Thought for the day: “A person isn’t who they are during the last conversation you had with them – they’re who they’ve been throughout your whole relationship.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke
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It’s a trope of virtually every post apocalyptic story: The townies come together to battle an outside force of bad guys. Its in virtually every. Single. Story.

So, if youre going to rally the townies, you’d want those townies to be like-minded individuals who are all on the same page. What are the odds of that? Well, you can stack the odds by stocking the town: start your own town:

But if you don’t love the way the towns and cities in your neck of the woods operate, you might be able to haul off and start your own. In fact, the United States is pretty much the only place on the planet where this is still generally possible to do, because we have a lot of what’s known as “unincorporated land,” or land that isn’t part of an established town or city (communities that spring up when people build homes on this land are called, unsurprisingly, unincorporated communities). It’s not necessarily an easy process, really, but if you want to establish your own brand-new town, you can probably pull it off.

Montana is a little tricky. The joke used to be that all you needed to b a town here was a bar and a Napa dealership. In actuality, it appears you need 300 like-minded voters and some sort of postal presence (which ,as I read, can be a Mailbox etc or UPS store that offers mailboxes).

Just to carry the mental exercise further, if you were to make your own town, I wonder if you could then create your own police force, automatically deputize every citizen, and thereby give them legal access to affordable post-dealer LE-only machineguns and heavier weapons. You know, a couple MAG58’s at the town entrance, MP5’s for everybody, maybe a quad-50 on a city gun truck for quick deployment.

If you start your own town, let me know. I could use a little pied-à-terre in such a place.

My boss is a fella from Tennessee. He’s all about college football and southern cooking. He carries a Sig P365SAS in his briefcase. I got him some 9mm for his birthday last month. He knows I like to shoot and am a gun guy. We get along.

He’s strolling through the office the other day and most of us are standing in the hallway outside our offices jawboning about nothing important. He says, “People, this thing in the Mideast has me worried. I know we’re not gonna see anything here in our little chunk of Montana but if you see someone weird out in the parking lot waving an AK, please notify someone.”

The next day, as I was getting him to sign some checks, he told me that he assumes I carry or have a gun at work (I do, but I don’t let anyone know…and I did not confirm or deny his assertion.) He said that he’s going to start carrying his pistol in his pocket rather than his briefcase because he “doesn’t like the way things are looking.”

And that’s, oddly, the sentiment that seems to be going around these days in my circles. Most people I know keep a pistol in the console of their vehicle. Maybe a bolt action rifle behind the seat. To a man, all of them have upgraded to something a little less Fudd and a lot more Dredd.

Oh, sure, this little quiet pocket of Montana isn’t exactly known for its Middle Eastern community, although being a college town you do get people from all over, but it is orders of magnitude unlikely that anything more dramatic than some graffiti on a synagogue (yeah, we have a couple) will occur.

Do I genuinely believe that some wanna-be jihadist will run through WalMart with an AK trying to buy himself some cred? I do not. Do I believe that some stupid hipster college kid who has spent too much time on Democratic Underground wiil throw a molotov cocktail at the local power transformers in the name of oppressed people somewhere? Eh…possibly, but unlikely. Do I believe that there will be the possibility of some homeless wastrel with a head full of bad wiring and a grudge might get belligerent when one of the girls in the office shoos him away from the garbage cans? Absolutely.

But whether its wanna-be jihadists with Ak’s or homeless crazy people with steak knives, there’s a definite vibe going on these days…and if my boss feels that his employees being discreetly armed is a good thing, who am I to judge?

Now, obviously there’s more to this than just wink-and-a-nod when the boss asks if I’m carrying a gun. As the president of the company it is a liability nightmare for him to condone, let alone encourage, employees to have Bring Your Gun To Work Day. But, he can publish something in the employee handbook clearly stating that we have an official ‘no weapons’ policy, and we can discreetly ignore it with tacit, unstated, unwritten approval. Dont ask, dont tell. Works for me.

Today he mentioned getting together with me, his 2nd in command, and my direct boss to form a ‘Security Committee’ to look at installing new locks and establishing protocols for evacuation and things like that. I like where his head is at. The trick will be to be helpful without tipping my hat too much about my sooper secret squirrel life as Commander Zero.

I had a freight order dropped off the other day from Mountain House. Its hard to be subtle when the guy unloading the truck is dropping off a four-foot tall pallet of freeze drieds, all marked MOUNTAIN HOUSE in big letters. So, I’m there watchng him lower the liftgate with the pallet jack full of goodies on it.

Him: So thats a lot of backpacking food. What are you doing with it.

Me, no longer even pretending: Paranoid survivalist

Him: Thats not paranoid. I’ve got a garage full of this stuff. Did you see on the news that….

And that is exactly how you meet other like-minded individuals.

I have a friend of mine whome I’ve known for about…mmmmm…ten years or so. When I first met him he was not a survivalist. He worked in an industry that certainly was frequented by my people, but he was not one of them. Over the years we’d chit chat about things like guns, food, precious metals, etc. But he was very much a ‘feet on the ground’ kinda guy. But after years of being exposed to people like me he has become a card-carrying member of the tribe. He texts me to show off when he gets cases of .223 and he has bought freeze-drieds and Magpul mags from me a half dozen times now.

In my world, I don’t really know anyone who isn’t some shade of survivalist.