09:07 – Barbara is volunteering for three hours this afternoon at the Alleghany Cares thrift shop. All profits from sales there today go to the local Friends of the Library. Alleghany Cares does this one day a month to benefit a different non-profit each month. The non-profit of the month provides volunteers to staff the sale that day.
The morning news reports more cops shot or shot at, all or nearly all of the shooters blacks out to kill whites, cops in general, and particularly white cops. Those assholes Clinton and Obama, of course, call for stronger gun control laws. I’m all in favor of that, as long as we start by disarming their Secret Service agents, personal bodyguards, police escorts, and so on. The 2nd Amendment guarantees the right of the PEOPLE to keep and bear arms. As far as I’m concerned, government agents have no right to be armed. Only private individuals acting as such are entitled to be armed.
More kit stuff today and tomorrow.
10:20 – I’ve been exchanging email this morning with a young woman whom I’ll call Brittany. I’m not sure how she stumbled across my blog, but I’m glad she did. She and her husband have been getting more and more concerned over the last few years about where things are heading. They’re fortunate enough to live in a small town reasonably far from large population centers. Her husband is an auto mechanic in the family business. She’s a stay-at-home mom who takes care of their two elementary-age kids and homeschools them. She has a nice side business selling stuff on eBay. They’re already better-prepared than most people, simply by virtue of living in mostly rural agricultural area and the fact that her husband is a hunter and shooting hobbyist.
For them, the Dallas shootings were the tipping point, as I suspect they’ll be for a lot of people. She and her husband discussed it yesterday and decided it was time for them to stock way up on food. They’re not Mormons, but there’s a significant Mormon presence in their area, so they’re aware of the LDS policy on food storage for a year. She said their problem was that there was no way they could afford to buy enough emergency food for the four of them for a year. It turns out they can afford it, easily. She’d been looking at prepper websites that push hideously expensive freeze-dried food from Thrive Life, Mountain House, and the like. I figured that out myself because she mentioned that the absolute most they could afford was maybe $5,000 and that would buy only a small fraction of what the four of them would need for a year.
She was shocked when I told her that she could buy enough bulk staples to feed her whole family for a year at a cost of $1,500 or less. Doubling that would allow them to buy a lot of canned meats and other stuff to make the bulk staples a lot more appealing. I sent her links to the locations for their nearest LDS Home Storage Center, Costco, and Sam’s Club, all of which are several hours’ drive from them. I suggested they make a big Costco or Sam’s run as soon as they can, and then just keep doing that until they have their year’s worth of food. I also told her that Augason Farms is a good source of stuff that the LDS HSC doesn’t offer and that the best prices by far on AF stuff are from Walmart online. I also sent her a PDF copy of the LDS prepping book, which is a good way to get started.