This guy is your enemy.   (During the Collapse, that is.)

He doesn’t seem like it; in fact, he looks kind of wimpy.  He’s not a jack-booted Homeland Security trooper breaking down your door to take your guns, so he can’t be a threat, right?

Wrong.  Dead wrong.  He’s a bigger threat to most of you than the government.

Of course the government will be a threat, especially in urban areas where they will congregate and hold onto power in their fiefdoms.  Gangs will also be a threat (more on that in Part 2 of this series).  My point is that the guy pictured above – the unprepared neighbor – is the one most likely to actually try to take your stuff and, if neccessary, hurt you and your family.

Who is this guy and why is he a threat?

He’s the guy who lives next to you.  Just an average guy.  Maybe you even gently tried to bring up the topic of prepping with him.  He looked at you like you were from Mars and said, a little sarcastcially, “Oh, like those people on Doomsday Preppers?”  Being a good (feminized) male in the suburbs, he thought preppers were a bunch of right-wing crazies who just had some weird fetish about (icky, icky) guns.  He had plenty of opportunities to prepare but spent his time and money on concerts, trendy clothes, and whatever else most of America thinks is more important than taking care of their families in a crisis.

Then the Collapse hits.  Very soon his high-end grocery store is out of goat cheese and the police are no longer functioning.  After the shock and total disbelief wears off, he is terrified.  Not just scared, but lose-your-mind hysterical.  He’s been awake for several days because of all the gunfire he’s hearing, the baby has been crying, and his wife has been screaming at him for hours to “do something!”  (This, of course, is a story in itself because she was the one who told him he can’t have a gun like Todd and Chloe in the 299 Days book series.)  Your unprepared neighbor is not thinking rationally.  He’s desperate.  Studies show that after about 72 hours without food, people – even “nice” ones – will do horrible things to feed themselves and their families.  He needs to shut her up, get some food, and feel safe.  He’ll do anything to make that happen.  Anything.

He remembers that conversation he had with you about “having a little bit of food in case the power goes out during the next ice storm.”  He remembers seeing you putting a gun into your car that day you went to the shooting range.  It all becomes “clear” to him: You need to give him food and a gun.  It’s only fair.  Besides, he tries to reassure himself, you are a nice guy.  You’ll help.

He walks over to your place.  He’s nervous and scared of what he’ll do.  He politely knocks on your door.  You don’t know it’s him so you don’t answer – home invasions are happening everywhere and the last thing you want to do is let anyone in.

The knocking gets louder.  Then even louder; by now, it’s pounding.  Who ever it is banging on your door is angry.

Finally, you recognize his voice.

Should you let him in?

How you answer this is a personal choice and depends on the circumstances.  However, my point is that you must recognize this guy for what he is: your enemy.  That’s kind of harsh, but here’s why.

You can’t solve his problem.

You can’t feed him and his family for the next few months or even years or guard his place all night instead of guarding your own.  You just can’t.  That was HIS job and he failed miserably.  He feels humiliated that he didn’t take care of his family – and his wife won’t stop yelling at him.  You are the reason (in his mind) that his problem isn’t getting solved.  So, instead of you being able to solve his problem, you ARE his problem.

Whether or not you let him in and give him a little food, he will start to talk to all the other neighbors who, of course, are not prepared either.  They will decide that you’re a “hoarder.”  Maybe the authorities are out looking for “hoarders” or “illegal guns” and one of the neighbors suggests that they turn you in.  You get the picture.  This guy is your enemy.

What can you do?  Two things.

First, recognize that a seemingly harmless guy like this will, indeed, be your enemy.  Recognizing this is the first – and biggest – step in successfully navigating this problem.

Second, get the hell out of that neighborhood at the first sign of the Collapse.

 

Consider this scenario: During the Collapse, you need some antibiotics for your sick child and have some ammunition to trade.  You need to do more than just have the ammunition on hand to trade – you need to know how to go to the post-Collapse trading post and get the deal done.  Without getting killed.

People have been trading for things they need for thousands of years.  Trading will certainly happen after the Collapse – in fact, trading will be huge because most of the “normal” stores won’t be operating.  Count on it: You will be shopping at a trading post in the future.

So prepare for it now.

There are three levels of preparing for post-Collapse trading: getting stuff, being mentally prepared for the rough trading post, and then perhaps running a trading post of your own as a merchant or security contractor.

The first level is getting a bunch of stuff that people will want so you have things to trade.  Here is a good article on 40 things that are cheap now but will be immensely valuable during the Collapse.  Many of you have already done this, though.  You have stuff to sell, but now you need to move up to the next level – which is how to shop without getting killed.

The second level is mentally preparing for shopping in a trading post which will probably look more like a backwoods logger bar than a shopping mall.  You need to get mentally ready for how different it will be from your current peaceful world.  You see, most of us don’t hang out with potentially dangerous people so we don’t know how to carry ourselves in these situations.  I’m an exception to this.  For the past 30 years or so, I have been lucky to go to tough-as-nails logger bars with the real Steve Briggs when I visit my home town.  I understand how these places work.  You don’t look at anyone else’s woman, you apologize when you bump into someone, and you ignore drunks who want to fight (unless they insult your woman – and you beat the shit out of them if they touch her).  (This song illustrates the code of conduct I’m talking about.)  A logger bar is how a trading post will be.

Only worse.  You need to be mentally prepared for the fact that thieves will be killed – very brutally.  There may be some unsavory things for sale.   A great introduction to life at a post-Collapse trading post is from the TV show Jericho.  Watch here at 14:53 – 17:00, 19:50 – 25:33, 28:47 – 32:33, and 34:52 – 35:40.  Here’s my point: You need to confidently walk into that trading post, quietly do your business, and leave as fast as you can.  There will be, especially at the beginning of the Collapse, lots of people who yell about “fair prices” or insist on paying with a credit card.  Don’t be one of those people.

The third level, and the one most people haven’t thought about, is operating a trading post of your own.  You might be the merchant or the security protecting the establishment.  Lots of you reading this have tons of guns and some training.  You’d make excellent security contractors.  You’d be paid a portion of the sales, which is how you could feed your family.  You could make sure the place operates honorably instead of like a giant garage sale of drugs and prostitution.  (And you could kill anyone who tries to bring women or – God forbid, children – in for sale.)  You’ll need to have sufficient firepower to fight off the gangs that will try to muscle in on your trading post.  But start thinking about this now.

Before you have to.

This three-minute video of a bunch of modern wussy males illustrates perfectly what most “enlightened” Americans think in our feminized culture: there should be no differences between men and women.

I strongly disagree for two reasons.  One is life-or-death.  One is quality of life.  Those are pretty big deals.

First, the life-and-death reason. When the Collapse hits, trying to pretend men and women are not different will get people KILLED and RAPED.  All those feminized males out there will assume the gangs roaming around freely (because the cops are gone) will treat women with the same respect the hipsters have for women.  Wrong.  Deadly and tragically wrong.

How can “smart” people like the well educated hipsters be so wrong?  Easy.  All these upper-income, sheltered, weak males have no idea what bad people are like – they’ve never met any in their nice subdivisions or hip urban apartments.  Worse yet, these brainwashed wusses actually think the only bad male behavior in the entire world is done by “rednecks.”  Like in the (icky, icky) South.  The feminized males think the only thing keeping women down is traditional American male values.  (Traditional men are actually great for women, but that’s a long blog post for another day.)

Here’s another practical way that wussified thinking will get people killed and hurt after the Collapse: the fear of being “macho.”  A fair number of modern males (I can’t call them “men”) will feel guilty or weird about defending women.  That’s acting “macho,” which is the absolute worst thing a wussified male can do.  During the Collapse, feminized males will hesitate to raise their voices – let alone raise an (icky, icky) gun – to defend women.  The gangs will laugh, kill the men, and rape the women.

The second reason I disagree with the idea that men and women aren’t different is quality of life – for both men and women.  (This applies now, before the Collapse, but will also apply during the Collapse.)  Most men want to be men and most women want to be women.  In general, men like to be masculine and women like to be feminine.  It took decades of public school and TV sit coms to drive this (natural) way of thinking out of us.  But, when no one is looking, most men like a good steak.  And most women, when no one is looking, like to bake cookies.  I mean, cookies are delicious.  I rest my case.

Trust me: Men and women are much, much happier in a relationship when each one can act like his or her gender.  Ask a woman who unsuccessfully nagged her husband but then gave up and let him go be a man – life is better in the house.  Most men will treat a woman like a queen when she treats him well.  Both are happier (and the sex is better!  For both of them!)

Oh, and for anyone thinking I’m some caveman who thinks women are inferior, I note that my wife is a doctor.  She’s very tough and very smart, and can do tons of things I can’t do.  And that’s OK.  I’m a man and can do tons of things she can’t do.  You see the picture?  Men and women are different.   And that’s OK.

Wow.  I didn’t think I’d have this strong of a reaction, but I did.  The Gun Dudes Podcast is ending after seven years.

I was thinking: It’s just a podcast.  Am I seriously saddened by this?  Yes.  Big time.  Here’s why.

I changed.  Entirely.  Starting in 2008, I went from a fat suburban go-along, get-along sheeple “male” (not man) to what I am today.  When my transformation started seven years ago, I simultaneously started listening to this podcast done by three UPS drivers in Salt Lake City who talked about guns and joked around.  The Gun Dudes.  They were hilarious.

They were just like me.  I instantly “knew” them just by listening to them.

Over the last seven years, the Gun Dudes did what I did: We grew.  We changed (for the better).  We became “famous” (in our little world, that is).  We became what we wanted to become.  That’s an amazing sentence, so I’ll repeat it: We became what we wanted to become.  We transformed together and at the same time – 2008 to the present.  What a ride.

Once I had an amazing conversation with the lead Gun Dude, Carl.  We were talking about how much time the books (in my case) and the podcast (in his case) take and the effect it has on our families.  Then one of us (I forget who) said, “Not everyone will understand this but: We have so many cool things we can do with our time that it’s really hard to do normal stuff, stuff we should probably do.  We have cool people to know, cool stuff to do.  Gun classes.  Meeting Massad Ayoob.  Going to SHOT Show.  Shooting with Special Forces guys.  Talking to Jack Spirko.  We never expected any of this.  This is a good problem to have.”  Very true, Carl.  Very true.

Probably the most profound effect the Gun Dudes had on me was confidence.  Sounds weird, I know: confidence from a podcast?  But when I was (painfully) transitioning from suburban softie to a gun guy, I wondered if there was something “weird” about me.  The Gun Dudes, episode after episode, showed me that us gun guys are funny and laid back.  We’re just normal dudes who like guns; nothing weird about that.  It was amazingly comforting.

Here are couple of my Gun Dudes memories that will make you smile.

I’ll never forget the first time the Gun Dudes read one of my emails on the air in 2009.  It was way before I wrote the books.  I couldn’t believe that “celebrities” read my email.

The next amazing Gun Dudes memory I have is also from before I wrote the books.  I emailed them and told them that I was thinking about writing a novel and they were in it.  (They are: the Stan, Carl, Tom, and Travis characters who help Special Forces Ted move the equipment out to Marion Farm.)  They read it on air and were, like, “Wow.  We might be in a novel.  How cool is that?”  I told them I was putting them in the books, in part, to force myself to finish the books.  I knew that if I told them I would put them in the books, but didn’t finish the project, that I would have let down the Gun Dudes.  I’m serious.  It motivated me to finish the books.

Then I sent them each a copy of the books.  They couldn’t believe they were in them.  I was blown away that these “celebrities” thought it was cool that I – little ol’ me – put them in a book.

I was on the show five times.  Each time we recorded an episode, I would tell them, “I can’t believe I’m talking to the Gun Dudes.”  They’d say the same about talking to “Glen Tate.”  It sounded so amazing to hear that.

A last fantastic memory about the Gun Dudes is when the narrator of my audio books, Kevin Pierce, recorded hilarious promos for the show.  The main one said, “You’re listening to the Gun Dudes, which is a free podcast.  You get what you pay for.”  I smile every time I hear that.  A big, hearty, down-to-your heart smile.  God, I love those guys (purely heterosexually, of course, as they would say).

I will miss the Gun Dudes.  Fortunately, I have their contact information and a standing invitation to come down to Utah and hang out with them, which I plan on doing.  What else are you going to do that’s fun in Utah?

My final thought is a huge, huge thank-you to them.  I know how much work it is do stuff like a podcast or write books.  I want to thank the Gun Dudes for putting on an amazing and life-changing – seriously, life-changing – podcast.  Tens of thousands of people benefited from you guys spending your Saturdays goofing around in front of a microphone.