OK steelmanning you, certainly a lot of them are way more interested in gun collecting and making beef jerky than other aspects.
[1] another example of a successful smear campaign
Both of which are available at Wal-Mart.
I always knew about the guns, but only recently discovered that Wal-Mart stores (at least in Louisiana) carry huge buckets with weeks worth of dehydrated survival food.
I'm sure it's for hurricanes. Yeah, that's it.
Take, for example, the 2018 California Camp Fire, the various southern winter flash power outages, or the endemic hurricane season pretty much everywhere exposed to the middle or southern pacific.
"For hurricanes" is a cute way to minimize it, but in much of the country it's rather little that separates you from being left to your own devices, at least for a little while, even when you're just suburban and haven't even looked out to the rural U.S.
There is a real deferred maintenance and resource mismanagement issue in this country. The increasing evidence of "preppers" and items like ration buckets becoming prevalent at bulk store operations like Walmart & Costco are early indications of the increasing prevalence of these issues.
Take a survey of the items that are always available at most Costos or Sam's Clubs across the country and you'll see similar results. They essentially market decentralized infrastructure for those that can afford it (or those who can't afford not to have it).
https://www.costco.com/p/-/mountain-house-1-year-emergency-f...
Sometimes they even appear in stores.
Apparently Mormons are required to keep some amount of emergency food on site.
Source: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/life/home-storage-center... (In older literature & analysis it used to be called the LDS Cannery or LDS Dry Cannery, but I guess they recently rebranded it.)
For me, it made a ton of sense to buy a couple of boxes of MREs and some Mountain House meals for this. They last decades, and they double as camping food.
Certainly some people probably emulate the Hollywood version, but I think that’s about it.
Most “peppers” are fathers that have had the good sense to pause and think “so, what would I be able to do to serve my family if something disastrous happened? What might that look like?”
Usually, a disaster go-bag of some kind with enough basic supplies to weather a day or two of displacement suspension of normal services. Sometimes, if they live in a place where it’s reasonable to imagine staying put is a good option, they might also have a generator and fuel, a week or two worth of long shelf life food, and some water storage. That ensures the wellbeing of their family will not be contingent on outside help, at least during most common disasters. Many of these people may also have a gun or two, for defense or for hunting if they are rural.
Some people go beyond that, and sometimes with a military focus, other times with months of rations, a bunker, or other unusual preparations. Mostly, those are not based on realistic scenarios. In almost any protracted disruption, having a lot of supplies , armaments, or resources will be as much a liability as an asset. People that buy guns -for prepping- are just living out some kind of hero fantasy. If you own guns, and use guns as part of your normal life, it would make sense to have a solid reserve of ammunition. If guns are your disaster scenario, you’re going to have a bad day.
As an individual or nuclear family, to weather an extended problem, you’d need to have a literal secret underground lair that was either so hard to get to or so well hidden that no one would know, and you’d have to be completely self contained. That’s simply not practical for all but actual billionaires, but people cosplay this to varying degrees. Even billionaires might find ymmv.
A much more practical and wholesome approach is to be part of a community that includes farming, independent sources of power and water, and generally sustainable independence from less robust centralized systems. This provides for basic necessities as well as a common defense. Humans lived in tribes for a reason, and 30 people with well aligned incentives and sustainable infrastructure for food, water, and energy is probably the absolute minimum viable structure for security during a disruption of more than a couple of months. Otherwise you would be dependant on total stealth or extreme isolation. Some neighbourhoods would probably coalesce into something resembling this, but organisation ad-hoc under pressure would probably end up with tensions if not violence.
Projects like this one can be real resources for well organized communities. I’ll probably look at running this on our servers as an additional resource, along with our library.
However, I think the derogatory prepper must exist in some number because you see so many products clearly targeting them. All the tacticool stuff, the buckets of dehydrated food, etc etc
As someone who lived through the "Snowpocalypse" in Texas in 2021, had no power for 11 days and no water service for 6 days, I was very thankful that I had a backup source of indoor heating, a couple of boxes of MREs, and clean water for a week as just part of having good disaster preparedness, as well as the mylar emergency blankets I hung by fishing line from my ceiling fans so to help create a warm space for my family. All that stuff is just part of a prudent approach to disaster preparedness that anyone who grew up in the middle of the country and has a house would do.
I know quite a few people who you'd write off as "preppers" that are not consumed with fantasies of a zombie apocalypse, but are instead wanting to ensure that their family is taken care of with basic necessities, vital medication, and a set of viable contingency plans when you lose power, water, etc for days or weeks.
Also, nobody but the very wealthy have "hundreds of guns". Guns are expensive. Guns hold their value. Guns are an asset in some communities. But they are expensive, and therefore even rather serious gun people have tens, but not hundreds. I'm probably more of a gun nut than the average, and I definitely do not have "hundreds of guns". To even store "hundreds of guns" safely (e.g. safe from theft, if not for other reasons) I'd need enough money to build a dedicated room in my house just to hold them. "hundreds of guns" is an armory, not a collection. I'm in the top 1% of wealth in my community in Texas and used to shoot competitively, so I'm more of "gun nut" than average, and I can't even imagine owning "hundreds of guns". That's such an outlandish fantasy strawman you have in your mind, it's nothing close to realistic.
You're really just smearing people with stereotypes in this thread that have no basis in reality, and it's clear you're completely unprepared for the reality of what life is like anywhere in the middle of America, much less in much of the rest of the world.
What type of pepper are we talking about: piper or capsicum?
