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Comment by mattknightlewis | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Army libertarians

My first thought was people whose disaster preparedness strategy is guns and ammo before water and food. Imagining violently defending your compound between weekly trips to the grocery store feels very Aboveground to me

During the LA Riots, some people parked in the parking lot spaces to loot supermarkets.

If we're talking some sort of civilizational collapse scenario, you would unquestionably want firearms over food as preparation. First of all you can hunt with a gun. Secondly, you can take other people's food with a gun. Finally you can defend your own food from being taken once you've acquired it by any means necessary.

Doesn't this require a ton of resources (gas and mobility gear, manpower to find and move food, or continuously migrating your living area) and assume everyone you meet will be an enemy you will want to take food from?

Based on my reckoning, it would behoove you to hunt first and foremost with a firearm, to secure food for yourself and your family. A single deer could feed a family for a month plus. A cow could feed a family for months.

But undoubtedly, skirmishes would happen. Humans are tribal creatures and tribal structures would almost instantly form in such a vacuum.

Above firearms, you want a community where trust exists.

Guns over food seems like a straw man. I was interesting in survivalism a couple decades ago, and every writer I came across put a heavy emphasis on water and food. Guns were something they considered necessary in an environment where you're one of the few with clean water and food. Trying to attack others who'd stocked up wasn't recommended by anyone; if they stocked up on food they'd probably have their own guns.

Eventually I read a great little book by someone who'd lived through the currency collapse in Argentina, who said all their rural survivalists got picked off by roving gangs. That doesn't mean the gangs had a great life expectancy either. He advocated staying in town and getting to know your neighbors, setting up a neighborhood watch, helping people start gardens, etc.

Thanks for mentioning this. A quick search turned up this book, is it the right one? https://archive.org/details/modernsurvivalma0000agui. Fernando Aguirre, 2009. The Modern Survival Manual: Surviving the Economic Collapse.

It would be really interesting to compare/contrast his account from others from Ukraine, Syria, the Balkans. What I hear in your comment is that the advice you heard was about having weapons for a strong defensive posture rather than to be used offensively. I guess the strength of both communities and gangs is in their size, they'll win out over the lone wolf fantasy.

Yep that's the book!

Serious survivalists know perfectly well that what you'll need is water, food, and skills like farming, spinning, sewing, cleaning, digging latrines, etc.

Unfortunately, there are a hell of a lot of people in the US who are essentially "survival LARPers" who imagine themselves as heroic alpha (or, better, sigma!) wolves who fight off thousands of degenerates coming for their canned food. ...Hey, did anyone think to get a can opener?

A hell of a lot of Americans are descendents of literal frontiersmen and women who were subjected to cow thieves, roving gangs, robberies, Indian raids, revolutions, European proxy wars, dust bowls, depressions, and terrible diseases (with no cures in their day) hundreds to thousands of miles from the closest forts or cities.

Yeah no one in the country doesn't own a can opener AND a shotgun or rifle AND know how to can their own veggies. But if you don't have peace, you aren't going to be able to farm in peace.

Do you even have acreage to farm? Do you have tools and skills to farm? If not, how would you get access to it?

First of all: Those "frontiersmen" suffering "Indian raids" looked, from a very slightly different perspective, an awful lot like "foreign invaders who murdered millions and took their homes being attacked by some of the few that remained trying desperately to avoid also being murdered and having their homes stolen." Parroting Manifest Destiny narratives isn't a good look in 2023.

Also those "dust bowls" were largely caused by their own incompetence at land management, expecting to import a specific brand of European farming practices to a completely different continent with many different biomes and have everything Just Work, because, of course, God Wanted Them To Take It.

I'm also not trying to claim that there's no value in having the knowledge and tools to defend yourself. But when you've got a bunker full of thousands and thousands of rounds of ammo, enough canned food to survive unpleasantly for about 6 months, and no understanding of how to grow more or interest in learning, that speaks of someone who expects to be murdering other people and taking their food to survive for the rest of his life.

If you want to farm enough to feed your family, you don't need 2,000 acres of farmland. That kind of acreage is mostly needed for specialist farmers and for grain. Furthermore, what's actually effective at making you ready to survive in a situation like what's being posited isn't total self-sufficiency: it's community. The people in the area get together and work out what land should be used for the village's potatoes, peppers, onions, etc, what should be used for pasturage for the animals, and what should be left fallow this year. (Hopefully in collaboration with some of the indigenous people who we haven't totally managed to wipe out, and some of whom still retain their historical land management practices, which were effective at making this land a flourishing place providing plenty of food for millennia before my ancestors came and tried to exterminate them in the name of gold, God, and glory.)

The U.S. was basically settled by rural survivalists not even four or five generations ago in most of the country. There is an abundance of clean water and food in North America but that never stopped rival natives from warring with each other, and raiding, enslaving and pillaging their opponents, even before the Europeans brought their wars and rivalries to the continent.

That all being said, there isn't enough land in a town to feed a town. No, you can't live on an herb garden. You need many acres to feed a single family. All modern cities in particular are completely dependent on reliable deliveries from mass production farming operations in rural communities. If that supply chain ever was cut off, there would not be enough food in the cities for the millions that live in them.

Maybe the Western US was. The Midwest and East has been settled for many times that.

My own great great grandfather settled in frontier Minnesota in the 1860s from Norway (assigned to move there by the immigration department of the time). It was still very sparsely populated in the 1860s, and was on the edge of the frontier with the Sioux Indians controlling much of the territory. The Federal government had reached an agreement with the Sioux to pay for land, but during the tense and financially constrained period of the Civil War, the government fell behind on annuity payments. So the Sioux retaliated by attacking and killing 600+ immigrants that had settled in the land the Sioux had sold. My ancestors barely escaped, their house was burnt down, and the ensuing wars with the Sioux persisted for several decades afterwards.

http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/dakota/Dak_acc...

Yes, every serious survivalist puts a heavy emphasis on water and food. I was not talking about the serious survivalists - I was calling out the silly minority

There is also a point where another gun or another case of ammo doesn't help as much as a case or three of MREs or HDRs

A single deer can feed a family for weeks. That only takes one shot.

That only takes one gun

Most people can only fire one gun at a time. There is a point of diminishing returns on stockpiling weapons.

Outside of some mass extinction event where we'll probably be dead anyway, I never really understood what exactly the scenario this would be prepping for. Even if all of societies institutions collapsed overnight, the winners are going to be whichever group reorganizes itself quickest. Not to mention some group is likely to inherit a ton of heavy weapons that aren't going to just disappear from the planet overnight.

This is not an imaginative scenario. Humanity has been through multiple civilizational collapses in its history. The fall of the Roman empire, followed by the Justinian Plague and the famines of 536 AD, is one such example. In the wake of the collapse there were thousands tribes that formed, which gradually recoalesced into modern european nation states (and invariably many of those made a pass at superceding Rome's former glory).

It would be likely that many groups would inherit heavy weapons but it's not clear that they would be particularly useful. If victory always went to the most heavily armed, then the U.S. would have handily won the Vietnam war without many casualties. And the Afghanistan war while we're at it.

Years ago I found a wonderful anecdote on Metafilter about someone who lived through this very situation:

https://www.metafilter.com/78669/What-if-things-just-keep-ge...

Thanks for sharing that, it’s a heartbreaking and yet extremely practical perspective that will stay with me for a long time

I'm not sure I know many preppers who have a gun but don't also keep a food store. Plenty of people do the opposite: lots of food and supplies, but no weapons. I think both are bad ideas, but If I had to choose one, I'd want to be in the former group, and then go around and find people in the latter group and see what they had.

This is the exact mindset that I was imagining: How are you going to find people in the latter group? Are you planning to drive around, refueling at abundant and well-serviced post-apocalypse gas stations in between your murderous rampages? Are you planning to walk or bike around, before you have any spare food, killing whoever you meet on sight? How long do you expect to live, when every meal is a firefight?

Are you really so heartless? What if it's not truly a zombie apocalypse scenario, but the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts and you are stuck in place, but will likely be able to evacuate in a month after roads get reconstructed? Is it worth killing your neighbors then? How about 3 months? What do you do when you go to kill someone for their food and they see that you're in a shitty spot and offer to help?

I have no qualms with also having guns and an ammo stockpile, especially for hunting, but that is significantly less important than figuring out water and food.

It's more that, while acknowledging that both would be important, in this completely contrived scenario where you have to choose only one, which one would you choose? In a world where your greediest next door neighbor is free to choose guns over canned goods, do you choose canned goods, only to have them taken away at gunpoint? Or, do you choose a gun and go find someone to take canned goods from? Again, a ridiculous thought experiment in the first place.

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