Hiding Livestock and Gardens & preventing robberies and home invasions

Posted by David Morris on September 2, 2010

Welcome to this week’s Urban Survival Newsletter,

sponsored by the SurviveInPlace.com

Urban Survival Guide

and UrbanSurvivalPlayingCards.com.

We’re going to cover a couple of questions this week on keeping animals, fruits, & vegetables safe after a breakdown in civil order as well as some quick and easy ways to keep your house from being targeted for robbery or home invasion.

So…here are two questionssent in by readers:  John & Errol: “What is best way to misdirect potential theives and looters from your property?”

Keith:  “We’re in a rural setting, we’ve got chickens and depending on the season, a garden that would make an inviting target.

We’re currently in the process of hardening the house proper, but still have sheds, chicken coop and workshop to keep in mind.

I’d rather people just pass us by then have to fight anyone off.”

Two great questions, and something that everyone needs to consider, no matter their level of preparedness.  I’ll cover the urban situation first.

Misdirecting potential thieves and looters.

In short, make sure that your neighbors look like better targets than you do.  Criminals are creatures of opportunity and will, in general, pick the targets that offer the most potential reward in exchange for the least potential risk.

If you buy expensive products, try to cut up the packaging into small pieces and/or dispose of them away from your house.

Also, look at your house as if you were a thief.  Do you have a big screen TV, a gun case, or other valuables in plain view through your windows?  If so, move the items so they’re not easily visible.

If you have an alarm system, make sure you have signs advertising the fact and then use your alarm.  It won’t stop a truly determined home invader, but it will give you a few seconds advanced warning.  If you don’t have an alarm, consider getting one or at least getting alarm stickers.

While you’re looking at your house through the eyes of a thief, do you see any places where you could hide?  Either because of bushes or because of shadows?  One of the most basic things that you should do is to add lighting with motion sensors on the approaches to your house.  Also, consider clearing out the bushes that provide concealment or replacing them with roses or other thorny bushes. 

The next thing is to look at your doors.  Do they LOOK secure?  Is the bolt lock a high end one or the $12 special from Home Depot that lock pickers use for practice when they first start picking locks?

How about your windows?  Fragile antique windows may look great architecturally, but they’re also very inviting to someone who wants to break in.  If replacing old windows isn’t an option, one thing you can do is install some inexpensive alarms, back up old locks with a piece of wood or PVC cut to size to prevent someone from opening the window from the outside, and even have a security film applied.

If you find yourself in an urban survival situation, you not only want to look like a bad target from the OUTSIDE, you’re probably going to want to go one step further and make sure you don’t look like a target to people who are INSIDE your house.

You can accomplish this by separating and hiding as much of your survival provisions as possible so that if need be, you can actually let people in to your house and show them that you don’t have much food or supplies worth stealing.  This obviously isn’t an ideal scenario, but it IS a realistic one. 

Historically, almost no urban survival situation has been a “Mad Max” type scenario.  Instead, they’re extremely fluid scenarios where people dying of starvation, people struggling to get by, and people with health, jobs, and food all live in close proximity to each other for long periods of time.

When most people think of survival, they are planning on a dramatic, instant, across the board breakdown in civilization where people are eating one another within 3-4 days.  Again, history proves that this just doesn’t happen.  One of the biggest reasons is because the majority of people will simply act like zombies and do nothing, unless they’re told to do something by an authority figure.  They don’t know how to make decisions, they don’t know how to take initiative, and they sure as heck don’t know how to spend their times and resources in a way that improves their chances of surviving.

There’s no doubt that a complete breakdown is POSSIBLE, but this melting pot of people in completely different phases of desperation living near each other is PROBABLE and requires a completely different approach.

In these in-between scenarios, ”going loud” and shooting/fighting isn’t the answer to every conflict.  In many cases, you can reduce your risk of becoming a target by simply hiding the fact that you have supplies to steal. 

This will be MUCH harder to do with generators, solar panels, deep cycle battery arrays, and other large items, but the principal of hiding everything you can holds true.

I’m going to be releasing a book on cacheing this year that provides a step-by-step roadmap for handling this exact situation.  It not only covers how to hide weapons, but also how to hide all of the rest of your survival supplies.

The author wants to remain anonymous and I’m simply going to be publishing it for him, but I can tell you that he’s knocked it out of the park with this book and it’s one of the most exciting projects I’ve worked on in quite awhile.

The second question on chickens and gardens in a rural setting is great too.

With chickens, you might need to have a plan to move them inside your house if things get unstable.  Again, your options are to hide them, increase deterrants, or have a 24/7 watch.

On the garden, there are a few options, but none of them are real easy.  One would be adding a skylight to your garage or attic and switching over to a hydroponic or aeroponic garden. 

Another would be to surround your garden with weeds to disguize it. 

A third strategy is to make sure that you don’t plant things that will scream “FOOD!”  As an example, carrots blend in with green weeds because the orange is under ground but tomatoes stick out because the red is above ground and visible from a considerable distance.

Keep in mind that it’s very difficult to grow enough food to provide all of the calories you need if you’re gardening part time. 

Between the number of calories you’ll need, the time that it takes to maintain the garden, protect the garden, and the potential shortage of water, fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides, it’s a 50/50 bet at best whether or not you will get enough food to survive or just end up wasting a LOT of time trying.  Add in vitamin, mineral, and fiber requirements, and you start to see how big of a challenge this really is.

If you’re already living off of your own garden, then this doesn’t apply.  But if you don’t have a garden, or are just a hobby gardener and expect to be able to flip a switch and start growing everything that you need to survive while adjusting to civilization breaking down AND doing something to earn money at the same time, you might want to rethink your plan.

A better approach may be to switch over to medicinal herbs that are low maintenance and native vegetables that grow easily and have low water requirements and blend in and don’t look like food to passer-bys.

This brings up an important point.  Even if you have chickens, a garden, and a rural location, you still need to have a good supply of food in the event of a breakdown in civil order. 

Even without having to defend against looters and thieves, chickens get sick and predators get hungry.  Bugs come, hail happens, and sometimes gardens just don’t grow the way you expect them to or they have in seasons past.

One of the best things about these two questions was that both people asked how to “misdirect” thieves and looters instead of how to make an inpenetrable fortress.

US houses just aren’t made to withstand a determined attack. 

A determined, focused attacker isn’t going to screw around with your doors and windows.  If they want you bad enough, they’ll just launch Molotov cocktails with a water balloon launcher over your neighbors’ house and smoke you out. 

If they want your stuff, all they have to do is drive a truck through one of your exterior walls and use smoke, gas grenades, or just mix household chlorine and ammonia to take care of you.

Both of these people were spot on that a better approach is to do whatever you can to stay invisible, and that’s one of the points that I hit repeatedly in the SurviveInPlace.com Urban Survival course.  I cover this topic extensively…from tactics for deflecting questions and more ways to make your house look unappealing to up-armoring your house without looking like you’re the neighborhood kook.  If you haven’t already, I strongly encourage you to re-read the course description and get signed up by going to SurviveInPlace.com.

What thoughts do you have for these two scenarios?  What operational security measures are you using to keep your preparations under wraps?  Do you have any “wicked-smart” strategies for hiding livestock & gardens from passers-by?  What’s your top question that you’d like answered in an upcoming issue of the Urban Survival Newsletter?  Share your thoughts by commenting below.

Have a great Labor Day Weekend!  I did Amway back in the 90s and we called it “Free Enterprise Day.”  I kind of like that :)

God Bless & Stay Safe!
David Morris
SurviveInPlace.com
UrbanSurvivalPlayingCards.com

Facebook.com/SurvivalDave  << For early access
Twitter.com/SurvivalDave << For early access

P.S.  Did you go to the 8/28 rally in Washington DC?  If so, please let me know what you thought of the whole experience.

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Episode 6 of The Colony on Discovery, “Skout”

Posted by David Morris on August 31, 2010

LOTS of conversation on last week’s episode…and this week was another good one.  One thing that I mentioned in last week’s comments was that The Colony isn’t a show you want to watch to LEARN how to survive a disaster.  It’s a show to watch to start preparedness conversations with your friends/loved ones, to give you scenarios to game, and to show you how average people MIGHT react in a disaster situation.  The psychology lessons alone are VERY valuable from the show. 

The show starts out with the colonists relalizing that the stream that they’re using is polluted.  There’s a sheen of oil and several dead fish floating on the water.  I’m really surprised that they haven’t caught more rainwater up to this point.

In a long term survival situation, once you get your basics (shelter, fire, water, food, & security) taken care of, you want to create redundancy for each of them.  In this case, even though they had repeated rains and were catching SOME water, they evidently didn’t store much of it because as soon as they see that the stream is polluted, they say that they only have 4 days of water left.  This is really pathetic, because that amounts to about 50 gallons of water, or 2 good sized rubbermaid containers.

As I cover in my “Advanced Urban Water Purification” book, you CAN make water contaminated with oil, pesticides, herbicides, and other pollutants potable in a fairly straightforward manner.  The colonists are very close to having everything in place to do this…they just don’t know it.

What they decide to do is build a cistern to catch rain water…great idea, but poor implementation.  They decide to build an above ground cistern.  Unfortunately, it’s got some big problems.  They basically use plywood lined with a tarp.  The first problem is that they left a big gap in the tarp for the water to go through.

The bigger problem is water pressure.  The cistern is basically a box that appears to be 8 feet by 4 feet and 4 feet high.  The 2 sides that are 4 feet tall by 8 feet long will have almost 4,000 pounds! of pressure against them when it’s full.  (as a note, it DID rain at the end of the show, the cistern got a couple of feet of water, and it held until morning!  I still have doubts as to whether or not their cistern could handle being filled.)

They would have been much better off if they would have found a place where they could dig in the ground and use the earth to provide counter pressure.  Their wooden design could work, but it’s not likely.

They FINALLY set up a night watch, but they’re only using one person for the entire night.  In general, the more boring the watch, and the less disciplined and experienced your group, the more often you should rotate.  Michael was supposed to be on watch, but he laid down and went to sleep and intruders came and broke in again.

I discuss this in the SurviveInPlace.com Urban Survival Course, and I’ll briefly describe a sleep/watch strategy here.  Basically, you would designate 12 hours for sleeping.  Out of those 12 hours, everyone in the group would sleep for 8 hours and be on watch for 4.  Ideally, you’d have 1/3 of the group on watch at any given time.

Again, you could obviously modify it if you had a high percentage of people with military experience, but this is a solid strategy for groups that are mixed in experience, training, and discipline.

Two of the guys catch a gator…which was simultaneously gutsy and done smartly.  While gators have very strong jaws, they don’t have much strength to open their jaws.  I would have killed it before carrying it a few blocks, but I’m impressed that they pulled off catching, killing, and butchering it.

3 of the colonists go out exploring and find a fast food restaurant.  For a second time, they find evidence that someone else is living in a place they’re searching and they decide to loot it anyhow!  I’m all for scavanging after a disaster, but I’m a 10 Commandments guy and taking supplies that people are using or will be using before you can replace them is stealing.

Besides that, there will be “law” and “justice” in a disaster situation, no matter how bad things get.  It may be in the form of people taking the law into their own hands instead of in the form of the police and a judge, but you have to expect that there will eventually be consequences for breaking laws.

When they got back to the colony, they changed their story and said that there was no sign of life.  To me, this is simply an indication that they realized that it was wrong to take stuff from the fast food restaurant, but they did it anyhow.

Fortunately, at the end of the episode, they decided to pick a leader.  They picked Sally, the mechanic.  One thing to keep in mind is that the person who does the most isn’t necessarily the best person to lead.  I’ll be interested to see if Sally taking a leadership role will take away from what she’s able to actually do, or if she’s able to use her leadership position to inspire the others and increase overall productivity.

I was very glad to see that the colonists switched from a democratic form of organization to a representative republic.  Democracies are inherantly unstable and have historically imploded when the laziest 51% figures out that they can survive off of the efforts of the 49% that works the most.

So, what survival lessons did you see this week?  What conversations did The Colony start for you?  And what are some of the traits should the ideal leader have in a long term survival situation?

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Urban Survival Newsletter-Movement and Communication After A Disaster

Posted by David Morris on August 26, 2010

SurviveInPlace.com
Urban Survival Newsletter for 27-Aug-2010

Reuniting and Communicating After A Disaster

Welcome to this week’s Urban Survival Newsletter, brought to you by the SurviveInPlace.com Urban Survival Course and UrbanSurvivalPlayingCards.com.  This week we’re going to talk briefly about reuniting and communicating after a disaster.

Here’s a specific question on this topic that came in from Tony. 

“How should you plan if you and your family are separated during a riot such as your wife works across town, kids in school, etc..  An EMP may have cut off communication or cell lines will be jammed. How can you communicate and reunite your family so everyone reaches safety.”  -Tony

Great question.  There’s no one answer to this because it’s so easy to keep throwing “what if’s” into the mix until you’re blue in the face.  The breakdown in communication could be from an earthquake, hurricane, heatwave, EMP, solar flare, or other issues.  So again, it’s important to focus on fundamentals.  In the SurviveInPlace.com Urban Survival Course, I cover movement in urban areas after a disaster as well as several methods of alternative communication that are inexpensive and easy to put into place, and we’ll touch on some of them here.

The first thing we’ll talk about is movement after a disaster.

Our family has primary, secondary, and tertiary meetup points in the event of a disaster.  In addition, I practice making PACE routes from wherever I happen to be to these meet up points.  PACE is a great mnemonic to remember.  It stands for:

Primary

Alternate

Contingent

and

Emergency

I learned this from a private military contractor friend of mine and have used it for close protection and it’s a great habit to get into.  It basically means that you should have multiple loosely defined, yet clear plans in your mind for getting from wherever you happen to be to a given set of rally points. 

The “emergency” option is the only one different.  For me, the emergency route is to somewhere I can hole up and gather myself, and possibly resupply and/or take care of medical issues. 

So, as I’m stopped at a light, I’ll ask myself, “If X happened, what would my PACE routes be to get to our 3 meet-up points and an emergency location?”  You can do the quick math and see that 4 routes to 3 locations means that I’m coming up with 12 routes, but once you train your brain to think this way, it’s a fairly quick process.

Things get very complicated when you throw children into the mix who can’t take the initiative and need outside help.  If your children go to school, you should find out what your school’s plan is in the event of a terrorist attack or natural disaster. 

Will they go into lock-down? 

It’s unlikely, but will the school monitor any radio frequencies?  If not, and their school uses radios, can you find out or figure out the frequency that they operate on?

Will they even release your kids to you in a lock-down situation? 

If you know another set of parents near the school, what do you need to do NOW to authorize them to take their kids to their house? 

If these friends are set up to take your kids, what will be their signal?

How will you communicate with them?

If this is a concern for you, these are all things that you need to consider with kids.

This isn’t far fetched or “way out” planning.  In many areas, it’s just a way of life.  In fact, it was for me.  I grew up in blizzard country and getting trapped at school was a real issue for us.  Every kid who lived in the country had to have one or more people in town who they could be released to in the event of road closures.  It was just something that got handled the first week of school every year.

What about communications after a disaster? 

It depends on your particular city and how far you’re separated from the people you need to talk to & get to.  I go into more depth on this in the SurviveInPlace.com course, but some of your options are simply texting, using family radios, HF radios, Single Side Band radios, and possibly satellite phones. 

If your concern is communicating after an EMP, then you’ve got an entirely different level of planning that you need to do.  Your communications will need to be independent of the electrical grid and be shielded when the EMP(s) happen. 

If you haven’t already, another thing you should do is memorize or keep long distance numbers in your wallet or purse.  The reason for this is that in local disasters, you may be able to make long distance calls long after the local lines are jammed.  So, if you and your spouse both have a relative’s number in another state, you can call them and leave messages for each other.  If this is a big concern for you, you can also get a Skype, MagicJack or other voicemail number in another area code for a few bucks a month.

The communication and reuniting issue is something that doesn’t have a one size fits all answer, but keep in mind that until 10-15 years ago, everyone didn’t have a cell phone and it took hours or days to get in touch with people during the best of times. 

In other words, we may THINK that it’s an emergency if we can’t reach someone on their cell phone at  moment’s notice, but not having instant communication after a disaster does not necessarily constitute an emergency.

Hindenburg Omen & a Stock Market Dip Within 40 Days??

Besides extreme physical events, we’re right on the verge of some extreme economic events as well.  I’ve talked aout over a dozen critical weaknesses in the US economy in recent months, and it’s looking like the stock market MAY have hit a critical point this week.  This week, in fact, technical indicators are showing a 77% chance of a 5% market drop within the next 40 days.  They’re also showing the probability of a panic sellout at 41% and a major crash at 24%. 

The group of five indicators are called the “Hindenburg Omen” and they have preceded every NYSE crash since 1985.  Keep in mind that the 5% drop that has a 77% chance of happening isn’t a crash…it’s just a drop that is newsworthy.  It’s more likely that the market will drop simply because the big money traders on Wall Street get back from their summer vacations and start trading again.  That phenomenon doesn’t have a scary sounding name, but it’s a fairly likely cause for a drop in the market.

It’s not a sure sign of impending doom, but it is one of many news items that you can use to spur yourself and your family to get prepared for ALL breakdowns in civil order and breakdowns in the food chain.

Of course, one of the best steps you can take is to go through the SurviveInPlace.com Urban Survival Course .  We don’t know what disaster will strike first…terrorist attack, natural disaster, or economic emergency…there are just enough vulnerabilities to our food supply and electrical system that it makes sense to get prepared for breakdowns in the system.  To learn more about the course and get signed up, go to SurviveInPlace.com.

What are your plans for communicating with your family and or reuniting with them after a disaster?  Share your tactics with others by commenting below.

Until next week, stay safe & God Bless,

David Morris
SurviveInPlace.com
UrbanSurvivalPlayingCards.com

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Episode 5 of The Colony on Discovery “The Abduction”

Posted by David Morris on August 24, 2010

Here we are on episode 5 of the Colony, “The Abduction.”

The episode starts out with one of the colonists, Becka, getting kidnapped and taken away.  The kidnappers leave a ransom note asking for medical supplies and gas.

The abduction starts with one of the attackers putting a bag over Becka’s head.  She comments later that she knew she had no chance, but this just isn’t the case.  Anyone who has been through any of the Target Focus Training DVDs or live events knows that when an attacker is busy with a hood on your head, it gives you an index for attacking them.  Even with your head covered and someone behind you, if their hands are busy on your head, you know where their eyes and groin and other targets are.

Once she injured her first attacker, she could have taken her hood off and taken him to non-functional to scare his friends and make sure that he wouldn’t be a threat later.

Granted, this is a reality show, and rupturing a testicle or sticking a finger in someone else’s eye probably isn’t allowed, but in a real survival situation you need to be prepared to take dramatic action like this.  To learn how to handle situations like this, I STRONGLY suggest that you check out Tim Larkin’s Target Focus Training at SurviveInPlace.com/targetfocustraining

Becka mentioned that, “No matter how hard I punched him, or how hard I dug my finger nails into him, I knew I wasn’t going to win.”  It made me sad for her, and sad for anyone who heard her who believed that B.S.  It just isn’t the truth.  Her problem wasn’t her strength or his toughness, it was that she wasn’t striking targets that are easy to injure.

If I remember right, it takes 8-12 pounds per square inch to rupture the eye ball.  Your thumb and finger tips are smaller than a square inch, so it doesn’t take a REALLY strong person to stop an attack.  ANYONE can generate the force necessary to stop an attacker, if they apply it to the correct targets.  Even if she didn’t rupture the eyeball, she could easily scratch it and take her attacker out of the fight temporarily and allow her to disable him or get away.

Would it have been a sure thing?  Absolutely not.  But it would have given her a fighting chance.

The narrator says that this is introduced to test the colonists’ ability to negotiate under stress.  This is a very important skill.

They decide to give up 2 of their 3 gallons of gas and a few of all of their medical supplies.

The colonists agree again to stay armed and in pairs.  At this point, I seriously doubt that they’re going to learn their lesson.

One of the colonists got a fairly deep cut on his arm.  I’m not sure if they cleaned it or treated it, but they did wrap it.  One field expedient treatment for an open wound is to pack it with sugar or (better) sugar and iodine.  Low sugar concentrations promote bacteria growth, but extremely high sugar concentrations cause the cell walls of bacteria to explode.  The sugar should be rinsed away and replaced when it soaks up enough blood/fluid that it changes from being granular to being syrupy.

-The kidnappers used a typical dirty negotiating tactic called a “nibble.”  They got what they asked for, but since the kidnappers didn’t have to give up anything, they simply asked for more.  They asked for all of the colonists’ canned food.

The colonists didn’t have any plan and don’t have any leverage over the kidnappers and they don’t have any reason to expect the kidnappers to give Becka back.

If you want to know how to handle negotiating in crisis situations, you can read more about it here:  http://secretsofurbansurvival.com/272/urban-survival-barter-and-improvised-weapons/.  This is high speed information that you really need to have.

-The fact that they pulled off the windmill was really impressive.  They now have almost 24/7 power.  They still don’t have food, and they’ve made themselves a target, but the windmill is impressive.

What did you see this week?  What did they do right?  What did they do wrong?  Share your thoughts by commenting below.

David
SurviveInPlace.com
UrbanSurvivalPlayingCards.com

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Top 5 Items For Urban Survival Situations

Posted by David Morris on August 20, 2010

Welcome to this week’s Urban Survival Newsletter, sponsored by SurviveInPlace.com and Tim Larkin’s Target Focus Training “Lethal Weapons” package.

Here’s a question I got recently.  It applies to everyone and I wanted to share it with you here:

“If you only had 5 items to help you survive, what 5 items would you choose? Please leave out your brain as one of the items because having one is not a choice. Using it might be, but everyone has one!”  -Bob

Well, Bob, I have to include my brain.  Everyone may have one, but I’m sure you can think of people who don’t use theirs…and in a survival situation you MUST keep your head.

In fact, your brain will be your single most important tool in a survival situation.  Your ability to stay calm, remember skills that you have practiced and execute them under stress will trump any wiz bang survival items that you have.

I cover this extensively in the SurviveInPlace.com course, but if you lose control of your mind, you can die quicker than if someone is holding your head under water.  It is absolutely critical to train your brain for survival.

And, by training your brain, one of the things I’m referring to is inoculating your brain to handle stress like you would inoculate your body to handle a virus.  I also mean getting your brain to think of non-traditional solutions to problems, keeping focus under stress, and thinking up solutions that are both strategic and tactical.  And finally, training your brain means learning skills so that you know how to do without as many survival supplies as possible. 

After my brain, my focus would be on multi-use items that can help with as many of the fundamentals of survival as possible. 

Specifically, sheltering my body, making fire, making drinkable water, getting food, providing security, and taking care of medical issues…trauma in particular.

By far, the most important tool to accomplish these goals in both a wilderness and urban environment is a knife.  And the best possible knife?  You might laugh at this, but it’s the one you have with you when your life depends on it.

This is common sense, but when you’re 5 miles from home on foot after a disaster, the cheap folder that lives in your pocket will always beat the $200 fixed blade sitting safe at home. 

What that means for me is that I always carry a good, solid folder that I have a few of. 

When I buy multiples of the same knife, I beat the snot out of one of them to make sure I can trust it.  I use it to split wood, throw it in the ground and into wood, hammer with it, pry with it, and of course cut a lot of stuff with it.

The particular knife doesn’t matter and my opinion on brands doesn’t really matter.  This is something that everyone needs to do for themselves so that they know…not because of what I’ve said or anyone else has said…but because of what they’ve seen and experienced they know they can trust their life to the knife that they’re carrying.

As a starting point, some common store brands that I’ve had good success with are CRKT (Columbia River),  Kershaw, BenchMade, Spyderco, and Gerber.

With a knife and solid skills that you’ve practiced, you can take care of a lot of basic survival concerns.

After my knife, I almost always have a small multi tool on me or near me, regardless of where I am.  They don’t do anything as well as a purpose built tool, but they do a LOT of things better than I can with my bare hands.  I like Leatherman and Gerber multi-tools

The third thing that I always have near or on me is a small tactical flashlight.  I keep it near me during the day and on me when flying or anytime I’m going to be out at night.

Those would be my first tier, and after that, most items can be improvised and they really depends on the environment, expected needs, and your skill set. 

Here’s a few examples of what I mean.

In an urban environment, a lockpick set is right at the top of the list for me, but that doesn’t have very much value in a wilderness environment or if you don’t know how to use one.  It’s also something that I can make a field expedient version of in a bind…especially with a multi-tool.

When I’m doing long distance trail running, I always carry a mylar space blanket, but that isn’t very necessary in an urban environment.

I usually have cord with me, in the form of laces, 550 cord, or rope, but I can make substitutes in urban environments with wire, torn bed sheets, or other items depending on the particular application.

Firecraft is important, but with all of the resources to make fire in an urban environment, it’s not nearly as important to carry firemaking materials with you as it is in the wilderness. 

Even in the wilderness, once you know how to do a hand drill and/or a bow drill, you really don’t need much to make a fire, although a good firestarter and tinder bundle is VERY nice, especially when you’re cold, tired, and can’t get gathered tinder to light.

An important point to remember is that your particular top 5 is going to depend on your particular skillset, location, and even your physical and medical condition.  Lockpicks are important to me because I know how how to use them, but they may have no value to you. 

Lighters aren’t as important to me because I know several ways to make fires if I need to.  I still carry lighters in my car, but I usually don’t carry one on me. 

But my top 5 is going to be different from your top 5 and many other people’s top 5.

If you’re completely blind without corrective lenses, then they are going to be in your top 5.  If you have a heart condition, one of your top 5 items will probably be a vial of nitroglycerin.

In GENERAL, you want to develop the number of skills you know and how well you can do them so that you need as little “stuff” as possible to survive, no matter what you face.  At first, it’s natural to depend on “stuff,” because stuff is one way to help you survive until you develop the skills necessary to survive without “stuff” so don’t worry if your list of items that you need is 10 or 20 items long to start with.  You can always develop more skills to pare that number down.

I’ll tell you this.  It’s incredibly empowering to keep replacing the “stuff” that you need to survive with skills that can never be taken away from you and I encourage you to take consistent steps to do just that.

Unless you haven’t been on email this week, you know that Tim Larkin at Target Focus Training put together a “Lethal Weapons” empty hands combat training package at a 54% discount for my readers this week.

If you like the idea of being able to replace “stuff” with “skills,” you’ll really appreciate this training package.  I was just telling a good friend of mine that even though I almost always carry pepper spray, a knife, and a firearm, I STILL consider my hand to hand skills to be my primary weapon.

The reality of the most violent attacks is that they don’t start with a standoff from 10-15 feet away.  They start with you getting hit, stabbed, or having a gun pressed up against you. 

I LOVE firearms, and they’re hard to beat when you have time to deploy them, but smart attackers are going to make you fight to even be able to get to your firearm or other weapons.  Target Focus Training is the best system that I’ve found to take care of this gap.

I posted three videos from the training on the SecretsOfUrbanSurvival.com blog yesterday.  If you missed them, go check them out.  http://secretsofurbansurvival.com/368/reality-based-fighting-self-defense-and-martial-arts-for-survival-video/

So, what are your top 5 items?  Let me know by commenting below:

God Bless & stay safe!

David Morris
SurviveInPlace.com
UrbanSurvivalPlayingCards.com

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