A theme I have pushed for most of the last few years is the idea of bugging out right now, rather than waiting until SHTF and then trying to escape with your tactical backpack packed with clean socks and some energy bars. This picture kind of captures that mindset.
A lot of people think that when things get bad enough, they will hop in their car, which will conveniently be full of gas, and head out of town on the highway, which will conveniently be congestion-free and arrive at their designated bug-out location safe and sound.
Think again.
Cars give people a sense of invulnerability. You are surrounded by a steel frame, windows and locked doors. You can control the temperature, listen to the radio and the rain doesn’t bother you. You have seat belts and airbags. You are invincible!
Except you aren’t.
Modern vehicles especially are fragile, full of sensitive electronics that are great for comfort when driving on the highway but crap for resisting being disabled. I am not even talking about someone shooting the engine block with a .50 Barrett, just a regular firearm can disable a car. 15-20 rounds from an AR or AK, or a few slugs from a 12 gauge, into the front of a car will shut it down. Maybe not immediately but you won’t get far once a FMJ round punches holes in your radiator or even just the radiator hose or one of the belts. Look under your hood sometime. There is thin sheet metal on the sides and usually a plastic grill in the front. Those aren’t going to stop a high velocity round. The whole inside of your engine is full of sensitive crap. This is the engine of the 2018 Honda Accord, picked at random because it is a popular car:
I am not a mechanic and I don’t know what even a quarter of that stuff is at a glance but I am pretty sure if you put holes in most of that stuff, the car will stop. Maybe not for a mile or two but it will come to a halt.
Tires are easy to disable, one round through the sidewall or even a puncture from a knife will leave you with a flat in a matter of seconds. You can drive on a flat but not very fast.
Of course, roads are pretty easy to block with other cars or debris. Bottom line, that car is only useful until someone makes a concerted effort to stop it. Once you are stopped, you are dead.
Windows are easy to break. Try to drive with the windshield smashed up. A brick or a baseball bat can wreck a side window fairly easily. Most modern cars will unlock the doors automatically if you are in park, and shifting into park is your natural impulse when you stop. That seatbelt you think will protect you in a crash will also trap you. If you have kids, you know how hard it can be to maneuver around to smack them when you are in a bucket seat and belted in. Kids know it too. Even if you can hold your own in a stand-up fight, you are in trouble if your assailant is outside of the car and you are inside. Even if you have a gun, have you practiced drawing your gun and shooting while adrenaline is pumping from a seated position? I haven’t.
As long as you are in motion, you are in a relatively safe spot although again a windshield can be shattered with a brick and it won’t stop a bullet. The problem is that cars are easy to stop and once you stop, you are vulnerable. The guy in Portland named Adam Haner was chased by a mob until he crashed his car and then a mob of black Lives Matter “mostly peaceful protesters” dragged him out of his vehicle and assaulted him until a man named Marquise Love kicked him in the head. Haner is apparently recovering but a blow like that to the head is possible fatal. When you add in improvised weapons like bats and other blunt objects? Like Herschel says: A Baseball Bat Carried By Antifa Mobs Is A Lethal Weapon. More and more we are seeing Leftist mobs armed with actual firearms and whether they know how to use them or not, that is still a significant escalation.
It might seem like there are lots of roads out of town but especially in larger metro areas it is easy to block them off. A little over a week ago, there was mass looting in Chicago, triggered by a black guy being shot by police after he was first shooting at them. Clearly unjust. The police ordered the bridges raised to keep more looters from arriving and the highways were mostly closed but that goes both ways. If things get out of hand and major thoroughfares are locked down, that leaves you trying to navigate the side streets and those are way easier to block off. An average city street has cars already parked along at least one side, a van or pickup truck parked sideways would block them completely.
It is hazardous driving through urban areas under the best of circumstances but under a SHTF scenario? It wouldn’t take long for you to find yourself trapped.
My advice as it pertains to cities?
If you live in an urban area, I don’t care how good your job is, quit and move out of the area. Do it now. The longer you wait, the more likely you are to get trapped and the harder it will be to sell your place. You can find another job, but your sweet benefits package won’t mean much if you are dead or a vegetable hooked to a ventilator because some activist caved in your skull.
Unless you can’t avoid it, stay the hell out of urban areas. Malls, sporting events, whatever. If it can be reached easily via public transit or walking, stay out. Is it fair or right that we can’t safely go to the cities we built? Of course not but crying about it doesn’t change reality. Being outraged isn’t a defense against a violent mob.
If you must go? Obviously you should be legally carrying, something you are comfortable with and familiar with shooting. If possible something with a capacity over 10 rounds. Probably a good idea to carry at least one extra magazine. Know where you are going before you leave your house, and by that I mean don’t just rely on the GPS. Look at a map, get a feel for the area. Is there a river or some natural barrier that restricts your exit? If you need to leave in a hurry, which way should you be going? It might not be the most direct route. For example, this is downtown Fort Wayne, the only city I regularly spend time in.
I live northeast of this area so my most direct route is to go that direction.
Two issues.
First, the Maumee and St Joseph rivers are in the way and there are only a couple of ways across those rivers to go east.
Second, the area that I would have to go through is very “diverse”. Most of the time it is fine because they are busy shooting each other but if the SHTF? A White guy driving alone or worse with my family is going to look like easy pickings. Sure I can shoot my way out but they might have guns as well, and someone outside of a car shooting in is in a better position than someone inside of a car shooting out. Plus my family might get hit.
Third, Fort Wayne is easy to get around if you are going north-south, not so much going east-west.
So depending on where I am, it might make more sense to go north on one of the major road ways and then go east. Or I might even be better off going south to get out of town and then going cross country to get home. Fort Wayne is pretty densely populate to the north but south of downtown it turns into corn fields in a hurry and people who live near corn fields are most likely my kind of people.
Where you park is also important. Don’t park too far from where you will be and try to avoid parking garages. A parking garage can become impossible to get out of in a hurry and as fraught with problems as your car is, it beats trying to walk out of a city on foot.
Be sure your car has plenty of gas and is in good working order. Even if you are able to get out of a city, bad traffic can happen and you don’t want to have to wander around looking for gas or worse yet running out. More than once I have encountered bad traffic and started running low on fuel, leading me to get off the expressway and into some sketchy neighborhoods where the clerk is behind bulletproof glass. Don’t drive anywhere near an urban area without a full tank of gas.
I am not a tactical expert so these are just some basic ideas.
The key here is to know where you are and know where you would go if things went sideways. As always the best course of action is to stay away from those sorts of areas but we all have to go to the store or government offices.
Your mindset needs to be that large urban areas are hostile territory. Not that you shouldn’t be in certain neighborhoods after dark but that the whole area is dangerous. They are concrete death traps full of people who might decide to rob, hurt or kill you.
The times we are entering are going to require a radical rethinking of our mindset. Millions of people in this country see you as their mortal enemy, as “fascists” who need to be punched or killed. In their online echo chambers they are talking themselves into justifying violence and murder. Zero Hedge ran a story the other day about a guy named Khaled Alqahtani at Berkeley making the case for political violence and rejecting the once sainted names of Gandhi and MLK: “This War Can’t Be Civil”: Berkeley Columnist Calls For “Violent Resistance”. The fact that a guy named Khaled Alqahtani is clamoring for the violent overthrow of the society his family chose to come to because it wasn’t like wherever the hell he came from is not lost on me. Nor is how hilarious his picture is:
Watch it boys, we have ourselves a badass here! That mustache is throbbing with masculine energy.
Anyway, these times are going to suck but they are going to suck a lot more for people that aren’t prepared for them. We no longer live in the United States of America. We aren’t united in any sense at all, and one half of the country hates the other half. The time has come to start viewing those who hate us not as misguided fellow Americans but enemies who want to see you and your family silenced, disenfranchised, punished for 150 year old “crimes” and if at all possible dead.
You are soon going to find out how far you are willing to go. If your path is blocked by an angry mob, are you going to stop knowing they might pull you out of your car or are you going to drive through them? If you get stopped and they try to get you out of the car, knowing that if they do your life is in mortal peril, do you let that happen or do you defend yourself with lethal force? If some scrawny social worker with a couple of bLM thugs comes to your house under orders from President Kamala Harris and demands you surrender your firearms, do you give them up or do you do what has to be done?
Many of our choices are being made for us and they are intentionally narrowing your options down. Slowly but surely parts of our nation are being declared off-limits to normal Americans. At some point we will have to return the favor.