I noted a tremor in the force, and found a neat new blog, Balloon Goes Up. I was especially impressed with his post on his Get Home Bag. In it he relates an interesting rule of thumb called the 10 C’s of Survivability. I need to review my plans against them.
This reminds me that it’s getting close to winter, and it’s time to review, refresh, and renew my Get Home Bag. It also occurs to me that I should take pictures of the stuff that goes in my bag.
A couple of recent events in my life got me thinking about the topic of what to carry should you find yourself in a situation where you can’t carry a gun.
There are two situations where this would come up – involuntarily and voluntarily. While I have found the solutions are similar, they do differ some.
In the last week there have been 4 robberies or attempted robberies on or near the campus of Georgia Tech, in midtown Atlanta. This hits home because my daughter is a student there, and frequently passes by the place where some of the incidents happened.
Under the law in Georgia, students and faculty are prohibited from carrying guns, even with a valid Georgia Weapons Permit. Visitors to the campus are allowed to bring guns, but they must stay in your car. This leaves students on campus without firearms for defense.
So, for my daughter, there is a three-pronged solution to living in a gun-free victim zone. First, she doesn’t travel alone on campus at night, and even in the day, she doesn’t travel alone in areas that are not well traveled by others. As much as it pains me as a father, this is the one time I am glad she seems to be always surrounded by boys. Of course, with the Ratio at Tech, that’s not hard to achieve.
Second, she carries pepper spray with her almost always. It’s a cute little pink bottle I bought for her as a present when she first started school there.
Third, she’s taken self defense courses, and she stays in shape. That way, she can fight or flee as the situation allows.
Does this make me feel better for her? A little. Her Mom, not as much. But we have come to accept that we do what we can.
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The other situation is voluntary. I’m not talking about the time when you decide to leave your gun in the car instead of taking it into the doctor’s office – more the time when someone physically can’t use a gun.
My mother-in-law lives alone in an apartment near us. My wife calls on her often, but she can’t be there all the time.
Recently, my mother-in-law asked me for advice about what kind of gun she could buy for protection, and I had to be brutally honest with her – none. She isn’t physically able to use a gun reliably. And even if she could, she isn’t physically mobile enough to be able to go practice with it, or to be able to quickly reach her gun safe (required!) before an intruder did.
Plus she lives in an apartment, and Rule 4 means she would have no good field of fire any way. With the construction of her apartment, even .410 bird shot would take out her neighbor and her neighbor’s neighbor.
The solution? A trip to Wal-Mart and $20, and I came home with 4 large cans of wasp spray and an air horn. Wasp spray in the eyes will totally ruin an intruder’s day, and it looks a lot less menacing than a bear-sized can of pepper spray.
She now has a can of wasp spray in her bedroom, bathroom, living room, and kitchen, the four places she stays in the most. The air horn is by the couch, and she’s talked to her neighbors, who now know that’s her call for help.
I also got her a small can of pepper spray, that’s on her key chain, for when she’s going to and from her car.
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And my daughter’s dorm room got a couple of large cans of wasp spray. Take note, boys.
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It’s not a perfect world, and given that, we can’t always be guaranteed our Second Amendment protections. But by thinking through the possibilities and planning ahead, we can make the most of what we do have.
I’ve talked here about the need to plan for emergencies. In the course of my planning I ranked possible scenarios, and made plans to deal with the most likely ones.
My Day Job is a great gig, but it means commuting 30 miles one way. My planning showed a number of possible scenarios where I could find myself stranded on the road. And, having lived in the Texas Panhandle, where getting stranded in your car by a snowstorm is almost a certainty, I knew the value of having emergency provisions, and a plan. I decided, though, to extend that to any scenario where I needed to survive on the road without my car, most likely having to walk home.
This leads us to the idea of the Get Home Bag. This bag is meant to support any number of people, for however long it takes to get to the safety of a better location. You keep it in your car, and when you need to, you grab it and go. For me, this means I planned for 2 people for a 3 day walk home.
Here is what I keep in my Get Home Bag. Naturally it contains all the things I used to keep in my cars for getting stranded by Texas winters, along with what we would need on the road. I check the contents at least monthly, and I put the bag on every now and then, and carry it around a while, to be sure it is manageable.
Granola bars
Water
Change of clothes (2 shirts and 2 pairs of socks)
Work gloves
Poncho
Shoelaces
Bandana
Rubber jar opener
Cell phone battery charger
AA Batteries
LED flashlight
Light sticks
Ammo
Lighter
Candles
Purel
Germicidal wipes
Bedroll and fleece blanket
Space blanket
Entrenching tool
Multitool
Trash bags
Map
Compass
Whistle
Pen & paper
Rope
Drugs – Aspirin, Immodium, Sudafed, Antacids
In addition, my plans would be to grab my gun, my cell phone, and the First Aid Kit out of my car. In the winter, I have a couple more blankets in the car any way, so I would grab those, too.
For you, you might find that your most likely scenarios don’t take you as far from home as mine do. If so, you can pare your contents down to a bag in the trunk. And, a simple Google search will find other suggested bag contents. Do some research and come up with what you would need. Then do it, because you never know when these things happen. If you did, you could stay home that day.
When I was in school I was a Boy Scout, and while I never rose as far as I would have liked to (I made First Class), the principles of Scouting have stayed with me all these years. By far the best thing I learned was to live the Scout Motto, Be Prepared. Today, there are countless expressions of this concept, from Colonel Cooper’s color code, to the OODA Loop.
This is the fist in a series of postings where I plan to talk about emergency planning and what I have done. I don’t pretend that my way of planning is the only way or the best. It’s just what I have done. But I hope you can learn from it.
First, I sat down and made a list of the kinds of emergencies that my family and I could face. This was a brainstorming session, and I didn’t question the probability of any event at this time. Yes, the list was extensive, and it includes black holes and alien invasion. To me it was important to consider the larger emergencies, because when you really think about them, a lot of the preparations you make for more intimate events like a fire or home invasion would be the same you would make for them.
My wife and I then picked the most likely events, and the easiest preparations, and made our plan. We’ve been at the plan for a few years, and we are steadily making progress. Here are some of the low hanging fruit, as it were, that we found we could do right away.
Make a printed telephone list. We found that we were all relying on our cell phone address books for contact information, but, if we lost our cell phones in an emergency, that information is lost, too.
Make sure there is a family member or friend outside your immediate area who will agree to be a contact for everyone, if necessary. This came from some reports during Katrina and other emergencies, where local communications were impossible, but where people could call or email someone outside the affected area.
Make sure you have a texting plan on your cell phones. This is because text messages are sent by a different method than cell phone calls, using the carrier signal that the cell phone tower uses to keep track of where your phone is. Even if the all cell phone circuits are busy in an emergency, it may be possible to send short text messages. Make sure everyone knows short messages they can send quickly.
Make sure your guns are locked up away from any children. They should not only be out of reach, but out of the prying eyes. Our kids never knew where I kept our pistol safe until they were old enough and they were trained how to use them. Make sure all the responsible adults in your household are trained, and know how to access them.
Practice. Just as you should have fire drills, practice other kinds of drills – tornado drills, earthquake drills, home invasion drills. When you are out in public, always stay alert (Cooper’s Condition Yellow at a minimum), and practice finding the quickest path to safety.
Fill Yer Hands 