Dear Survivalists,
Stockpiling weapons and ammo is stupid. The first real big reason it’s stupid is because it feeds this fearful feeling that somehow people can and will survive if only there are enough guns. To quote Mark Bowden, who wrote “Black Hawk Down” he said, “In Mogadishu, guns have accomplished everything they are capable of accomplishing”.
Guns will not save you or me or us.
You have zero chance against any organized military in a shooting war. You have no air force. You have no tanks. You don’t have the logistics to fight a prolonged war and the government does. Not that I think it will happen, mind you, but really, why do you need that many guns?
What you should be doing, if you really think the end is coming, is learn how to grow food. Wow, now that’s every bit as exciting as firing a few hundred rounds down at the range, isn’t it? But you’ll also need to learn how to extract water from the ground and how to install a hand pump. You’ll also need to learn about having to dispose of your own waste. You can recycle it into your garden and that’s a great idea but that is also something that can’t be sold as a good idea on talk radio. I guess you won’t hear it there.
You’re going to need to know how to plant food but unless you’ve got plans to grow old in that bunker you’re going to have to have a real live social network with the survivors living near you. If everyone who is left is armed to the teeth how to you think they’ll resolve disputes? You will need everyone you can find to help get the crops in, to help with livestock and to build new infrastructure like barns and bridges. You’re going to have to trade with other groups who have also survived that end-of-civilization thingy that’s on its way. Having a society that is an armed camp where everyone carries an assault rifle is going to look a lot like Afghanistan. I hear it’s great there.
In twenty-five words or less what you’re really going to need is other people. You are going to have to trust them and they’re going to have to trust you, and this has got to work on a large scale, or we’re all screwed. All these guns and all this ammo isn’t about trust; it’s about fear. It’s about being scared and hiding.
I’m not real sure what sort of world might evolve out of that but I am fairly certain it’s going to look a lot like what we see in Somalia and Afghanistan. I’m pretty certain it won’t resemble anything our Founding Fathers were looking for. It’s going to take farmers and parents and hardworking craftspeople to rebuild after that end-of-civilization thingy that’s on its way. Those kinds of people are nearly never the fearful type. You might want to consider why.
Take Care,
Mike
Mike writes regularly at his site: The Hickory Head Hermit
Opinions expressed in this article are not necessarily those of the management of this site.
+19-14
Mike, your points are all spot on, as they usually are. However, I got the impression that these folks were preparing for a world-wide nuclear holocaust, not a military move in general. Anyone in their right mind would not go up against an organized military force. Yes, the far left also has its concepts, but those are the ones that will stand the test of ‘untimely time’.
Jim,
The Far Left…..I wouldn’t know where to begin. I knew fewer of those than I do the Far Right, but they all scare me about the same amount.
And thanks for the kudos.
If you’re looking for something to survive, I’d suggest preparing for man made global epidemic, which is the most likely global disaster. Then your guns might be useful to shoot yourself.
So how many guns would you need for that Grog? “You only got the two hands” to paraphrase Captain Malcolm Reynolds
Spot on, Mike. I’ve argued with you about crap before, but this is so spot on with my view and what I’ve been preaching that I almost got a chubby reading this.
Stockpiling weapons for war, Sander, is like stockpiling baseballs getting ready to play the Yankees.
There is more to it than some might think.
I don’t need to learn how to raise crops or get water. I’ll just shoot the people with food and water and take theirs.
Thank you, TD, for making my point for me.
Those skills will be great to have, but in an apocalypse, if you’re growing food you’re going to be growing it for the people with the guns. Unless you can protect your group and defend your supplies, someone better armed is going to take it all away from you. A stable society will require protection to form and grow–I’m not sure how else you can achieve that without being armed.
RT, I’ve said as much as that. Guns will be needed, and they are needed. But the idea that guns are the answer is much more blind than saying they aren’t needed at all.
Look at the role of guns when this country was formed. Hunting first and then war. It may happen like that again and everyone having an AK-47 looks ugly.
but in an apocalypse, if you’re growing food you’re going to be growing it for the people with the guns.
If you carry a gun, you’re also going to be carrying it for the people with the guns. It’ll be warlords with zones of control, not independent villages with small arms.
Uncle Joe sez all you need is a double barrel shotgun….
Joe Biden is right.
Ken, I will hunt you down and sue you if you ever tell anyone I said that in any other context.
Inside of a house, a 12 gauge opened up is an impressive as anything you can ever hope to see.
Outside of a house, you can knock a deer down at a good range.
I totally agree. Yet I have read between the NRA’s lines and I think they fear the black gangs, or it is a convenient excuse to hold on to their lethal toys.
John,
I fear the white men in Congress a lot more than I fear the black men in gangs.
That’s because you’re a hermit who doesn’t live near any gangs. See Steve Sailer’s Dirt Gap explanation for people’s positions on gun control.
Noumenon, you’re right about me not living anywhere near a gang but that does not mean I’m blind to what happens elsewhere either.
This isn’t about gun control. I wish I had been able to state that a little more clearly the first dozen or so times.
I think Steve Sailer is mostly silly now that I’ve read him.
Mike, your fear of the government is irrational. Could be that you listen to media personalities who’s only goal is to gain an audience for fame and fortune. To get attention they have to make extreme claims that appeal to paranoid reactionaries.
I don’t fear the government, John. But I don’t trust it either. I don’t think anything weird is going to happen anytime soon but if it does guns aren’t going to be nearly as vital as knowing how to make a bucket.
@rtkane, he didn’t say don’t have a gun, he said learning to be self sufficient would be more useful than acquiring a hundred guns. You’ve only got two trigger fingers, so once you’ve got two guns, work on learning something useful.
I agree I dont need 5000 rounds of ammo
“There are two kinds of people in this world. People with guns and people who dig. You dig.”
So let me get this straight. Society will collapse, except for the military, so fighting the military (who I guess will have become warlords?) is futile, since even though society has collapsed they’ll still have plenty of fuel and spare parts and the soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen won’t desert to take care of their families.
While I agree that knowing how to survive at a 19th century level of technology is a good thing, what good it would do me as a suburban apartment dweller is debatable. I’m not sure where in the complex we’re gonna be able to put the crops and the only livestock we have barks.
If other people want to spend their money on firearms and ammunition, paintings by Old Masters or VW bugs (or anything else you may find “impractical”) it really isn’t anybody else’s business but their own.
If this civilization collapses it will not be the fault of survivalists who wanted to be left alone to their own devices. It will be due to progressives and other control freaks who know how to run your life (and the economy) better than you do, so you’d damn well better obey.
I suspect very strongly Neon that the military will not last very long. “An Army marches on its stomach” Napoleon said.
If the end comes people with pitchforks will be more useful than people with guns. You can kill all the people you want but it’s not fun to eat them.
I also suspect the it will be more of a battle of wits to survive than simply being able to threaten the way up the food chain.
My brother has 8 kids. I asked him, “If your kids were starving, and I had a cup of rice stashed in my house, would you kill me to get it”?
“Damn right I would!” …my own brother!
…I’ll be out floating the gyre on my trash bottle island..
I’ll be back in a few years and see how y’all are doing!
Like the Incas, Mayans, and Aztecs, even the Anasazi of the american southwest, I would come home to find fertile lands and abandoned cities, where they ate the foodstocks on hand, then each other, then moved on to pillage or be pillaged. Farmers will lose their crops to thieves, breeding stocks of animals would be wiped out and eaten, as well as all wildlife.
Is it time to ‘cull the herd’? Any eco system where there are too many parasites and leeches and not enough hosts is doomed to a cycle of rebirth.
XA,
All of those civilization sought to move in on their neighbors and eventually collapsed. ( They are all mentioned, I believe in the book ‘Collasped’ which puts many causes to blame for the end) but in the end, their military might could not save them.
I think your last sentence is very accurate.
as a wise Sargent once said in the movie anyways when the time comes that i need one of those guns there will be plenty lying around to grab. the french resistance used small hunting rifles to get military weapons from the Germans. I teach my kids how to hunt, fish, build shelter, fire, and this year we are all learning to garden. and with the rising food prices we are going to need these skills more then ammo cant use all that ammo if you have been weakened by starvation.
I hope I’m near you and your kids if the end comes, ALN.
I think you got it right.
You’d be in good company Mike, if you were.
You have to think a man that prepares for the end by investing in his children has some real wisdom, Jon.
Growing food is fine and all but you need to protect what you have. There will always be people who want to take what’s yours. Personally, my zombie plan is to escape to the wilderness and get as far away from people as possible. As soon as I finish printing out all these articles, that is. Hope the power doesn’t go out before I finish.
Best of luck with those zombies, Kevin, just remember never to set them on fire or use a chainsaw against them.
You have zero chance against any organized military in a shooting war. You have no air force. You have no tanks. You don’t have the logistics to fight a prolonged war and the government does
Don’t tell the VC or the Afghans that, they think they did just that.
evidently y’all didn’t see the video of some people trying to shoot a shotgun vs an ar-15, a shotgun is a good weapon, but not always the most appropiate
Gotta love you Yanks. It always comes down to guns. If it comes down to survival, guess who you are gonna be killing. Yep, other Yanks.
No arsenal is gonna fight off a killer asteroid or more likely a biological disease. And God ain’t gonna be any help there. Dinosaurs obviously didn’t believe.
And if the “survivalists” do survive, just think of the gene pool that will leave.
An open letter to Mike from Survivalists:
Dear Mike,
Your attempt to address the errors that survivalists make by assuming that none of us have thought this through has resulted in a blog post that applies only to media stereotypes. Nobody is like that. But thanks for your arrogant and condescending remarks to make it seem like you know what’s best and nobody else has a clue, just like any other blogger.
-Survivalists
The south will rise again….
After thought, F@<k guns, I'm gonna start learning how to make my drones with poison gas jets (many Internet links available). I'm stocking up on batteries.
Bring on the guns, I'll see ya coming and just spray ya.
The intelligent always find better ways to kill the ignorant. Can you say Hiroshima. Or Drone.
Unfortunately, Jarrod, my experience in this subject is first hand and reality based.
Locally, all we have is gun hoarding, bullet buying, target shooting, guns nuts who rush out and mas their credit cards when someone puts a Bushmaster on sell for a thousand bucks.
And thanks for stereotyping bloggers while we’re trading spit here.
you do have the right to think stockpiling is stupid, but there are plenty of people out there now who will kill you for nothing and their survival is not at stake. Do you really think those type of people will just disappear or suddenly become pollyannish and team players for the good of mankind in an end of the world situation and the ensuing anarchy? or will they become more violent in a lawless era and joined by otherwise good people who are tired of seeing their children starve?? I really wish your vision was on the one that would happen, but I seriously doubt it.
If they take the second amendment away, how long will it be before the rest are at risk? It is all ready against the law in some areas to record the what the police are doing in public, a legislature in Va I think has introduced a bill allowing the police to come in and inspect your home for contraband once a year. What one person thinks you need and your rights are two separate things. I don’t need to talk trash about Obama, Bush or whoever, but I certainly have the right
FWIW, I don’t own any guns nor do I care anything owning them. but I don’t have the right to tell you what you need to do to keep your family safe or tell a woman what she needs to protect herself.
grumpy, what gene pool will survive? I would say the ones who are willing to stand up and fight for what is theirs and their right to exist, unfortunately the meek who depend on some one else to protect them or rely on the goodness of mankind probably won’t survive in large numbers.
to whoever it was that made the comment about Americans and guns, who is it that countries call on when they need help protecting themselves??? Us frigging Americans of course
yeah I know my grammar sucks
Doug,
Take a deep breath. Now, if you’ll read everything I have ever written you’ll realize I have never advocated taking guns away from anyone. I advocate gun ownership. I own guns of my own and I have no intention of every surrendering one of them to anyone for any reason. I have no intention of letting that happen to anyone I know, or for that matter, anyone I do not know, unless they’re nuts or dangerous. Or both.
What I am saying is that guns alone will not save us. What I am saying is that by overspending on guns and ammo if something bad does happen guns are all a lot of people will have and that is going to get ugly quick.
Look at the comments here and the mindset is pretty clear; there is an overabundance of fear of not having enough weapons to defend the resources people are already not spending enough money on in the beginning.
There is a kneejerk reaction to anyone saying anything that might possibly, in some remote way, come across as anti-gun ownership.
I never said that. I never implied it. I said and I will say again, guns will not save us. We may need them but in the end, they are not the answer we are looking for.
Take Care,
Mike
Then Mike I apologize for the misinterpretation
Doug, it might have been the way I presented the idea.
Most people assume anything that is anti-gun in a context is anti-gun.
I don’t think guns belong in schools, churches, bars, or swimming pools. But that doesn’t mean I want to have them banned in homes, shooting ranges, in my truck, or on the hips of people who know how to use them.