[ared38]

Campbell 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?

[ticviking]

> Is an entire continent, and reducing its 1.2 billion inhabitants to "where to begin" is incredibly insulting to their individual histories and experiences.

Acknowledging that they aren't currently equipped to adequately cover this in depth is insulting?

You also seem to be ignoring the premise that being armed is a key part of these plans. The goal isn't just to be food secure, it is to prevent being victimized while the crisis is ongoing or you escape the crisis.

[ared38]

> Acknowledging that they aren't currently equipped to adequately cover this in depth is insulting?

Except he doesn't acknowledge ignorance, he plows ahead and puts the entire continent in the same category as Syria and Afganistan. Less than 2% of Africans live in the countries he does deign to mention.

> You also seem to be ignoring the premise that being armed is a key part of these plans.

Good luck singlehandedly fighting off the Venezuelan/Russian/Union/rebel army when they come to appropriate your assets. There's a reason insurgents use hit-and-run tactics, they'd be slaughtered in a pitched battle.

[wcarron]

I don't think you're discussing the same threat model as the author. You're talking about fighting an army. He's talking about other dangerous, non-military people (e.g. Another gang of survivors, who happen to have guns while you just have food)

To be fair, military presence is certainly a problematic situation, but it seems more likely you'd encounter other, uh, less-than-savory people out there in an apocalyptic scenario, who are more likely to be dangerous to you than military personnel.

[slowhand09]

I think he lumped African countries for convenience. I have a friend living in Kampala for 30 yrs. He takes his family to stay on a boat in Lake Victoria for a month during any major election period. Or leaves the country. The authors Syria observation is a perfect example. The major points are simple. The benefits of firearm ownership among those who consider themselves able to defend their family/property for a short time outweighs any negatives they are likely to experience.

[saalweachter]

The US history with revolutions/rebellions is also weird - in both cases, it was the State-level of government rebelling against the parent government.

[omegaworks]

>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.

[TomMckenny]

This 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.

[ticviking]

> This and the fact the when one side or the other comes to draft, a handgun won't stop them. The subtitle of the piece is literally, "who needs an AR-15 anyway." You're kind of ignoring the point that the idea of being heavily armed is about having more than a single gun for home defense.

> 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.

I recall a series of results recently indicating that democracies tend to have outcomes favored by the elites.[1] This suggests that the democracy isn't functioning and some degree of skepticism and activism is warrented.

> 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.

I am bewildered by many customs of other cultures, and confused what the decidedly odd US gun culture has to do with the dissatisfaction people have with their system of governance and feelings of powerlessness?

[1] - https://journalistsresource.org/studies/politics/finance-lob...

[cryptonector]

Democracy is, after all, the worst possible form of goverment[+].

[+] But for all the others.

(Churchill paraphrase.)

[cryptonector]

I'm not sure what "US gun culture has to do with the dissatisfaction people have with their system of governance and feelings of powerlessness", or that it matters.

Near as I can tell you have: a) people who believe they should exercise their rights in order to not lose them, b) people who believe having a gun or three will better help them if ever they are burgled while at home, c) people who believe that an armed society is a polite society, d) people who believe that an armed society is less likely to become tyrannical, e) preppers, f) hunters/sportspeople... These groups/motivations often overlap. You only need one of these motivations to convince you to own a firearm, but many people will be swayed by just one of these. It seems every week we see a news item about a burglar repulsed by an armed homeowner, for example. And recall that the plaintiffs in Heller (the case that established that there really is a second amendment right to have firearms) were gay people in D.C. who felt unsafe. And recall that during the Civil Rights era (and before! going back all the way to Reconstruction) many black people felt they needed to be armed to resist lynchings (were they wrong?).

I didn't list "dissatisfaction people have with their system of governance and feelings of powerlessness" because, as far as I can see, that's not a common reason for people arming themselves. Fear of tyrannical government is one reason people arm themselves, but I wouldn't say that's a feeling of powerlessness, or of dissatisfaction with government -- it's not at all incompatible with feeling empowered and satisfied with one's government.

It is true though, I think, that if push came to shove, the fact that people are armed wouldn't be likely to make much difference to a determined tyrannical government that can mobilize (and motivate) modern military and/or police forces against rebels. But it sure would be easier for a tyrannical government to have a disarmed population. It's not for nothing that tyrants generally disarm their populations (Hitler, for example, did this). Thus having a well-armed population functions as a canary in the coal mine: if and when the would-be tyrants decide to confiscate firearms, that's when you might start thinking about hopping on a plane to some other place for a while. As a corollary, if the U.S. (federal and/or state) governments don't go confiscating peoples' guns, many people will not think them tyrannical.

For me, as long as we have free, orderly, timely, and clean elections, and as long as the state espionage machinery is not used to twist elected officials' arms, then we do not have a tyranny that cannot be corrected at the next election day. One of the most enduring parts of the American Constitution is that it focuses on process and that those constitutional provisions establishing process are the ones that have least been ignored, maligned, or violated by the institutions it provides for -- the U.S. Constitution is a work of genius, and this multi-century resiliency (while also being flexible enough to be amended, and with a Supreme Court that has enough power to fill in the blanks) is something to behold.

The Constitution is ultimately the biggest reason that the American system is stable, not that the people are armed, but I'm not at all convinced that the people being armed has no role in this, for there is another reason for American stability: its great decentralization and large geographic area. How would one mount a coup in the U.S.? I don't see how. In many countries you see the military (say) take over TV and radio stations, newspapers, shut down the Internet or otherwise impose severe controls on it, and park tanks at key intersections in key cities, and then it's all over. But in the U.S., if someone tried this, they might control one, or maybe two cities, but the rest of the country could easily refuse to go along -- how would one make sure 50 states go along when they all have national guard units, and some even separate militaries as well? It would require a civil war, and no one in the U.S. wants a civil war. In a civil war, the fact that so many civilians are armed would definitely count for something, thus making a coup even less likely.

IMO.