There’s an age-old debate in the prepper community between guns and gardens. The gun people say you need to have security to protect yourself during the Collapse; the garden people say you can’t fixate on guns and ignore food production. Of course, you need both but sometimes a small portion of the garden people feel morally superior because they’re peace loving and not “aggressive” like us gun guys. These garden people say, “You can’t eat a gun.” To which I reply: “Your wife never got raped by a garden.”
Look at every single collapse that’s happened in the world and you will see that vicious bands of thugs roamed the cities and country and stole, killed, and – yes, we don’t like talking about it – raped.
Take the economic collapse in Argentina in 2000 for example. Read the accounts of a survivor, FerFal, as he describes what happened out in the country to those peaceful and decent farm families. Who were unarmed. Russia in the early 1990s is another example. Bosnia. We all know what happened there.
It’s not just rape. Good old fashioned stealing is a problem for peaceful gardeners. I find it amazing that gardeners will erect sophisticated barriers so deer and other animals don’t eat their crops, but they have no real defense against people walking up and stealing all the food they so diligently protected from deer. News flash: a gang, or even a hungry neighbor, is much more of a threat to your food supplies than a deer. Defend your garden accordingly.
“Oh,” the peaceful gardener will say, “I have a gun to defend my homestead.” What kind of gun? “Grandpa’s 30-30.” Not good enough. Count on bad guys to be much better armed – perhaps even rogue military and law enforcement – and definitely count on them to rove in packs of several men. Don’t think about scaring off one person; think about killing a street gang.
Once they get to your house, you’re dead. You need to keep them away, far way. You need full-time long-range snipers – yes, plural – and you need a warning and communication system. You need to have extremely badass-looking men with impressive weapons and gear that bad guys instantly realize they don’t want to mess with. You need word to get out that you have a bunch of warriors. Gangs and especially hungry neighbors will move on and try to take someone else’s garden that’s only defended by Grandpa’s 30-30. Good.
Can every single peaceful gardner acquire a security team? Nope. This is what community is for. A community has a security team that does this work. But how does the security team eat? They can’t be out pulling weeds when they should be patrolling.
The answer is so simple and, quite frankly, it baffles me that liberty-minded gardeners don’t realize this: trade. The security teams will trade their services for food – that can now be grown because there are no bands of gangs stealing it. This is the free market. I can’t believe some hardcore libertarian gardeners who think everyone should garden. They are wrong.
Here’s another fallacy to the idea that gardening is king for everyone: the assumption that everyone is set up to garden. Take my cabin, for example. There isn’t much space that has any sunlight. But there’s plenty of space to house the Team and store our vital supplies. Gardening doesn’t work for everyone.
So the next time someone says, “You can’t eat a gun,” remind them, “Your wife never got raped by a garden.”