
The Surprisingly Solid Mathematical Case of the Tin Foil Hat Gun Prepper - korethr
https://medium.com/s/story/the-surprisingly-solid-mathematical-case-of-the-tin-foil-hat-gun-prepper-15fce7d10437
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olliej
The problem I have is when people say that they need an ar15 (or any automatic
rifle) to defend themselves, family, or to protect their property. I’ll put
the last out of the way first: theft is not a capital offense, so someone
stealing your car is not a reason to shoot them.

For the other options a automatic rifle is an poor choice. No rifle has any
difficulty going through dry wall or cladding, so if you’re in any urban or
suburban location your odds of hitting someone else (like your family members
or neighbors) is reasonably high.

For rifles like ar15s you’re firing bullets that will go through whoever you
hit, if you do hit them. Given they’re automatic, you’re presumably planning
on firing many rounds, which further increases the risk to others.

Presumably part of the reason to want an automatic weapon is to manage missing
the target - that’s why soldiers have them. Of course a soldier has another
thing a preppier doesn’t have: all the people in one direction are valid
targets.

This isn’t the case if you’re not on a battlefield.

Then there’s the practicality of the “protect my family” argument. For that to
be useful your gun (of any kind) has to be loaded and easily accessible -
which is a good way to add to the statistics of children accidentally killing
themselves or others with their parents guns.

Finally - if you /really/ want to have a gun to “protect your family/self” use
a shotgun. There’s less harm to people who aren’t directly in the line of
fire, the effective distance is vastly shorter so less risk to people in other
rooms, and you don’t have to be as good at aiming.

High powered automatic rifles don’t belong off a battlefield.

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hansthehorse
An AR15 is a semi-automatic rifle. An M-16 is an automatic rifle and can't be
owned by a civilian. A semi-automatic firearm means to fire two rounds you
must pull the trigger twice, to fire three you pull three times etc. An
automatic rifle will fire as long as you hold the trigger back.

An M-16 will expend it's 30 round magazine in about 3 seconds in full auto.
Full auto is rarely used and when it is it's mainly for suppressive fire,
which generally means to keep the enemy's head down while your squad moves to
better cover or firing position.

Oh, one more thing, at house distances shotguns most certainly have to be
aimed.

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howlin
In terms of rifles, the relevant calculation would be more along the lines of
the probability of a calamity happening and the rifle coming in handy, versus
the probability that the rifle is abused in some way (stolen, harmful accident
or suicide). I generally believe that those with prepper mentality downplay
the latter probabilities because those are more under their control. Preppers
tend to be control freaks, and worry much more about exogenous risks than
risks they feel they can personally manage. However, this is likely fallacious
reasoning. Everyone runs a risk of a mental/emotional break, or an act of
carelessness leading to an accident.

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strken
Building a house doesn't cause a flood plain to flood (hopefully!), but adding
lots of guns to a country sounds like it should have an effect on the number
of revolutions, be it up or down.

It's also not clear whether prepping will have been a good thing or a bad
thing in the event of a revolution. You're arguably more likely to shoot
yourself with a gun than to shoot someone else, even during a period of civil
unrest; you're painting a target on yourself in the eyes the government; some
measures you could take, like owning a gun, fortifying your house, firing your
rifle at 7AM, owning an aggressive dog, or kicking people off your property,
will socially isolate you from the same neighbours you'll need to cooperate
with in the event of a disaster; and in general it's not clear why a prepper
is more likely to survive than a small-scale farmer, given that the latter
owns and regularly uses guns, produces food, is used to intermittent hardship
and long days, lives in a rural area, and gets along with the government and
their neighbours better.

~~~
korethr
> Building a house doesn't cause a flood plain to flood (hopefully!), but
> adding lots of guns to a country sounds like it should have an effect on the
> number of revolutions, be it up or down.

Intuition would imply that, but I'd say there's not enough data to really say.
There's countries with less civilian firearm ownership than the US, older and
younger both, with more frequent violent revolution, and less frequent violent
revolution. There's too many differences in culture, demographics, economics,
and probably other factors I'm not thinking of, that even if increased rates
of firearm ownership had an effect on the number of revolutions, that effect
is utterly swamped by other factors.

Your latter paragraph seems to imply you have a different idea of what
preppers do than I do. When I hear the word "prepper", I think of a person who
stockpiles non-perishable foods, stockpiles ammo, owns multiple firearms and
practices with them regularly, and drills both evacuation and hunkering-down
scenarios with their family. I'm not sure where alienation of the neighbors
enters in here, as nothing in preparing for a disaster requires or recommends
having pre-established enemies living <100 feet in any direction from where
you do.

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ggm
No.. surprisingly naieve stats. There is no causal linkage between violent
events beyond the business cycle, so his math on averages is observational not
deterministic.

The watts riots are not linked to no blood for oil. You can't throw a line
between them and plot median interval before violence breaks out like that.

Seriously: prepping makes sense if you are risk averse but you don't go from
hydrology flood risk to vampires in one throw.

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chrisdhoover
He shouldn’t ignore the minor events and only calculate the grand events. For
instance the Brits attacked us in 1812, Mormons slaughtered settlers 59 years
later, Mexican revolutionaries raided borders, Johnstown was flooded,
Pinkerton shot strikers, we had draft riots, Martin Luther King’s
assassination set off urban riots as did the Rodney King trial, if you were
black in the South your life was in peril, Hurricane Katrina placed folks in
desperate straits with an already corrupt police force refusing to help and
actually hindering self protection to the point of openly shooting people for
no god damn reason, almost forgot Kent State, the armed forces killing
citizens. The whole fucking enterprise is corrupt. The unibomber may have been
on to something ala John Brown whose body lies moldering in the grave.

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fallingfrog
What really scares me is, the same argument applies to war- and because the
world is loaded with nuclear weapons, when it finally happens it’s likely to
go nuclear. Nukes are one class of weapon where in the aggregate their
existence is an existential threat to mankind.

~~~
cultus
For this reason, a long term goal of mine is to move to New Zealand. In
retrospect, we probably had a more likely chance than not of the Cold War
turning nuclear. There were several extremely close calls averted by dumb
luck.

In the next Cold War, especially in light of instability from climate change,
we might not be so lucky.

~~~
fallingfrog
Yeah, New Zealand is probably the right place- isolated, Southern Hemisphere
so there’s less fallout, English speaking, temperate. Still, in the worst case
scenario there will be about a billion starving people flooding down from
various places in Asia so even there you’re not really safe. I’m putting my
efforts into political organizing as my strategy, I think that there really
isn’t any good course of action in the event of nuclear war and prevention is
the only good option.

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mc32
Prepping might give you an advantage during a small interruption in services.
Any prolonged disruption and it does you little good, unless you’re far
removed from everyone and no one knows you have some dedirable goods. Maybe if
you live in decommed silo. Otherwise, unless you have a militia with you, who
will needs lots of food and other things, no matter how well you’re armed and
stocked, you’ll be overwhelmed by others you’re not sharing with. So it may
help in minor cases, but definitely not in catastrophic cases, except it may
help delay the inevitable a little bit.

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ohiovr
Financial calamity prevented on every down turn year turns a normally unstable
situation into a financial bomb. Markets are always unstable and they always
correct. Thwarting the ultimate course of corrections ensure that eventually a
correction comes that cannot be stopped or softened and the magnitude isn’t a
calamity. It is a cataclysm.

~~~
patrickg_zill
I think of the example of holding a beachball under water. The farther under
the water you hold it, the more explosively it will leap out of control when
you do let it go.

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burfog
The example is broken.

Air is much more compressible than water. Pressure will be almost a linear
function of depth because water isn't very compressible.

From the depth at which pressure is equalized inside and outside the
beachball, until reaching the depth at which the ideal gas law becomes
inaccurate, the volume of the beach ball will be simple function of depth.
Doubling the depth will halve the volume. Beyond that, the volume will
collapse faster, until the air becomes a supercritical fluid with density
similar to that of the water.

In any case, the ball shrinks as you go deeper.

Buoyancy is roughly the density of the water times the volume of the ball.
(the air inside is of trivial mass) The water density doesn't change much
because water is not very compressible, but the volume of the ball decreases.
This reduces the buoyancy force.

Suppose the ball is made of PVC, which sinks in water. Once the air has been
pretty well compressed, the average density of the ball (air and PVC) will
exceed that of water. The ball thus sinks.

