> Cash on hand, a gun with ammunition, canned food, and bottled water.

Contrary to popular opinion, people generally pull together in disasters rather than society falling apart. Good book on what happened in various situations ( 1917 explosion that tore up Halifax, Nova Scotia, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans)

* http://rebeccasolnit.net/book/a-paradise-built-in-hell/

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6444492-a-paradise-built...

It's an area / sub-field of study:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_of_disaster

Ever seen Threads (1984) though? Or for something less outright depressing, perhaps the first few episodes of James Burke's Connections?

Both make it clear that should something cataclysmic befall us all we'd be faced with the near-impossible problem of restarting agriculture. Modern, surplus-generating, agriculture isn't possible without modern society, starting with the basics like fuel and fertilizers (and everything else that's connected: the rule of law, supply chains, logistics, PhD-level domain knowledge and expertise, and so on). Those who survive "the event" would be forced into a life of sustenance farming for generations - and while you might think some semblance of modern civilization could be reestablished within a few years, consider that if everyone is sustenance farming for themselves, that leaves almost no-one left to do the actual reconstruction work, and that includes rebuilding fertilizer plants, fuel refineries, oil extraction, and agricultural machinery production.

Without anything close to today's industrialization and automation being restored within a few years (hint: very unlikely) it only gets worse: our modern society depends on an educated workforce. Under a "everyone sustenance farms for themselves"-scenario that means there's no-one to sufficiently educate the tens of millions of school and university-age people, assuming those kids aren't press-ganged into farming for their local district before they can even read or write, so with that outlook what hope is there to rebuild and operate oil refineries from scratch?

And "rebuild from scratch" is the word. While Russia might no-longer have enough strategic warheads to completely obliterate the northern hemisphere (at least for now), I'd bet a week's worth of my future postwar turnip ration that Russia has all of North America's oil refineries and related infrastructure marked as primary-targets, such is total war - so in the aftermath it definitely wouldn't be as simple as reconnecting some broken pipework and wiring-up a generator: the entire gulf-coast's set of oil refineries would be obliterated.

So, yes, you're not wrong: we will all band together, but I'll add that we'll band-together for a world of suck for 10-20 years before we mostly succumb to then-untreatable cancers, and our offspring will grow up as illiterate and uneducated serfs.

I must say, relocating to Chile or New Zealand is looking very attractive right now...

This assumes a rapid, catastrophic collapse, which seems unlikely. Possible, but unlikely. More likely are localized disasters and gradual, sometimes imperceptible decline. These things have trickle-down impacts (migration, food shortages, etc) but are generally unlikely to trigger full on survival scenarios for most people. This isn't to say our industrialized food chain isn't problematic, it certainly is, but a gun is less likely to aid most people in day to day survival.

> This assumes a rapid, catastrophic collapse, which seems unlikely.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists recently set the Doomsday clock to 100s to midnight.

OK? But I'm not sure of your point. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists doesn't know much more than the rest of us do about this. Anyone can tell you there's lots of nuclear weapons and that using them would lead to a massive social collapse. But a nuke hasn't been deployed in anger for nearly 80 years. In that time there's been countless natural disasters, pandemics, conflicts and social upheavals. I know what I'm planning for.

We also haven't had a proper pandemic for a century, and then we had one. Nukes aren't something you can do much about, but excluding then entirely from one's disaster planning feels like a mistake.

> We also haven't had a proper pandemic for a century, and then we had one.

I disagree. COVID-19 has certainly been the widest scales pandemic, but in addition to high profile localized pandemics (Ebola and Zika), we've had several smaller serious outbreaks (H1N1 killed between 200,000 and 500,000 people worldwide, and also overwhelmingly impacted younger people).

> Nukes aren't something you can do much about, but excluding then entirely from one's disaster planning feels like a mistake.

Nor would I suggest you should exclude it. But as the parent comment stated, the real problem in such as situation is social (restarting industrial systems), which isn't really something I can prepare for.

Disasters, yes, not collapse.

Totally agree. Nuclear war is something completely different. There is nothing to come back to.

Resource scarcity would turn things violent really quickly for the survivors.

What use is cash in the case of a true catastrophe? And I don’t see the benefit of having a gun with or without ammunition. I would never ever be willing to shoot another person (or even an animal), even to protect myself or mine. I’d rather we are raped, tortured, and killed than harm another person.

> What use is cash in the case of a true catastrophe?

Not much long term in a civilizational collapse, but even then it might still be useful before everyone realizes what's going on.

> And I don’t see the benefit of having a gun with or without ammunition. I would never ever be willing to shoot another person (or even an animal), even to protect myself or mine. I’d rather we are raped, tortured, and killed than harm another person.

I think that's probably an unusually high level of commitment to nonviolence.

It's also creates moral dilemmas: allowing someone to be "raped, tortured, and killed" by others is harming that person. All your principle may mean in practice is the innocent are the ones harmed and the guilty are left unharmed.

If you live in a more rural area, a gun with ammunition can be a viable source of food. The shelf life of ammunition is a squishy subject, but with good storage it's reasonable to expect it to last on the order of a human lifespan.

Absent a complete ecosystem breakdown, game feeds itself. Obviously if too many people are hunting, there's the risk of killing off all of the game. Which is another excellent reason that is would be a strategy better suited to a less populated area.

It's hard to imagine a more efficient way (measured in money and space required) to supply food for potentially decades.

While I understand non-violent, sometimes violence is the worst of your bad choices. I have no plan on shooting another human, but I need to reserve that right because there are people who will shoot me (Russia if you are in Ukraine)

Unless you are an active combatant in a war, or civil war, that's usually not your problem.

I plan to keep out of war. However those live in Ukraine a week ago you have no choice in the matter - I cannot ignore the possibility that the same might happen to me (though it does seem like a remote chance)

Yep, we are all (in certaim age groups and qualification levels) one general mobilization away from being meat for the meat grinder. The basic "this dangerous end of rifle, point at enemy, pull there" training will be provided in those cases so.

>>I’d rather we are raped, tortured, and killed than harm another person.

What a truly bizarre statement, and I seriously doubt you mean it.

Did you notice the poster's name?

Cash on hand is important for basic trade. There are plenty boring examples of extended power outages where people fall back on cash for buying groceries and such.

That's an interesting take. Do you have any personal experience with those types of victimization and their impacts? You also say "we". Do the other members of the group share the same position?

Honestly, I think if you had resources you would eventually run into someone who would use violence to take those resources and the last line in your post is exactly what would happen.

Defending against real harm is reasonable. Just don't be pro-active about it.

If you don't have to worry about hingry predators, large ones like bears or wolves, tigers and lions, I think an axe and a saw for fire and construction wood is a better alternative than a gun.

EDIT: Hunting, a gun can be used for hunting. If you know how to, if you don't it's still pretty useless.