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The Surprisingly Solid Mathematical Case of the Tin Foil Hat Gun Prepper
- Clubber 8y agoAnother reason is if for some reason we have an oil crisis. Most of what you eat is delivered on trucks. No oil means no food in about two weeks. Hunting used to be par for the course just a few decades ago.
- Frondo 8y agoFrom personal experience, from a social circle that spans a wide variety of types of people, the venn diagram of "people who are Into Guns" and "people who can effectively hunt their own food" has no overlap. 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.
- lainga 8y agoWhat does enthusiasm for guns have to do with this discussion?
- panglott 8y agoThe linked article is about rationales for possessing rifles such as the AR-15.
- lainga 8y agoYou can own an AR-15 without being compelled to enthuse about it to everyone (as the grandparent mentioned their poor-hunter friends do).
- Spooky23 8y agoThe AR-15 is the key word. Subsistence hunters aren’t buying expensive guns. You can get guns for that purpose for 80% less money. AR-15s are like toy light sabers for adults.
- lainga 8y agoYes, but if you're not a subsistence hunter, and only planning to become one in unusual circumstances, the AR-15 is so popular that its parts and ammunition are widely available everywhere. In fact, I'd say an entry-level AR-15 at about $400 is a better choice for someone who isn't enthusiastic about guns, and doesn't want to expend too much brainpower maintaining them, as opposed to a $100 Cosmoline-encrusted Mosin or Norinco rifle. Even if it is overkill for hunting.
- flyingfences 8y ago5.56 is actually under-kill for hunting a lot of game, especially as compared to something like the Mosin that you gave as an example.
- cc439 8y agoYou're right in that .223/5.56 is only useful for game up to your typical southeastern Doe or small Buck but milsurp rifles are a thing of the past. Not only is a decent Mosin ~$350 these days, they are awful, awful hutning rifles for a dozen+ reasons. A Savage Axis is the better comparison but it costs about the same as a budget AR-15 and either option is so cheap it's hard to argue against buying both.
- Density 8y agoThat's why intermediate 6mm cartridges exist. 6.5mm CM, grendel and better yet .300 blackout. All easy conversions to the AR platform. All you need to go from a base .223 ar to a .300blk is a barrel swap.
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- busterarm 8y agoWith the dramatic increase in CWD in the US deer population, I don't know if I would be messing with deer meat anymore. I started turning down venison at meals for good two years ago. I'm probably being overly cautious.
- cc439 8y agoThe only difference between "military-style firearm enthusiasts" and "hunters" that I've noticed is that the hunting focused crowd rarely shows interest in platforms like the AR-15 but they loooooove to talk about/argue about handguns. All the hunters in my family rareoy discuss their field guns (there's really not much to discuss about the differences between one .308 bolt action/12ga pump or inertia shotgun and another) but god forbid they get started on a 9mm/.45 debate or their umpteenth Wonder 9/1911 argument. Basically, the difference boils down to one of defensice ideology, tacticool people believe in the benefits of the modern carbines/rifle concept while hunters believe in the benefits of a CCW and/or bedside handgun instead.
- vkou 8y agoIf there are no more trucks in the United States, the only thing you'll have left to hunt after a few weeks would be people. [1] [1] http://www.actionbioscience.org/biodiversity/rooney.html http://www.actionbioscience.org/biodiversity/rooney.html
- gowld 8y agoHow are deer related to trucks?
- saalweachter 8y agoThe US has 30 million deer and 330 million people. If divided evenly and your exclusive food source, that would last the country about 3.5 days.
- Clubber 8y agoWell there won't be 330 million people for long either. There are also a lot of other animals to eat other than deer. 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.
- xkcd-sucks 8y agogator, bear, duck, squirrel, possum, goose, raccoon (boil in baking soda twice, according to Joy of Cooking)
- LyndsySimon 8y agoRead stories from people who lived through the Great Depression - there was basically no wild game left. It took decades for it to return.
- crsv 8y agoAn oil crisis from where? Our reliance on foreign oil has diminished considerably, we would need an oil crisis domestically for this to even be on the table, and that seems an even further reach than an international one. https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/us_oil.php https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/us_oil.php
- sverige 8y agoNo trucks means no food in three days or less for 95% or more of the population.
- cc439 8y agoHunting won't be a viable method for replacing the majority of calories in one's diet in any scenario in which the public has to resort to finding such a replacement. Small game is only capable of supplanting other calorie sources, and although that role as a supplement is incredibly important in terms of nutrition, it can't serve as Plan A no matter how many squirrels and ducks you see in the park during "peacetime". Large game, which means white tailed deer for 95% of Americans, is viable in terms of calories per successful hunt but the success rate of hunting will plummet the longer any food-insecurity scenario continues. The population of white tailed deer is enormous (15,000,000) but the population of people capable of hunting them is large enough to absolutely annihilate that population in mere months. 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.
- code_duck 8y agoEasier math is that 30 million cattle are slaughtered in the US annually.
- maxerickson 8y agoUnfortunately there's not really a meaningful amount of game. Even a relatively small portion of the current population hunting for sustenance would demolish that resource. Cannibals would of course have a ready supply of food.
- saalweachter 8y agoThe calorie density of a corn field is higher than Manhattan. There's also more calories of beef in the US than people.
- maxerickson 8y agoThe comment above suggests a scenario where the fuel has stopped. There's a lot more people on Manhattan than there are cattle and corn fields.
- Clubber 8y agoMost people who are stuck in large cities would simply starve to death.
- saalweachter 8y agoI mean, maybe? There are people starving to death (or to an infirmity that leads to death, rather than literally starving to death) inside and outside of cities today, so it can certainly happen. 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.)
- LinuxBender 8y agoWithout even reading the article, I would suggest that people should do whatever makes sense to them to protect themselves and their loved ones. Waiting for real world statistics to back you up is additional risk. I would suggest it would be pragmatic and entirely logical to be proactive and prepare for the worst.
- gowld 8y agoHow do you know what makes sense if you don't know the statistics? Any action could be more harm than help.
- LinuxBender 8y agoExperience has shown that common sense can augment or even replace statistics. Statistics are great for confirming or rejecting what you knew using common sense.
- delecti 8y agoLiterally the entire point of the field of statistics is to augment our highly fallible "common sense" with objective measures of assessment.
- fhood 8y agoGood idea. I should preemptively murder anyone who might cause me harm. I know I am being ridiculous, but you get my point. Evidence based decisions and all that.
- squozzer 8y agoThank you author -- I knew cumulative / long-term probability had a name but did not know it -- Bernoulli Process. >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.
- shifter 8y agoYep. They also need regular "exercise" and lubrication if you want them to be worth anything in a WROL situation.
- Clubber 8y agoBack when my uncle was in the army, they stored all their weapons dry so the oils wouldn't trap all the dust. So I guess the attic is ok as long as you store it try, or in a gun case or something.
- squozzer 8y agoI went to a friend's house once and fetched a couple of old shitguns from her attic. They were serviceable, but had developed a this coat of rust, enough to require re-bluing. 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.
- shifter 8y agoThere's enough oxygen floating around in various forms that the _lack_ of an oil layer can allow rust to form. There are other ways to treat it, as your uncle alluded to, but they are probably very sensitive to following the appropriate maintenance schedule.
- gowld 8y agoThe major point that the author misses is that by being obsessed with upcoming catastrophe, you lower your quality of life now (not only with prep expenses, but also with stress and paranoia) in exchange for surviving a low-probability disaster in the future, where even surviving would be a pretty miserable existence. 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.
- sverige 8y agoWhere do you propose low- and middle-income people move to from the U.S., and when? And what country is it that will take in refugees from the U.S., if you wait too long to move?
- cc439 8y agoHere's an even better question: "what country would be any better if the world's economic lynchpin is no longer a safe and stable place?" If the US becomes unstable, it will cause everywhere else to become equally unstable if not moreso.
- kodablah 8y ago> The major point that the author misses is that by being obsessed with upcoming catastrophe, you lower your quality of life now [...] 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.
- LyndsySimon 8y agoI completely agree. 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.
- colemannugent 8y agoSlightly related to the article: Does anyone else feel like the general public's inability to extract information from statistics is a huge problem? I think that any sort of "standardized" education should include at least a class worth of teaching on how to interpret statistics.
- gnodar 8y agoI had that class in HS. Or at least I had a general statistics class where the teacher emphasized interpreting results, common fallacies, etc. As one might expect, the students didn't pay attention to anything other than memorizing the formulas and spitting them back out on the test. They then promptly forgot the formulas the memorized. I took the optional follow up class as an elective. Even amongst the students of that class, who were interested enough in statistics to take a more advanced one as an elective, all of us had to re-learn the formulas we forgot. 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.
- skookumchuck 8y agoOne way to do it is to teach statistics using poker (or blackjack).
- madengr 8y agoSure, but the average person has probably had only high school algebra, and remembers none of it.
- daenz 8y agoYES 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."
- jawns 8y ago> all he must do to ensure it doesn't hurt anyone is not shoot anyone with it 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/2017/07/25/436533/stolen-guns-america/ 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-statistics 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.
- madengr 8y ago"In 2016 alone, there were 495 incidents of accidental firearm deaths." In 2015 there were 1250000 incidents of violent crime. No need for further math. I'll keep my guns.
- verbify 8y agoYou're more likely to die via guns if you yourself own a gun. This factoid is suggestive, but there are many complex factors at play (e.g. you're more likely to own a gun if you live in a shitty neighbourhood, suicide, and you're more likely to be involved in a shootout if you try to defend yourself). However it's flippant to say that there's no need for further math.
- pmyteh 8y ago
- panglott 8y agoThe problem with this article's defense of firearms for disaster preparedness is that firearms are among the least urgent disaster-preparedness items. If what people were really concerned about was disaster preparedness, the things they would obsess over would be flashlights, water storage and purification, a few weeks of food supplies, backup power sources, medical supplies, portable radios. Some preppers do spend time and energy thinking about this, it's true. 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.
- madengr 8y agoNo, handguns suck for self defense. That's why the carbine was invented. Though a handgun you can conceal, so it's handy.
- sullenpaladin 8y agoOriginally, the carbine was invented for cavalry use, since a shorter stock is easier to handle on horseback.
- LyndsySimon 8y agoI suspect the GP was referring to the transition from handguns to PDWs ("Personal Defense Weapons") in the military. This happened around 1940; the US Army began issuing the M1 Carbine to tank and vehicle crews, as it was much more effective than a .45 ACP handgun while being shorter, lighter, and easier to move around enclosed spaces than an M1 Garand (the issued rifle at that time). 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.
- cpsempek 8y agoCan the author justify the accuracy of estimating revolt using a Bernoulli process? At minimum he should provide sufficient reason to believe that the random variables he is using as components of his Bernoulli process (which are 1 if a revolt or revolution occurs in a given year and 0 otherwise) are independent and identically distributed Bernoulli trials. These assumptions in the situation he is describing seem unlikely, or at best hard to establish. The author is being deceptive by not providing some sort of warning stating that there are good reasons to believe this is a bad model and the probabilities computed are inaccurate (no confidence intervals provided for instance).
- omgbananas 8y agoInstead of being an interesting discussion about the mathematics of events worth preparing for, this is turning into a tired discussion about the merits of guns. I was hoping for the former, because if I wanted the latter, all I have to do is go on Facebook.
- mikeash 8y agoThat’s probably because, despite the title of the article, it’s almost entirely about guns.
- omgbananas 8y agoMentioned in opening because I imagine most people associate preppers with gun hoarders. 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.
- mikeash 8y agoThose were all background to talk about guns. Prepping (whether for disasters, revolutions, or zombocalypses) is about far more than just armaments, but there’s almost no discussion of how non-gun supplies factor into it.
- omgbananas 8y agoI reread the title and noticed it does have the word "gun" in it, so there is a little merit to your argument, but I stand by my belief it was just included because I think most people associate "prepping" with gun hoarders. The author clearly is more interested in the math than the guns here. 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.
- wcunning 8y agoI'd like to modify the statistical argument against the author's conclusion -- if we take his yearly probability of violent regime change in the US and take the yearly likelihood as i.i.d., then the probability that it will happen in the remainder of my statistically likely life is significantly reduced by it not having happened in the first 1/3rd. And every year that I procrastinate prepping, I'm more and more incentivized to skip it the next year. That's the math that the average person is unconsciously doing... 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.
- thaumaturgy 8y agoThis is the problem with extrapolating a linear trend from nonlinear data. I think few people would argue that the probability of revolution in the US in any given year is as high now as it was in say 1800. 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.
- jmcphers 8y agoI'm not sure I buy this statistical justification for gun ownership, because if you're into statistics then you owe it to yourself to look not only at the odds that you will need a gun at some point in your life (which is what this article argues) but also at the odds on what that gun will be used for while you own it (which this article totally ignores). 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. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/gun-deaths/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/gun-deaths/
- leephillips 8y agoThe probability of a civil insurrection can be roughly estimated, and is completely external to me. My decisions have no effect on that. The average rate of gun suicides have nothing to do with the probability that I will turn my gun on myself, which is zero. As the author says, if you think you're going to use your rifle for murder or suicide, you should get rid of it. 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.
- guntars 8y ago> the probability that I will turn my gun on myself, which is zero. 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.
- crankylinuxuser 8y agoNot trying to go all anti-2a.. 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.
- Clubber 8y ago1. 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.
- fwdpropaganda 8y agoThis isn't to address the argument, but I just wanted to point out that the guy writing this article chose to describe himself with "I think a lot."
- omgbananas 8y agoI suppose that's better than the alternative.
- CompanionCuuube 8y agoI'd take that over "I feel very strongly"
- splitrocket 8y agoThis only makes sense if they are willing to expend a similar, if not greater resources into pro-social, civilization strengthening activity. Otherwise it's barbaric. Literally a bet against civilization and your fellow human.
- LyndsySimon 8y agoI believe that a population that is proficient with firearms does in fact strengthen civilization. My experience is that it almost always results in the person seeing the world in a different, more individualist, way.
- splitrocket 8y agoFirearms alone do not a civilization make. 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.
- XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 8y ago> My experience is that it almost always results in the person seeing the world in a different, more individualist, way. It's unsubstantiated that the above actually strengthens civilization.
- InitialLastName 8y agoMy experience is that it's not the individualists who put any effort in to bettering the lives of others.
- maxerickson 8y agoTwo qualifying events in 340 years is a 0.5882% annual chance of nationwide violent revolution against the ruling government. 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.
- yongjik 8y ago> There’s the “tyranny can never happen here” bucket, which the Left has mostly abdicated in the wake of Trump winning after they called (and still call) Trump a tyrant. There’s the “you can’t fight the army with small arms” bucket, which is increasingly unsound given our ongoing decade and a half war with Afghani tribal goat herders. And there’s the “what the hell do you need an AR-15 for anyway?” bucket, which by its very language eschews a fundamental lack of understanding of what those people are thinking. 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.
- graedus 8y agoYou can organize and vote all you want, but being one person out of 320 million, sometimes things aren't going to go your way. It is not a bad idea to have a backup plan, even for unlikely events. So then what? "Retire to the Bahamas"? Assuming you have enough money laying around to do that, and don't have elderly or less-mobile family/friends, is running away to a foreign country where you have no connections really so preferable to having the option to defend yourself and your family/friends?
- ared38 8y agoCampbell is tremendously overestimating how much extreme prepping actually increases your chances of survival. Keeping a week or two of food, water, and energy is smart, but "zombie prepping" is useless: 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?
- omegaworks 8y ago>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. 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.
- saalweachter 8y agoThe US history with revolutions/rebellions is also weird - in both cases, it was the State-level of government rebelling against the parent government.
- TomMckenny 8y agoThis and the fact the when one side or the other comes to draft, a handgun won't stop them. 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.
- kasey_junk 8y agoTo me, the problem I have with 'preppers' or the 'gun lobby' is that the over extend their arguments past the point of reasonable-ness. 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.
- Density 8y agoPickup trucks aren't protected by the constitution. Individual militia arms are. 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.
- kasey_junk 8y agoWhy is it exactly that when people quote the 2nd ammendment they don't quote the whole thing. It's relatively short: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." 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.
- JKCalhoun 8y ago> There’s the “you can’t fight the army with small arms” bucket, which is increasingly unsound given our ongoing decade and a half war with Afghani tribal goat herders. 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.
- flyingfences 8y agoSmall arms will hold off the army if the army has a supply chain that isn't vulnerable. If the army's supplies originate from the contested territory then it becomes possible for the insurrection to sever that chain.
- dicroce 8y agoA few years back I became obsessed with securing a server (a previous one had been hacked). I noticed after a while that what started out reasonable (updating software, closing ports, etc)... had become unreasonable (writing custom code to detect changes to any file on the machine)... and I realized that each step normalized the next step in the sequence. The same thing is in effect with preppers. 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. :)
- skywhopper 8y agoLots of straw men, poor assumptions, bad analogies and more in this article. He starts with some weird dumb swipe at "the Left" for thinking tyranny is impossible. And ends with a something I've never heard of: a class of people "vehemently demanding the confiscation of rifles". He ticks off countless wars to prove that states of violence is common, but conflicts that reach the state of "war" are going to roll over you and your family and all your prepper gear whether you have one, ten or zero AR-15s. 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.
- YeGoblynQueenne 8y agoCool. I hadn't thought of risk calculation as a Bernoulli process. Hey, I know next to nothing about risk calculations! 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.
- cc439 8y ago>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. 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.
- mnm1 8y agoUntil the same bans are applied to police and military forces operating on US soil, this isn't even a discussion. It's incredible to me that even some gun owners do not realize that the primary purpose for the right to own guns is to keep the police and military at bay. I'm certain that without the huge number of guns, we would be in an even deeper police state than currently. A gun owner has no need to even unpack or assemble a gun in order to have a positive impact on society, namely keeping police somewhat in check through the possibility that they may use their gun should police get out of line. Our police and military are the likeliest enemies these days, but foreign forces invading cannot be completely ruled out, though extremely unlikely. Guns, and the ability to own them, are the only thing keeping us from complete tyranny. In that sense, the thousands of lives lost due to guns, while a tragedy, are not a reason to change our gun laws and never will be.
- simonh 8y agoWell of course many people in the US are worried about violence. They see frequent cases of mass shootings on TV, sometimes in places they know or places much like the place they live or work. They see the Police officers getting gunned down, or gunning unarmed people down on an almost daily basis. If I live in a society like that I’d be pretty paranoid too. 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?
- JBReefer 8y agoAgreed. The whole point of elections are not to elect perfect people - they are a revolution, every two years. Trump might not be perfect, but he's a lot better than people in Wisconsin having to rise up against people in California. It's likely that in 2020, the people of {Insert Swing State Here} will not violently murder the president, like they had to during the French Revolution, but will instead vote him out of office. 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.