Ogre wrote:Our main purpose in Forting Up is to avoid completely if possible the first few chaotic weeks of any breakdown.
"Yea be thee like unto the mouse that hideth in the hedgerow. She doth not shake her cheezy bits at cats, nor doth she squeak 'come and try if thou thinkest tho art hard enough' to the angry shrew. But she travelleth her way in silence"
preppers i v iii
This is a great point. However, do not underestimate the willingness of the feral youth to burn your house down just for the laugh.
By the way, did you know it's perfectly legal to buy thunderflash "grenades" /flashbangs??
Paintball suppliers sell them.*whistles innocently*
And you can pick up a decent 5mW green laser for under a tenner on ebay.
Imagine your a member of a feral mob, about to storm / burn a house. Suddenly there are three almighty loud bangs and loud flashes of light - now you're almost deaf (that high pitched "eeeeee" in your ears), dazzled and maybe concussed (certainly disoriented)... You'll now be operating purely on fight/flight instinct... So there's probably a strong chance you'll start to stagger away...
Maybe when some of your fellow thugs flee you'll join them? (crowds tend to move like flocks of birds or swarms of bees)
But let's say you stay and try to continue the assualt... Imagine there's a flash of green light and now you're (temporarily) blinded.... perhaps you'd try to get away now? Or maybe when you hear the muffled cries of your fellow thugs as they too are "hit" by the green light, or various flying objects?
Or maybe when you're suddenly struck by fast flying steel ball bearings? Or stuck with an arrow? That you've no idea who's firing - because you can't see.... Or when you feel the wetness of your own blood running?
How many people would panic and try to leg it by this point? How many would hang around, half deaf and blind, injured, under barrage until the defender(s) sallied out to employ their tools of choice in completely nuetralising the remaining semi-incapacitated attackers?
As someone who's had the misfortune to actually have to fight some feral youth, I gotta say, they are not (by and large) Spartans. They do not expect their victims to fight back, and are quite put off when it happens. If the West had relied on 300 chavs to hold the Hot Gates we might all be speaking Persian even now!
Someone said upthread that in the UK it's rogue military that are probably the worst worry and I agree.
If you read around widely you'll find that even in Gunchester, Shottingham, Brum and Londonistan the street scrotes are operating a kind of "gun lending library" system, because (apart from sawn offs) most guns are pretty hard to come by in UK and therefore expensive - not to mention that ammo is also way rare and stupid money - like a tenner a round! (again, apart from shotgun shells) .. Needless to say the average chav is unlikely to master the art of reloading their own.
To sum up, I think bugging in outside of the major conurbations has a lot more going for it in UK than elsewhere, especially the UK.
In my town in particular I am a short walk from a river (water source). On which some friends of mine still live in boats (BOL). There are vacant lots with firewood growing on them within a block's walk (heat, cooking, water treatment), and various woodlands with tasty critters to be caught in them within 45minutes walk (food, more fuel, building and bow / arrow making materials). YMMV
