The Surprisingly Solid Mathematical Case of the Tin Foil Hat Gun Prepper

I&#x27;d like to modify the statistical argument against the author&#x27;s conclusion -- if we take his yearly probability of violent regime change in the US and take the yearly likelihood as i.i.d., then the probability that it will happen in the remainder of my statistically likely life is significantly reduced by it not having happened in the first 1&#x2F;3rd. And every year that I procrastinate prepping, I&#x27;m more and more incentivized to skip it the next year. That&#x27;s the math that the average person is unconsciously doing...<p>To extrapolate to a rural&#x2F;urban divide, the number of times I&#x27;ve lost power and the average length of that loss is <i>massively</i> lower in the city that I now live in vs. the country farmstead I grew up on, both within 100 miles of one another. Similarly, the number of times I&#x27;ve been unwilling to leave my house because of a major snow event or the like is much lower in the city than it was back home because the speed of road clearing is much much higher here. These sorts of infrastructure things build into the heuristic that produces &quot;trust in the system&quot; in a person, and the likelihood that you&#x27;ll prep for a week without power or three days snowed in. Once you&#x27;ve prepped for that, prepping a little more is easier because you&#x27;re already storing extra food and toilet paper, keeping a generator on hand to keep the well running since you&#x27;re not on municipal water or sewer, etc... It all adds up to different populations feeling very differently about how sane&#x2F;necessary this activity is.

&gt; all he must do to ensure it doesn&#x27;t hurt anyone is not shoot anyone with it<p>That assumes his gun will never be stolen, or that an accidental shooting is out of the question. Some stats:<p>&quot;According to data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), during the four-year period from 2012 to 2015, nearly half a billion dollars worth of guns were stolen from individuals nationwide, amounting to an estimated 1.2 million guns.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.americanprogress.org&#x2F;issues&#x2F;guns-crime&#x2F;reports&#x2F;2017&#x2F;07&#x2F;25&#x2F;436533&#x2F;stolen-guns-america&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.americanprogress.org&#x2F;issues&#x2F;guns-crime&#x2F;reports&#x2F;2...</a><p>&quot;From 2006-2016, almost 6,885 people in the U.S. died from unintentional shootings. In 2016 alone, there were 495 incidents of accidental firearm deaths.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aftermath.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;accidental-shooting-deaths-statistics" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aftermath.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;accidental-shooting-deaths...</a><p>And those stats only consider deaths. Think about survivable injuries on top of that.<p>Also, keep in mind that even people who receive some sort of basic firearm safety training typically don&#x27;t receive training related to how to respond to violent confrontations. The NRA, for instance, offers several Personal Protection courses, but typically you&#x27;ve got to take home firearm safety and shooting courses before you can take a Personal Protection course. The problem is that some people take a firearm safety training course and then think they&#x27;re fully qualified to act in a violent confrontation. And, unfortunately, that misplaced confidence can put themselves and others in harm&#x27;s way.

Campbell is tremendously overestimating how much extreme prepping actually increases your chances of survival. Keeping a week or two of food, water, and energy is smart, but &quot;zombie prepping&quot; is useless:<p>Revolutionary War: Unless they chose to fight, the &quot;middle class&quot; of independent farmers wasn&#x27;t much affected (though I&#x27;ll admit they were already zombie-prepped). The poor did the dying, and the elites got kicked out.<p>Civil War: Much more calamitous, but little that could be done about it. If you were displaced, your stocks of supplies were reduced to only what you could escape with. If you were killed violently, well, no point buying a gun when you&#x27;ll be given one before sent charging into artillery fire.<p>Russia: See Civil War above. And just for fun, remember that having a large private store of grain wasn&#x27;t exactly smiled upon during collectivization.<p>France: While farmers were undoubtedly more food-secure than their urban compatriots during occupation, those who cached guns and joined the Resistance weren&#x27;t exactly making the safe choice.<p>China&#x2F;North Korea&#x2F;Vietnam: See Russia above<p>Africa: Is an entire continent, and reducing its 1.2 billion inhabitants to &quot;where to begin&quot; is incredibly insulting to their individual histories and experiences. But if we&#x27;re talking colonialism, advising people to buy land is a bit out of touch, don&#x27;t you think?

The problem with this article&#x27;s defense of firearms for disaster preparedness is that firearms are among the least urgent disaster-preparedness items. If what people were really concerned about was disaster preparedness, the things they would obsess over would be flashlights, water storage and purification, a few weeks of food supplies, backup power sources, medical supplies, portable radios. Some preppers do spend time and energy thinking about this, it&#x27;s true.<p>But usually what you typically have is a person who enjoys guns and is trying to think about a situation where it might possibly be useful to own an AR-15. It&#x27;s a terrible self-defense weapon in an urbanized area (compared to a shotgun or handgun), and they&#x27;re illegal to hunt with in lots of areas. Owning such a gun requires a major investment of money and time (for practice and training), and encourages this kind of paranoid outlook. So you have interest in guns driving interest in disaster preparedness, rather than interest in disaster preparedness driving interest in guns.

The major point that the author misses is that by being obsessed with upcoming catastrophe, you lower your quality of life <i>now</i> (not only with prep expenses, but also with stress and paranoia) in exchange for surviving a low-probability disaster in the future, where even surviving would be a pretty miserable existence.<p>There&#x27;s a surprisingly solid mathematical case for living in the present and near future, and accepting the risk of catastrophe that you&#x27;d only have a marginal chance of surviving and thriving in. In WWII Austria and Poland, a huge catastrophe, the people who escaped suffering weren&#x27;t the preppers, they were the people who saw writing on the wall and moved away.

Slightly related to the article: Does anyone else feel like the general public&#x27;s inability to extract information from statistics is a huge problem?<p>I think that any sort of &quot;standardized&quot; education should include at least a class worth of teaching on how to interpret statistics.

Until the same bans are applied to police and military forces operating on US soil, this isn&#x27;t even a discussion. It&#x27;s incredible to me that even some gun owners do not realize that the primary purpose for the right to own guns is to keep the police and military at bay. I&#x27;m certain that without the huge number of guns, we would be in an even deeper police state than currently. A gun owner has no need to even unpack or assemble a gun in order to have a positive impact on society, namely keeping police somewhat in check through the possibility that they may use their gun should police get out of line. Our police and military are the likeliest enemies these days, but foreign forces invading cannot be completely ruled out, though extremely unlikely. Guns, and the ability to own them, are the only thing keeping us from complete tyranny. In that sense, the thousands of lives lost due to guns, while a tragedy, are not a reason to change our gun laws and never will be.

Instead of being an interesting discussion about the mathematics of events worth preparing for, this is turning into a tired discussion about the merits of guns.<p>I was hoping for the former, because if I wanted the latter, all I have to do is go on Facebook.

I&#x27;m not sure I buy this statistical justification for gun ownership, because if you&#x27;re into statistics then you owe it to yourself to look not only at the odds that you will need a gun at some point in your life (which is what this article argues) but <i>also</i> at the odds on what that gun will be used for while you own it (which this article totally ignores).<p>Adding a gun to your house increases the odds of successful suicide, of that gun being used against you, and of that gun being involved in an accidental death of a loved one. Gun ownership isn&#x27;t as simple as &quot;don&#x27;t shoot anyone with it.&quot; Every year that you own a gun, there is a nonzero risk of it being part of a tragedy. You can mitigate and reduce this risk, but it&#x27;s just as dumb to set it at 0 (because you&#x27;re responsible) as it is to assume that the odds of a revolution are 0 (because one has not happened in your country in your lifetime).<p>A more thorough assessment would use the same Bernoulli Process to calculate the lifetime odds that the gun will be involved in a tragedy, and compare it to the odds that it&#x27;ll save your life in a disaster of some kind.<p>FiveThirtyEight has a great writeup on gun deaths here, if you haven&#x27;t seen it. 2&#x2F;3 of the gun deaths in America are suicides.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fivethirtyeight.com&#x2F;features&#x2F;gun-deaths&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fivethirtyeight.com&#x2F;features&#x2F;gun-deaths&#x2F;</a>

Another reason is if for some reason we have an oil crisis. Most of what you eat is delivered on trucks. No oil means no food in about two weeks. Hunting used to be par for the course just a few decades ago.

Lots of straw men, poor assumptions, bad analogies and more in this article. He starts with some weird dumb swipe at &quot;the Left&quot; for thinking tyranny is impossible. And ends with a something I&#x27;ve never heard of: a class of people &quot;vehemently demanding the confiscation of rifles&quot;. He ticks off countless wars to prove that states of violence is common, but conflicts that reach the state of &quot;war&quot; are going to roll over you and your family and all your prepper gear whether you have one, ten or zero AR-15s.<p>And the author is extremely naive in his assumptions about the relative risk of having an assault rifle in your home versus the marginal increase in safety said assault rifle would grant you in the case of a massive societal breakdown. If anything, at best it would be a wash: Carrying the rifle openly would just get you targeted by military, militia, gangs, or other preppers who would at such a point have nothing to stop them from employing pre-emptive lethal violence against you. You might be able to protect your home from random lone-wolf raiders, but organized groups could overwhelm you pretty quickly.<p>As for his two-data-point calculation of the likelihood of violent rebellion based on the history of the United States, the Civil War was a fairly straightforward war between government-equipped armies, not a period of random anarchy. And the Revolutionary War was relatively small-scale given the expanse of the American colonies at that time.<p>The sadly common European wars up until 1945 were horrific wastes of human life, but again, I&#x27;m not sure how having a rifle handy would appreciably change the lives of the folks impacted by the wars. I don&#x27;t know about earlier wars but I&#x27;m pretty sure most every healthy fighting age male in Europe was in their respective military, not holed up in their basement protecting their tins of sardines from the looters across the street.<p>Point being, the chances of a societal collapse where your AR-15 will make a difference for the safety of your home and your family is miniscule. And the risk of the gun&#x27;s presence in your home over the decades you wait for the apocolypse which never comes is much, much greater.

A few years back I became obsessed with securing a server (a previous one had been hacked). I noticed after a while that what started out reasonable (updating software, closing ports, etc)... had become unreasonable (writing custom code to detect changes to any file on the machine)... and I realized that each step normalized the next step in the sequence. The same thing is in effect with preppers.<p>You start with the thought &quot;I should have some canned goods and water on hand.&quot;... 5 years later you&#x27;re locked in your bunker in south dakota... each step seemed reasonable, but the destination is unreasonable.<p>That said, you should have some canned goods and water on hand. :)

To me, the problem I have with &#x27;preppers&#x27; or the &#x27;gun lobby&#x27; is that the over extend their arguments past the point of reasonable-ness.<p>You may have a very valid reason for owning an AR-15 (even if that very valid reason is &#x27;its rad at the range&#x27;). But for basically every valid reason, you can extrapolate a valid reason to own a pickup truck. In fact, there are <i>more</i> valid reasons to own a pickup truck. Pickup trucks, and the materials for making them work, are exposed to all manner of regulation and no-one but the most extreme anarchists make a peep.<p>Try applying the same sorts of regulations to AR-15s and you get &#x27;slippery sloped&#x27; out of existence. So, to me, gun control advocates of the &#x27;left&#x27; have not abandoned logical arguments, they&#x27;ve been out lobbied&#x2F;pr&#x27;d by the gun extremists on the &#x27;right&#x27;.<p>This is all coming from someone that does not own any AR-15s, but has fired them enough times to understand how much fun they are at the range.

Thank you author -- I knew cumulative &#x2F; long-term probability had a name but did not know it -- Bernoulli Process.<p>&gt;He could leave [his gun] in his attic with a couple of cans of ammunition, just in case something horrible does transpire where he might actually need it.<p>Please keep your firearms and ammo out of attics and crawlspaces, unless the alternative is underwater. The key to longevity is climate control, at least within reason.

Cool. I hadn&#x27;t thought of risk calculation as a Bernoulli process. Hey, I know next to nothing about risk calculations!<p>However. If we work backwards in time and keep to the same reasoning, the yearly probability of a violent revolution goes up for every year you get <i>closer</i> to the last event (because there are fewer years to sample from). For example, the chance to have a violent revolution in 1866, after the US Civil War, was at its maximum for the period after the Civil War (0.57 by my calculation). That is intuitively wrong. Surely, the probability to have a violent revolution must be <i>minimal</i> right after the end of the last one, when the new status quo is in its most well established, everyone is tired of fighting, etc etc.<p>I guess you can argue for and against that- but the point is that revolutions cannot be accurately modelled as a Bernoulli process, with a constant probability depending on time, else there is a risk of wildly over- or under-estimating the chance of having another one.<p>Finally- I think it&#x27;s very dangerous to assume that just because you can model someone&#x27;s reasoning as a rational process, that person will actually follow that process and reason rationally. Or in other words- someone else might be able to come up with rational arguments to back up preppers&#x27; actions, but that doesn&#x27;t mean preppers themselves are thinking rationally. You can get to the same behaviour through very different lines of reasoning, not all of which are necessarily consistent.

Can the author justify the accuracy of estimating revolt using a Bernoulli process? At minimum he should provide sufficient reason to believe that the random variables he is using as components of his Bernoulli process (which are 1 if a revolt or revolution occurs in a given year and 0 otherwise) are independent and identically distributed Bernoulli trials. These assumptions in the situation he is describing seem unlikely, or at best hard to establish. The author is being deceptive by not providing some sort of warning stating that there are good reasons to believe this is a bad model and the probabilities computed are inaccurate (no confidence intervals provided for instance).

This only makes sense if they are willing to expend a similar, if not greater resources into pro-social, civilization strengthening activity.<p>Otherwise it&#x27;s barbaric. Literally a bet against civilization and your fellow human.

Well of course many people in the US are worried about violence. They see frequent cases of mass shootings on TV, sometimes in places they know or places much like the place they live or work. They see the Police officers getting gunned down, or gunning unarmed people down on an almost daily basis. If I live in a society like that I’d be pretty paranoid too.<p>But is the solution to this problem mass gun ownership? I think more and more school children in America are beginning to realise that actually no, that’s not the right way to think about this.<p>Is it really sound to compare the USA to Somalia and Afghanistan as though that comparison is just as relevant as a comparison to the UK or Australia or Canada? How many democratic countries have suffered revolutions and mass social breakdown? All of a sudden you end up with a very short list, and usually within a short period of time of coming out of a dictatorship of some kind, before democratic institutions and processes have become established. How many that have been democratic for more that 50 years? I can’t think of a single one.<p>Finally about 30,000 Americans die by the gun every year, many by suicide but that just goes to show the risks of easy access to guns. (If you disagree - people could stab themselves to death instead - compare death rates with other stable affluent democracies. You might be able to explain away some of it but I’m already rounding down to the nearest 10k.) Let’s say you have one uprising every 150 years. To pay it’s way in blood gun ownership would have to be responsible for saving over 450,000 lives. That’s about half the total of the Civil War. I think it’s far from clear that this would be the case, and surely isn’t having huge numbers of firearms in circulation more likely to make such a tragic breakdown of society even worse?

<i>Two qualifying events in 340 years is a 0.5882% annual chance of nationwide violent revolution against the ruling government.</i><p>That&#x27;s not an accurate characterization of either the Revolutionary War or the Civil War.<p>Immediately availability of small arms is also unlikely to be all that important in similar scenarios (just lie when the local revolt asks if you are against them).<p>It&#x27;s an interesting thing to consider how likely things are to fall apart though.

&gt; There’s the “you can’t fight the army with small arms” bucket, which is increasingly unsound given our ongoing decade and a half war with Afghani tribal goat herders.<p>Has either side &quot;won&quot; the &quot;decade and a half war with Afghani tribal goat herders&quot;?<p>There are certainly no invading forces of &quot;Afghani tribal goat herders&quot; in the U.S.<p>Sounds like small arms will, at best, hold off the army.

Without even reading the article, I would suggest that people should do whatever makes sense to them to protect themselves and their loved ones. Waiting for real world statistics to back you up is additional risk. I would suggest it would be pragmatic and entirely logical to be proactive and prepare for the worst.

This isn&#x27;t to address the argument, but I just wanted to point out that the guy writing this article chose to describe himself with &quot;I think a lot.&quot;

&gt; There’s the “tyranny can never happen here” bucket, which the Left has mostly abdicated in the wake of Trump winning after they called (and still call) Trump a tyrant. There’s the “you can’t fight the army with small arms” bucket, which is increasingly unsound given our ongoing decade and a half war with Afghani tribal goat herders. And there’s the “what the hell do you need an AR-15 for anyway?” bucket, which by its very language eschews a fundamental lack of understanding of what those people are thinking.<p>Yeah, and where&#x27;s the bucket for &quot;If you have to bring out a gun to shoot police officers, your nation has failed, <i>YOU</i> have failed at protecting your nation and what it stands for, and I&#x27;m not interested in your political fantasy where you become a hero to save the day after abdicating your responsibility while everything collapsed&quot;?<p>If these guys realistically believed America would turn into another Afghanistan, what they need is an airline ticket. Why prepare for a doomed fight when you can retire in Bahamas? If they realistically believe that America is going down and they need to stop it, what they need is to get involved in politics and fight, NOW, to turn the country around.<p>But no, they want to believe they can be heroes, while at the same time don&#x27;t want to believe they can do anything about it now, because then they will be responsible for their inaction. So they keep talking about guns, and how everyone else will feel sorry once civilization collapses.

Not trying to go all anti-2a..<p>Many people have guns. I think the numbers are that there&#x27;s more guns than there are people in the USA.<p>However for those numbers of guns, there&#x27;s nowhere near that amount of training to teach proper firearms handling and usage. The hunters probably have the most experience, outside law enforcement and military.<p>I personally don&#x27;t have enough time to dedicate to mastery of firearms. Just going and buying a handgun seems like a splendid way to either injure yourself or have it taken from you and used against you. This decision is personal.<p>However I&#x27;m pretty good at: electronics, design, reverse engineering, software, power, chemistry, and many other areas. I may not be a master at firearms, but I know metalsmithing and chemistry to make the bullets gun owners need.<p>And frankly, if shit goes haywire, they&#x27;ll be enough guns to go around. Because I could see another country moving in, and guns being passed around like candy to defend us. And barring that, I&#x27;ll know enough tech and have enough scrap to be needed.