive long in a combat situation, so I don’t spend much time thinking about guns.
These days you can easily get a lower receiver (the part that's considered a firearm by the ATF) for <$100.
I started turning down venison at meals for good two years ago. I'm probably being overly cautious.
[1] http://www.actionbioscience.org/biodiversity/rooney.html
It took decades for it to return.
The people who have rifles will have a better chance than the people who don't. The people without them will have to rely on the kindness of others to live. I think people stuck in or near cities will have a low chance of survival regardless of if they have a rifle.
Just doing some napkin math but several sources state the average carcass of a northern state buck yields 72lbs of meat. Does outnumber bucks and are far smaller (plus southern deer are far smaller) but let's be conservative and say the average is 60lbs of meat per carcass. Multiply that by the FDA approved # of calories per pound of ground venision which is 712, and you get 42,720 calories. Let's say you have to feed a family of 4 and you're fine with a starvation diet of 1,400 calories per day. That deer only provides you with 15 days of food assuming it only needs to provide for half that already limited calorie intake. Make that ~11 days if you want to maintain a 2,000 calorie diet with venison being half. Now picture the ramifications of that math as it plays out over a population of millions of families with an experienced hunter in the household and their need to take 2+ deer every month. Not only do you still need additional sources for the other half of your calorie intake, you'll need to replace the portion satisfied by venison fairly quickly as the deer population is hunted into near extinction.
Basically, hunting serves as an excellent way of supplementing your diet in such a scenario but it is by no means a complete solution over any timeframe and it becomes completely non-viable withing a surprisingly short window of time.
Cannibals would of course have a ready supply of food.
There's also more calories of beef in the US than people.
There's 120 sq miles of cornfields in New Jersey and 160 of soybeans, which are enough to feed Manhattan for a year, even if they're not currently allocated to feeding people in Manhattan and not enough to feed the entire metropolitan area. There's a considerable amount of food within one day's walk of even giant cities like New York.
Moreover, non-mechanized transport and storage of grain is kind of something humans are good at. Pre-modern cities relied heavily on it for hundreds of years. Rome, London and Beijing weren't relying on food grown by farmers living in the city.
In any non-magically-fast collapse (eg, the oil supply is cut by 20% per year until only a negligible amount remains on the market versus ALL OIL LITERALLY DISAPPEARS OVERNIGHT) I think there's going to be a decent glide path to an alternate structuring of civilization (electric-solar heavy farm equipment; reduced quantities of grain-fed meat; electric-solar rail and increased river/canal transport) that we'll be heavily incentivized to take.
(The end-of-the-world that scares me most is a _rapid_ shift in climate leading to significantly reduced growing seasons which allow for significantly less food production world-wide; I can't see any way that doesn't turn bad, and I am not sure what an individual would do to safe guard themselves against it besides hide in an unmarked cave with a massive food store until things are magically better.)
Ya, but that's the farmer's food, so you're talking about stealing it. The farmer might not like that and shoot at you. Even if he doesn't, what mechanism is in place to make sure that food is distributed evenly over the course of a year? How are you going to keep that corn from spoiling? What's going to stop a group of people sealing it just for themselves?
That's a lot of faith in local governance and structure.
>I think there's going to be a decent glide path to an alternate structuring of civilization
I would think so too, but it's fun imagining what would happen if it were abrupt (largely because of the word imagining rather than living through).
And the author is extremely naive in his assumptions about the relative risk of having an assault rifle in your home versus the marginal increase in safety said assault rifle would grant you in the case of a massive societal breakdown. If anything, at best it would be a wash: Carrying the rifle openly would just get you targeted by military, militia, gangs, or other preppers who would at such a point have nothing to stop them from employing pre-emptive lethal violence against you. You might be able to protect your home from random lone-wolf raiders, but organized groups could overwhelm you pretty quickly.
As for his two-data-point calculation of the likelihood of violent rebellion based on the history of the United States, the Civil War was a fairly straightforward war between government-equipped armies, not a period of random anarchy. And the Revolutionary War was relatively small-scale given the expanse of the American colonies at that time.
The sadly common European wars up until 1945 were horrific wastes of human life, but again, I'm not sure how having a rifle handy would appreciably change the lives of the folks impacted by the wars. I don't know about earlier wars but I'm pretty sure most every healthy fighting age male in Europe was in their respective military, not holed up in their basement protecting their tins of sardines from the looters across the street.
Point being, the chances of a societal collapse where your AR-15 will make a difference for the safety of your home and your family is miniscule. And the risk of the gun's presence in your home over the decades you wait for the apocolypse which never comes is much, much greater.
You start with the thought "I should have some canned goods and water on hand."... 5 years later you're locked in your bunker in south dakota... each step seemed reasonable, but the destination is unreasonable.
That said, you should have some canned goods and water on hand. :)
You may have a very valid reason for owning an AR-15 (even if that very valid reason is 'its rad at the range'). But for basically every valid reason, you can extrapolate a valid reason to own a pickup truck. In fact, there are more valid reasons to own a pickup truck. Pickup trucks, and the materials for making them work, are exposed to all manner of regulation and no-one but the most extreme anarchists make a peep.
Try applying the same sorts of regulations to AR-15s and you get 'slippery sloped' out of existence. So, to me, gun control advocates of the 'left' have not abandoned logical arguments, they've been out lobbied/pr'd by the gun extremists on the 'right'.
This is all coming from someone that does not own any AR-15s, but has fired them enough times to understand how much fun they are at the range.
Our government simply doesn't have the legal power to regulate ar15s like they do trucks.
IANAL but "right to bear arms shall not be infringed" sounds pretty bulletproof to me.
IANAL either, but the courts have changed their position on it over the years. For instance in United States v. Cruikshank (1875) the Supreme Court ruled that the 2nd amendment only applied to the federal government and states could restrict gun rights. Different parts of that decision have come under scrutiny many times.
In any case, its a very modern and specific reading of that amendment that suggests that none of our governments can regulate ar15 ownership. Further Amendment 10 is fairly clear that if it isn't mentioned then the federal doesn't have the right to regulate something, yet here we are with federal regulations on pickup trucks.
>He could leave [his gun] in his attic with a couple of cans of ammunition, just in case something horrible does transpire where he might actually need it.
Please keep your firearms and ammo out of attics and crawlspaces, unless the alternative is underwater. The key to longevity is climate control, at least within reason.
I believe the heat cycling (heating + cooling + condensation) in an attic acts on guns the same way auto exhaust acts on a car's exhaust system.
However. If we work backwards in time and keep to the same reasoning, the yearly probability of a violent revolution goes up for every year you get closer to the last event (because there are fewer years to sample from). For example, the chance to have a violent revolution in 1866, after the US Civil War, was at its maximum for the period after the Civil War (0.57 by my calculation). That is intuitively wrong. Surely, the probability to have a violent revolution must be minimal right after the end of the last one, when the new status quo is in its most well established, everyone is tired of fighting, etc etc.
I guess you can argue for and against that- but the point is that revolutions cannot be accurately modelled as a Bernoulli process, with a constant probability depending on time, else there is a risk of wildly over- or under-estimating the chance of having another one.
Finally- I think it's very dangerous to assume that just because you can model someone's reasoning as a rational process, that person will actually follow that process and reason rationally. Or in other words- someone else might be able to come up with rational arguments to back up preppers' actions, but that doesn't mean preppers themselves are thinking rationally. You can get to the same behaviour through very different lines of reasoning, not all of which are necessarily consistent.
Is that intuitively wrong? How many civil wars and revolutions have we seen spiral into madness after the official end to hostilities between the "governments" involved? Iraq, Libya, and South Sudan are among dozens of examples we can pull from recent memory. The defeat of a government or other high level of societal organization does not imply the defeat of the reasons why the war began in the first place. The rise of the Jim Crow laws and the incessant waves of black emigration fron the South after the collapse of the Union state's Reconstruction efforts speaks to the inherent instability of post-war societies. There are more historical examples of "post-conflict" societies which almost immediately descend into further conflict than one can count. Once the seal of peace is broken, it's incredibly hard to recreate.
Otherwise it's barbaric. Literally a bet against civilization and your fellow human.
If you are investing some portion of your income/wealth to individualistic self-preservation in the event of societal breakdown, one should, from a purely rational perspective invest in the prevention of such a breakdown, which means the social safety net, democracy, community engagement, etc.
To not do so is, in fact, a bet against civilization, which is, in my humble opinion, literally barbaric.
It's unsubstantiated that the above actually strengthens civilization.
But is the solution to this problem mass gun ownership? I think more and more school children in America are beginning to realise that actually no, that’s not the right way to think about this.
Is it really sound to compare the USA to Somalia and Afghanistan as though that comparison is just as relevant as a comparison to the UK or Australia or Canada? How many democratic countries have suffered revolutions and mass social breakdown? All of a sudden you end up with a very short list, and usually within a short period of time of coming out of a dictatorship of some kind, before democratic institutions and processes have become established. How many that have been democratic for more that 50 years? I can’t think of a single one.
Finally about 30,000 Americans die by the gun every year, many by suicide but that just goes to show the risks of easy access to guns. (If you disagree - people could stab themselves to death instead - compare death rates with other stable affluent democracies. You might be able to explain away some of it but I’m already rounding down to the nearest 10k.) Let’s say you have one uprising every 150 years. To pay it’s way in blood gun ownership would have to be responsible for saving over 450,000 lives. That’s about half the total of the Civil War. I think it’s far from clear that this would be the case, and surely isn’t having huge numbers of firearms in circulation more likely to make such a tragic breakdown of society even worse?
There's a reason the preponderance of his examples came from countries that were transitioning to democracies, and there are very few examples of violent overthrowing of democratically elected governments.
That's not an accurate characterization of either the Revolutionary War or the Civil War.
Immediately availability of small arms is also unlikely to be all that important in similar scenarios (just lie when the local revolt asks if you are against them).
It's an interesting thing to consider how likely things are to fall apart though.
Has either side "won" the "decade and a half war with Afghani tribal goat herders"?
There are certainly no invading forces of "Afghani tribal goat herders" in the U.S.
Sounds like small arms will, at best, hold off the army.
I know I am being ridiculous, but you get my point. Evidence based decisions and all that.
Yeah, and where's the bucket for "If you have to bring out a gun to shoot police officers, your nation has failed, YOU have failed at protecting your nation and what it stands for, and I'm not interested in your political fantasy where you become a hero to save the day after abdicating your responsibility while everything collapsed"?
If these guys realistically believed America would turn into another Afghanistan, what they need is an airline ticket. Why prepare for a doomed fight when you can retire in Bahamas? If they realistically believe that America is going down and they need to stop it, what they need is to get involved in politics and fight, NOW, to turn the country around.
But no, they want to believe they can be heroes, while at the same time don't want to believe they can do anything about it now, because then they will be responsible for their inaction. So they keep talking about guns, and how everyone else will feel sorry once civilization collapses.
Many people have guns. I think the numbers are that there's more guns than there are people in the USA.
However for those numbers of guns, there's nowhere near that amount of training to teach proper firearms handling and usage. The hunters probably have the most experience, outside law enforcement and military.
I personally don't have enough time to dedicate to mastery of firearms. Just going and buying a handgun seems like a splendid way to either injure yourself or have it taken from you and used against you. This decision is personal.
However I'm pretty good at: electronics, design, reverse engineering, software, power, chemistry, and many other areas. I may not be a master at firearms, but I know metalsmithing and chemistry to make the bullets gun owners need.
And frankly, if shit goes haywire, they'll be enough guns to go around. Because I could see another country moving in, and guns being passed around like candy to defend us. And barring that, I'll know enough tech and have enough scrap to be needed.
1. Always assume it's loaded and the safety is off.
2. Don't point it at anyone, ever, even inadvertantly.
3. Don't put your finger on the trigger until you are ready to shoot.
4. The rest is in the manual.