I’ve been in kind of a shooty shooty bang bang sort of mood lately, so I thought I might mention how I figure firearms fit into the whole zombie apocalypse (and other things) preparedness idea.
It’s mostly entertainment. Which on the surface seems like an odd perspective to take, and certainly puts me at odds with the party line of survivalists and gun people both. The thing is, though, the first thing I’m preparing for is for a disaster not to happen — whatever I do has to work even if the zombies don’t come. In the absence of zombies, the function of my firearms is to entertain me and contribute to my personal development, and they need to be able to perform this function well.
I think a good zombie story needs to have at least some zombie shooting in it. And possibly also some zombie stabbing, which is why I’m thinking that my M1 Garand is my designated zombie weapon.
Then there’s the not-zombie bit. Outside of zombies, I’m mostly interested in preparing for everyday life and relatively minor but more probable disruptions where the priority is to avoid upsetting people and drawing negative attention more so than expecting to engage in outright combat. This implies an emphasis on concealed carry handguns over openly carried longarms, and that’s what I view as my focus for emergency preparedness firearms use.
Even there, I think this is more a matter of having an idea of how one of my hobbies can potentially be put to use — I generally see the pointy end of self defense as something that has more of an effect on the population level (that bad things sometimes happen to people who attempt to commit crimes) than for any given individual (who will likely be involved in such an event perhaps once, or more likely never).
So it’s not the most exciting story in the world there, but it does well enough for me.
Smoke Test Shack 