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Guns For My Neighbors; In Consideration of Community Preparedness
In a fortuitous Shot Show meeting in the Press Room, I had an excellent conversation with Robert Farago, publisher of “The Truth About Guns”, he proposed an interesting idea from an East Coast perspective:
“If a storm rolls through my area and things get bad enough that looters are a serious risk, my neighbors not only do not have the skills to protect our neighborhood – they don’t have the tools.”
Storing food specifically for neighbors who do not prepare is something we already advise and teach – the idea of storing firearms that your neighbors can use to help defend your neighborhood is a new perspective for me (of course, in my neighborhood, everyone has an envious arsenal).
So, what parameters need to be considered with this idea? Consider that these neighbors likely know nothing about firearms, potentially have never shot or even held a firearm and certainly may have no training at all. How can you incorporate all that into a plan to be able to relatively safely hand out firearms to your neighbors to man a line to keep looters out?
Robert’s suggestions include a revolver so they don’t have to figure out how to load magazines or anything complicated and a heavy trigger pull so they don’t accidentally discharge their weapon. For longer range work he proposes a lever-action .22 with a tube feeder. This will allow them to utilize the firearms easily with minimal instruction and basically turn it into a point and shoot experience.
Many of you will share his perspective of having such inexperienced neighbors, fortunately I don’t have any experience with that viewpoint to really expand on the situation other than stories I’ve heard/read. I really liked his ideas of simple use firearms that could be handed out and, of course, I love the idea of Prepping for your neighborhood to hold off the looter hordes. As Robert said, “You’ve got to plan for stupid!”.
How does this idea strike you? Are there opportunities to discuss this with your neighbors at all before this kind of scenario becomes reality? Could you get your neighbors to get some training ahead of time?
Obviously, this idea means that you will have to have considered how you will rapidly train your neighbors to manage to not shoot each other, how to hold a line and how to use the simple firearms you’ve provided them with. Not only will you need to add the firearms to your preps (seriously, who has a problem with getting more firearms anyway) you’ll also need to make sure you have ammo for them.
What other types of firearms might be useful? I’m somewhat inclined to expand my collection of Ruger 10/22′s with hot lips mags and plan to teach them to use the speed loader. That does add to the complexity a bit, but I would prefer to do that over keeping a different type of rifle than the one I keep for my kids. Cheap “Saturday Night Special” .22 revolvers would be great to store for this scenario, even if it never happens, .22 ammo is super cheap and you could use the same ammo for the revolver and the long gun.
Are there other firearms that would fit nicely into this paradigm?
American Preppers Network Blog: www.AmericanPreppersNetwork.com Forum: www.AmericanPreppersNetwork.net
2013-01-17 17:46:00
