A comment on the previous post about the perceived need these days to be more than a little armed at all times….specifically, regarding vehicles:

 If gear or extra guns must be shed, abandoned or cached away from home base in an incident so be it. That excess cargo kit in vehicles should be sacrificial extra inventory items any way. How much is your life worth? It may be stolen from vehicles, the vehicle stolen, or the vehicle totaled out or torched in some scenarios that are indeed possible. It is deadly serious out there, so equip yourself to at least stand a chance.

This ties into something I’ve always found interesting when it comes to survivalism – the notion that ‘just in case’ gear, or gear that you stash away for an unlikely-but-possible emergency can be several orders of magnitude beneath your ‘primary’ gear in terms of quality.

Let’s say that you decide you’re gonna ride out the apocalypse with your Daniel Defense AR, a tricked out Glock, and maybe a sweetly set up Rem 870. But you figure that you should have a stash somewhere else ‘just in case’. And, more often than not, that same person stocks their ‘backup stash’ with a Makarov, an SKS, and whatever extra shotgun they have laying around.

I’ve mentioned this before but heres the crux of things – if you need to resort to your hideaway stash becase you can’t get to your primary gear, then its safe to assume that your life has just taken a turn for the spectacularly ungood, agreed? So, in that time of (literally) existential crisis doesn’t it seem to make sense that you would want the best gear you can have?

Or, put another way, assuming the guns listed above, you show up at Uncle Steve’s cabin, tear up the floorboards, find your Pelican case of hideout gear, and throw the lid open. Would you rather your DD AR and Glock was in that case or would you rather it was an SKS and a Mak?

When people skydive, do you think their backup ‘chute is of lesser quality and construction than their primary ‘chute? When people scuba dive, do you think the respirator and tank that are carried for emergencies are made to a markedly lesser quality?

This is why, personally, I spend the money on such a heavy layer of redundancies. I can take a good Glock 17, a quality AR, and a reliable 870, tuck them into a Pelican case and stick it away in a hideyhole somewhere ‘just in case’ and be just as well armed with that set up as I would be as if I hadn’t had to resort to my stash. And I can do that several times. Sure, stash one and two may never get used, but when its 3am on a dark rainy night and I’m frantically pulling that Pelican case out from under the woodpile while looking over my shoulder for the headlights that I’ve been trying to avoid….that third stash will be worth the expense of the other two.

And this doesn’t just apply to guns. Think about the stuff you keep in your vehicle. I know people who, when they wear out a pair of boots, throw them in the vehicle for emergencies. Dude, an emergency is when youre gonna want a pair of good boots…not ratted out old ones with blown stictching, split seams, and floppy soles.

Your backup gear should be of the same ‘tier’ as your primary gear. Is that expensive? Heck yes. But it’ll seem dirt cheap if you ever need to use it.  Are there exceptions? Maybe. If your primary setup is a SCAR and a Zev Glock you could probably get by with an AR and a regular Glock, for example. But there is not going to be an award given to the person who made it through the apocalypse with the least expensive gear. I have no doubt that a person could make do with bleached-out two-liter pop bottles to store their water in, a ChinaSport 3-9x on their .22, and a Harbor Freight generator. Maybe. But if you didn’t have to, why would you? Don’t you want to give yourself every possible advantage at a time when you’re desperately going to need them?

As the commenter pointed out, yes, you may wind up sacrificing your gear for some reason. And thats gonna suck. But up until that point, you will have a tremendous advantage in your favor.

Everything is sacrificial when it comes to survivalism. Yes you paid $3k for that rifle. But if you go through that checkpoint and you get caught with it you may wind up in jail cell as the world collapses around you. So out the window at 45 mph it goes. It hurts, yes…but look at whats more important.

We purchase things all the time, never use them, and consider it money well spent. Take homeowners insurance for example. If you pay the insurance for 30 years and your house never burns down, was it a waste of money? No, it was not. For those thirty years you transferred your risk to someone else. For those thirty years you were effectively bulletproof if something happened to your house. So, no, not a waste of money. Same thing with any gear you wind up having to ditch or never get to use – it bought you a level of safety and security by its very existence. Worth the expense.

So do it right the first time and get back-up gear as good as your ‘main’ gear. Or if thats really too painful, and I know it can be, get the next step down. But for the love of Crom, don’t just skip the second- and third-best options and sink straight to the Mosins and HiPoints. Scared and desperate future you will thank you for it.

It occurs to me that I’ve always found it a little…skewed? …that when it comes to things like a ‘Get Home Bag’ or other I’m-away-from-my-main-gear kits, the first emphasis is almost always on weapons. I’ve known people who have gotten stuck in Manhattan and had to walk off the island during 9/11, or been in an earthquake that brought things to a halt, or any one of a dozen similar scenarios. In almost all of them , the thing that made the most difference was comfortable shoes to walk in and water to drink. Nowhere in there did anyone say that the real gamechanger was having a pistol or carbine tucked away in their gear. (In fact, in virtually all the scenarios people have told me that they were in, being visibly armed would have been a big problem what with all the cops and other folks running around.)

I suppose, fairly, that the circumstances of your stranding have a lot to do with whether you’re need for a firearm is higher or lower. If you’re walking three miles home through the city because you’re alternator died it’s not as high a need as if you have to walk three miles through the city because the power grid just went down and night is falling fast.

Thats not to say that those things aren’t important, but rather that their usage in a crisis is almost nil. Yeah you should have them, but you’ll wind up using 90% of your other gear before it comes time to use that 10% that goes bang. Usually.

But when I think about the situations where I’m away from base, even in this current (mostly) non-EOTWAWKI period, my concerns drift towards the potential for violent encounters. There are far too many deranged homeless people, drug-influenced crazies, politically motivated thugs (‘peaceful protesters’) and just general whackadoodles out there for me to feel comfortable going anywhere these days without some sort of means to protect myself. And in a real crisis, the kind where civilization is hanging by a thread, being on foot with a backpack of useful gear just means that you’re an epic loot drop for anyone who thinks you’re ‘easy pickings’.

I’m starting to think that the real-world has finally caught up to the level of risk and threat the we always kind of imagined it was. Twenty years ago I was far less likely to be subject of a home invasion, mugging, armed robbery, or violent crime than now. Heck, there was a period of years where I never even bothered locking my door. But, for better or worse, it seems like the times have changed to the point that not having a weapon of some sort in any type of ‘survival kit’ or ‘bail out bag’ is just poor planning.

I’ve always kept a G19, holster, and a couple mags in my Bag O’ Tricks ™ just in case….and one of the reasons I got the Ruger PC takedown carbines (or the PC Charger) was specifically for toting around in my bag. It’s just interesting that the things that seemed a little ‘out there’ or ‘overkill’ a few years ago seem like reasonable prudent measures no