Gun Digest Book of Survival Guns

^{While the author’s wife is totally blind, she is strong and can easily handle the carrying of equipment such as the Food Insurance Essentials Two Week Kit.}

CHAPTER TWO Sheltering in Place vs. Bugging Out

What plan should you be working on, sheltering in place, bugging out, or a mixture of both?

The answer depends on what the real estate agents always say is important—location, location, location. Simply put, is your home someplace you would want to get to or away from? The answer to that requires an equally simple set of additional questions: Where do you live? Is your home in the middle of a city? Is the area already high crime? Who are your neighbors? How aware of your neighborhood are outside people, i.e., is it a high-value area that might provide the best return for the least amount of work by marauders?

Next, ask if your home and property can be reasonably defended for a long period of time. Do you have the ability to harden any area of your house? Is there any chance your utility services or any other aspect of modern comfort, safety, and convenience will remain intact, even if it is through your own power generation? Finally, is your home a place you cannot leave due to an invalid family member or some other such limiting condition? If your answers to these and other questions point to relocating to a different piece of real estate rather than staying in place, then you will need to be focused on being able to take as many essential items with you as you can, maybe at a moment’s notice, leaving behind only non-essential, replaceable items of little survival value.

^{Being able to service your firearm is hugely important. This is especially true with AR systems, which need more care, cleaning, and attention than, say, an AK-type weapon or other piston-operated rifle systems. That’s something to consider when you have room for only a select number of tools and you need to get out of Dodge in a hurry. You can only take so much with you.}

^{You can’t have too much coverage of any position when the balloon has gone up. Each person in this group has an area of responsibility to provide overwatch of, thus protecting their lead point people as they attempt to accomplish their mission of prying open abandoned buildings in search of food and other supplies.}

When Is It Time to Go and Where?

Hopefully, some of you have already looked ahead, or thought ahead, and have realized that living in a trendy urban area in the midst of or proximate to a big city with major crime problems isn’t the best of ideas. Cops and firemen who regularly deal with the dregs of society have made it a long-standing tradition to live and keep their families as far away from the urban mess as possible. In the rural area in which I live, there are firefighters and cops from both the nearby major urban police department, as well as from many of the now decayed suburban municipalities surrounding the main urban center that used to be considered safe. In my neck of the woods, an average cop with any time under their belt has dreamed of, and sometimes managed to obtain, a “cabin in the woods” on a few acres of defensible land. Those of us who have made this choice are already ahead of the game and are not trying to work our way out of a hole. Cops in particular have been moving out and away from their jurisdictions for the 32 years I have been a cop, but so, too, have many firefighters. Recently, more and more of those cops who have been moving “out” have been doing so not just to keep their families away from day to day criminal activity and other undesirable conditions, but to find a location from which they may be able to withstand a larger societal collapse. This is an entirely new twist on the practice.

If you are hemmed into living in a location near large centers of our population (the epicenters of civil unrest), and you are living in a home that is part of a shared building, such as an apartment or other multi-unit, multi-family condo structure, or a rehabbed or converted factory or warehouse, you will be lucky to just make it out of your unit in one piece. In those kinds of living spaces, the chance of being able to defend yourself against a large number of desperate neighbors or interlopers for any long-term period is very poor, since you cannot protect all sides of your living area or even have visibility on all sides, due to the common-wall construction. If you live in these types of structures, your plan should be for you to leave at the first sign of trouble and know where you are going to go via the safest route.

You Can’t Take It with You

This means having to “bug-out” (I hate that term, it sounds silly and overused, and, yes, I know it originated as a military term), or at least having emergency evacuation gear at the ready. I won’t go into what all should be in the kit in detail, as that is the purview of other publications, including those by Gun Digest. However, I will say that you can’t take everything with you! Your gear load is going to be limited by what you can carry on your person or to your vehicle. If you have able-bodied family members or trusted friends and are using multiple vehicles, you can and will need to take more stuff. Regardless, if you are carrying gear to your vehicle, you want to try and carry everything you need out in one trip. That may be all the chance you get, and you need to get it right on the first attempt to limit your exposure to attack. There will be things you will have to leave behind, things that can be replaced, and things that are no use to you in the ugly, grim, and dark time that you are facing.

^{Now is the time to be and stay prepared. This includes while vacationing, particularly when you travel by vehicle. This Food Insurance emergency kit should be packed in your vehicle’s trunk when you’re on the go. Such a kit can get you through being stranded in a remote location while you either wait for help or set out to search for it.}

While I have lived by a rule of life that says you can’t own too many guns—my wife’s opinion non-withstanding, as she says you actually can have too many—when it comes down to it, what are you going to do with that big collection once you need to leave? Remember, your first priority is that you have food, clothing, and water! You won’t have room to pack it all, not even all your precious guns, unless you are distributing them to your friends and members of your team for use. You are going to have to leave some of them behind in the best fireproof safe you have or seal them in airtight containers and bury them in a secret location in the event you return later. (You don’t want your weapons falling in to the hands of those who may harm you with them later.) So think about what you need to take with you and why you need it. Try to select weapons that can perform at multiple levels, in other words, weapons that are effective at close, medium, and extended ranges. If you must leave a couple behind, fine, but secure or disable them or both. The same goes with ammo and other ancillary supplies.