Preparing for election season and beyond

As I've said elsewhere, I think we're likely to encounter many disruptions to our routine as the elections draw nearer.  Riots and protests will interfere with daily life in many cities, as will looting mobs intent on stealing whatever they can while police are preoccupied with legal and political issues.  At the same time, COVID-19 and other disrupting factors are already interfering with supplies to distributors and retailers, making many of the things we need harder to find and more expensive.

I'd like to suggest a few resources to help plan around these realities, over and above those that have already been discussed in these pages.  These links will give you additional food for thought, and perhaps some ideas that will be useful.

First, The Organic Prepper has an excellent article titled "The 7 Pillars of Urban Preparedness".  It's a very useful overview of what it means to be prepared, and the basic steps we need to take in each area.  The "pillars" are water, shelter, fire, food, signaling/communication, medical/hygiene, and personal safety.  Highly recommended.

Mr. B., who blogs at In The Middle Of The Right, offers his thoughts on areas of preparedness to consider in two articles (so far):

• Remember the shortages? (Prepping for the election part 1)
• Planning for unrest Part 2

Short, pithy ideas that will help you re-evaluate your current situation.

Come And Make It, a Philippines blogger, has a useful idea about preserving dry goods in the freezer, to extend their useful life and keep pests out of them.  I hadn't considered that, but he makes a lot of sense.

Moving on to personal defense and protection, Michael Bane has a sobering overview of the current climate and what it implies for our security.  He calls it "Staying Alive in the Brave New World".

Maybe if we all take a deep breath, calm down and relax, we’ll come through this. But maybe not. “Maybe” is a very big word. As we have said on THE BEST DEFENSE, self-defense is always a compromise, a balance of risk/reward. If we apply that same thinking to our current situation, we see the fallacy in “relax.” If we relax and the current crisis just fades away, everything is cool. If we relax and are, in fact, wrong, we lose the country, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the vote, our guns and maybe even our lives. The teeter-totter is wildly weighted on only one end.

SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, given those assumptions, what do we need to know as we face the Brave New World? I have been thinking about that a lot and talking to my team, who I believe are the best in the world at what they do. If we immediately move down to a “tactical,” as opposed to “strategic” level, here are some thoughts.

In particular, note his first point:

If you are not armed all the time, you are a fool. The time for fond illusions of safety has passed.

There's more at the link.

Massad Ayoob is well-known to many readers of this blog.  I've taken three courses from him, and I'll offer an excerpt from his book "Deadly Force:  Understanding Your Right to Self Defense" in my "Saturday Snippet" feature tomorrow morning.  He recently gave an interview to the Armed Citizen's Legal Defense Network, titled "Defense Against Mobs", that I think is one of the best overviews of our current urban unrest and how to deal with it.  Here's a brief excerpt from a long and very informative article.

What we are seeing ... is most aptly described by a friend of mine who is a very street-wise police supervisor in a major, high crime city. He said ... the mob is not working with one mind, one purpose and one target. What we have is the Antifa types and the opportunistic looters basically seeding themselves in among those I would call the legitimate protesters–the people who are there in good conscience and good faith, to cause no physical harm to anyone and to voice what they believe is a very important concern.

My friend said the crowd today is not a mob; the crowd today is an ocean in which the predators swim, hide and are essentially effecting camouflage. They emerge out of the ocean to set fires to buildings, to violently assault people, and then to melt back into the protection of the crowd. They are using the crowd in the same way that Saddam Hussein used human shields: taking women and children and settling them in camps surrounding all the military bases during the Iraq war when he was afraid the Americans would obliterate his military bases.

That changes things entirely in the 2020 riot situations.

. . .

You don’t know who’s who! You are going to have to be really careful ... What you have got here are sharks that swam out of the ocean and there might be a little wave of good-faith protestors coming out of that ocean trying to pull the sharks off of you. You don’t know for sure. Target selection and target determination are going to be absolutely critical.

There's much more at the link, and it's all worthwhile reading.

I've written many articles in these pages on related subjects that you may also find useful.  You'll find some listed in the sidebar.

Peter