Many years ago in the Northeast, I was a teen convert to TSCC. A Family from the Midwest moved in. They had a huge two year food supply for themselves and their four kids. Packed into this was many rounds of ammunition. I was only 16 and could not understand why all that ammunition would be in with the food, but the wife smoothly explained to me that when the apocalyptic economic breakdown happened (which was practically around the corner), they were going to shoot off all of the desperately hungry people who tried to steal their food.

Did TSCC used to teach people to do this?

"Whoever gives to the poor will not want, but he who hides his eyes will get many a curse." Proverbs, 28:27

Survivalism is not Biblical.

So why on Earth did Mormons get into preparing to shoot off hungry people? Brigham Young Mentality?

Us versus them goes back to Joseph Smith.

"Us vs them" goes back way further than JS, Jr.

donbagley Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> "Whoever gives to the poor will not want, but he
> who hides his eyes will get many a curse."
> Proverbs, 28:27
>
> Survivalism is not Biblical.

While I'm not on board with much of "survivalism," there certainly is some wisdom in preparing for disasters and protecting your family. I think most people are able to discern between the violence of a thief and voluntarily giving to the poor. Don't you think this verse is addressing someone who is stingy in giving to the poor rather than someone who seeks to protect their home from a thief?

The Bible actually seems to argue that we're pretty valuable, and it's okay to defend ourselves. Maybe you missed this other scripture from Exodus 22:

2“If a thief is caught breaking in at night and is struck a fatal blow, the defender is not guilty of bloodshed; 3but if it happens after sunrise, the defender is guilty of bloodshed.

And this one from Luke 22 where Jesus specifically tells disciples to buy a sword:

35 Then Jesus asked them, “When I sent you without purse, bag or sandals, did you lack anything?”

“Nothing,” they answered.

36 He said to them, “But now if you have a purse, take it, and also a bag; and if you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one.

The difference is between self defense and hoarding.

donbagley Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> "Whoever gives to the poor will not want, but he
> who hides his eyes will get many a curse."
> Proverbs, 28:27
>
> Survivalism is not Biblical.

That quote supports charity, but does not condemn preparation for emergencies.

"The wise store up choice food and olive oil, but fools gulp theirs down." Proverbs 21:20

Yes - shooting and killing is part and parcel of what was taught and I expect is still taught in the food prep courses. Not taught in Sunday meetings, these are the optional Saturday classes for the extreme survival nuts.

Not sharing your food with the hungry is so Christ like. Kinda like it letting children of gays be baptized. Jesus says tonsend the children to him except the children of gays. Mormonism is so Christ like.

It's not just Mormons.

Many survivalists/zombie apocalypse folks stockpile ammo.

Recently specific types of ammo were rare. Stores rationed what you could buy. People were grabbing far mor ammo than they would have just because they were afraid they'd never get another chance.

Of course defending ones home is a given.

Lots of folks would plan on hunting to supplement their food storage. I know it was Dad's plan. He told me where to go if food was low regardless of the season.

I remember back in the day, 80's?, when food storage was a hot topic and often talked about in Elder's Quorum meetings. Guns & ammunition was also preached as a way to "harvest" animals for food and with an undertone, to protect your food storage from thieves. Of course, this was also around the time when the three Nephites were hitchhiking around and warning those who gave them rides to store up 2 years of food. Remember those? It was always someone's Uncle or Cousin who picked one of them up.

I guess the 3 Nephites warned them for nothing, seeing that nothing drastic ever happened. Now the church says to have a 90 day supply. Two years is long gone.

This is a logical extension of having a 2 year supply.

Most natural disasters are short term, and localized. Earthquakes tend to be local, and not many miles away grocery stores and whatnot are working fine. Forest fires and floods tend to require that you bug out with what you can put in your car on very short notice. Blizzards tend to subside in a few days. Ask the people in Rexburg how useful their two year supply was when the Teton Dam broke. They had piles of muddy rusty canned goods with the labels washed off.

Unemployment can go on for months, or even years, but frankly, a year's supply of money would be more useful than a year's supply of food. Can't buy gas or pay mortgage payments or rent with canned wheat.

If your house water supply or sewer goes out for more than a few days, local officials are going to require evacuation of the neighborhood.

The only situation in which a 2 year supply makes any sense is if there is a complete collapse of the food supply and a complete collapse of local infrastructure for months on end. Hard to imagine how that could happen other than in a world wide economic and governmental collapse. And yeah, then you would need ammunition. And gasoline. And a 2 year supply of prescriptions, and a bunch of other stuff besides dried beans, canned wheat, and off-tasting water in reused soda bottles.

It always amused me in the Mad Max type movies how all of civilization had collapsed, yet oil refineries seemed to still be pumping out gasoline. Funny how that works.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/26/2017 08:20PM by Brother Of Jerry.

My ex liked to talk about how people would try to get your food storage and how he would shoot them. (You know, in case of zombie apocolypse or what-not) yeah...WWJD? Oh, I know,do not share; kill starving people.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/26/2017 08:24PM by aquarius123.

No need. That food will (sometimes) kill you all by itself!

My brother and I spent about 8 hours throwing out the ancient food storage that had been around since the 60s. Some of the home canned stuff was unbelievably foul and the grain cans held new species of insect life.

I remember throwing out spoiled food storage--how nasty it was! We would be better off saving our spare change for emergencies.

I used to play in a band in high school and some of my college years. We used to practice in our drummer's basement, his dad was very into Cleon Skousen and John Birch society, as well as food storage. Once while we were practicing his mom came down and opened a secret door in the paneling to get something out of their food storage. There on the wall was a Browning Automatic Rifle -as in WWII vintage / full auto. His mom let us look at it. His dad just died a few weeks ago, 95 yo, and his obituary reminded me of this.

A two year food supply? No got. Ammo..I got.

The doctrine of things will be super evil just before Jesus comes is actively taught. Zombie apocalypse and shoot em up fantasies logically follow, at least in country where you see "BEER ICE AMMO" on billboards.

We used to have a store in Roseville, CA, that sold booze and guns both. The title over the storefront was "Liquor Sports."

it was the godless commies who were going to invade the US (see the movie Red Dawn), and the all John Birchers had to be prepared. From some things that I read on this site, it sounded like a number of the GAs at the time (60s) were on board with the John Bircher's visions of commie hoards and/or hippie communes overrunning the country.

Funny how so many folks who insist how wonderful the afterlife is gonna be suddenly think they better delay the trip as long as possible.

I can only imagine how many millions..perhaps billions have been wasted on food spoilage by chrustians mirmons and preppers...hell knows we wasted our 30-50 k and we were poor by most standards...generations of food hauled to the dump when granny dies...far asshooting folks...geez...ya think it's worth it eddy??...i dont...think of the smell in four days while your mad maxxing it in the backyard bunker...if it ever does happen im sure its going to be far uglier than the most hardened prepper could fantacize...but as you can see...even the fossils have backed way the hell up..was seven years when i was a kid...then two...now a couple weeks...meh...its just more bible bs bantered about by people scared to live for fear theyll die...seems thats what religeon does best...scare the bejeebers outta the kids...theres no age limit on kids...if you asked em about it today id guesss it would be a hinkley shuffle...i dont know that we teach that...what a pr guy...sure glad the hike to missouri was called off indefinitely...they didnt teach that either

In the late 60's the head of the U of U Institute of Religion was a family friend- a former missionary comp of my father. He assured us that he had the firepower to defend his assets against jaybirds. Use your imagination.

My family had a NonMo neighbor in Fresno in the late 1980's- early 1990's who was a total survivalist nut. When we were there just for a few years, he told my dad he understood why we might not bring all of our food and weapons with us but told us we were welcome to store some survival food and weapons in his underground bunker - just enough to last until we could get back to our main stash back in Utah.

My parents never had the proper 2-year supply anyway, and I'm not sure there were any weapons.They had about a month's worth of food and drink plus roughly enough money out of the bank to get by for a month or two.

From my reading (bear in mind, I only have a contact lens in one eye), it seemed like the two-year supply of food and guns was because Smith n Young figured they would have to hold out that long against the United States Army.

... and bring about Armageddon. Hence, the "Latter Days." But, hey! why not have something to nibble on while yer waitin'.

I'm pretty sure that's how that came about.

Correction me if I'm wrong.

In a WROL scenario, ammunition can be used for self defense as well as currency.

Hopefully that day will never come, but when gangs are roaming your neighborhood looting and you don't have any means of protecting your family, well... RfM won't be around for you to post about it :)

For those not current on their prepper acronyms, WROL is without rule of law. (I had to look it up) Like I said above, that is the only fantasy in which a 2 year supply makes any sense at all, and even then, it doesn't make much.

Could it happen? Sure. An astroid could also hit your house, or a volcano could appear in the neighborhood too. None of these are very likely. Floods and fires happen regularly, both of which tend to destroy stored food.

Even in major disasters (in recent years, Haiti, Fukushima, Kathmandu) you never hear about people starving to death. Getting food and water to a disaster site is relatively easy. Disease and shelter from the elements are more problematic.

Food storage was a scam to get Mormons to by food from welfare farms that are tax free (hey, it's a church program), grown and processed with free labor, and then sold to TBMers who think they are getting a screaming deal, though the church no doubt makes a tidy profit from the sales.

Follow the money.

I worry more about quarantine from an epidemic. Ever hear of the plague?

Worst case scenario is a "nuclear winter". In recent years, until this one, it was becoming unlikely. Indeed, a professor under whom I studied "International Negotiation" was later the man who negotiated the first SALT treaty under Nixon. Gradually, we have been reducing our nuclear arsenals. Now???

I grew up in the 60's and 70's. We had our 2 year supply of food. We had guns and ammunition. We had sheets of plywood stacked in the garage to board up the widows of our house during the battles that would rage before the return of Jesus.

I used to bug my dad to let me use that plywood to build a tree house and was always told we would need for the above stated purpose. I think he eventually used it to build a puppet theater for my moms puppet show business.....we never did need to board up the windows.

As a kid, I grew up totally thinking I would be shooting guns out our boarded up windows while panic ruled the streets outside.

Even with the Cuban missile crisis in 1963, and the great blackout not long after, I was never brought up to fear chaos and the need for a large supply of food to say nothing of guns. I saw natural disasters including a hurricane which killed five people near where we lived and knocked out bridges, etc. Never were we put in fear. When 911 happened we did not feel threatened even though one daughter would have been at ground zero if she had not felt funny about taking a job in the towers and decided not to work there. That was a day before it happened.

I do not believe in having guns handy as they are more dangerous to those with them than to any imagined enemy. While still a member at least in name, we were threatened with flooding and I knew exactly who could be affected but....the bishop had put someone in charge who had just arrived from the west. LOL. I even offered to help because I not only had seen flooding both of the rivers and the ocean but had been told by my father about a flood back in the 1930s and he showed me pictures he had taken then, so I knew of other dangers. Heck, I even had a photograph from the 1880s of a flood in California showing my grandfather in hip boots - picture taken by a relative, J. Pitcher Spooner.

Now see, if you had a gun, you could have shot the flood and killed it.

Only in Mormon doctrine. I can, however, avoid the flood. We lived on top of a hill so it was down the hill at the river that the damage happened and people died. Where I live now is close (about 1100 feet) to the ocean and I can run in about three minutes to elevation 120 feet which should suffice even in a tsunami which would first hit Long Island.

My wife and I are preppers of sorts. We enjoy canning and storing food and rotate it so that it doesn't get old. This summer we canned approx. 25 dozen qts. and 25 dozen pts. of vegetables, meat and fruit. We buy in bulk and on sale so we save a lot of money by doing so.

I built wooden crates that hold 2 dozen qt. jars. The pt. boxes hole 3 dozen jars. They stack and have a door in the side so we can access what is inside. Very organized and very handy.

We may never experience a situation where we would have to rely on this food but never say never. "I would rather have it and not need it than to need it and not have it." Those who mock such preparedness we figure may be the very people knocking on our door it a time of need.

OMG, I'd think you were talking about my ex-inlaws except they lived in California. They had a 2-year supply of Sam Andy dehydrated food and at least a #10 can full of ammo for each of the over-300 guns he owned. He did his own reloading. When he'd run out of shelf space to store the ammo, he'd just build another little room onto the back of the house.

And it was the same reasoning--that when times were hard, people would know Mormons had food so we'd have to be armed to fight them off. Like, I guess, each of the kids and grandkids would be stationed at a window or something with a rifle to shoot anyone in sight.

I told him once that if we were surrounded by hungry people, especially children, I'd share what I had and then when we ran out I guess we'd all die together. He told me that he'd feed the kids but I'd be on my own. He died 14 years ago with no fanfare, no chance to ever shoot anyone, and they dumped all the food storage in the local landfill.

What did they do with all the brass? He may have saved away a fortune in Ammo, the gun nuts drove the price up really high because Obama was going to take away their guns.

His kids fought over and split up the guns. I'd imagine the brass went with them. From what I heard from my kids, my ex got almost 100 guns. But he probably sold off a lot. His name is very well known in the local prostitute world (my son showed me the backpage site where they talk about and warn each other about clients), and hookers don't come cheap.

His dad must be turning over in his grave. He had a fit when we had been married a year and sold a gun to buy a used washing machine because we were about to have a baby. I still didn't have a dryer, had to hang diapers on the clothesline. I told him that a washing machine was more important than a gun. He let me know in no uncertain terms that NOTHING was more important than a gun. Especially when you lived in North Las Vegas. So he gave us another gun and we were supposed to be indebted to him for life.

Ammunition was the old "food supply", as was knowledge to hunt, trap, fish, etc., and the knowledge to clean the kill, and cook it too.

Of course that is when there was land: an environment for animals to live, and for people to explore...

If you are going to play the food storage game, then a supply of ammo and guns would make sense. If you lived in a world that you needed to live off at least a year's worth of food then you would need guns to be able to keep it and protect yourself since it is unlikely that 911 would still be an efficient way to get help.

I remember when I had just returned from Iraq and my mom was telling her how she was the ward "emergency resources coordinator" which meant that her job was to inventory everybody's food storage so they could pool it all together at a church building.

I asked her if they would all have a years supply of bullets since they would need to protect something like that from marauders.

If the shit ever hit the fan it would make sense that you would need to be armed to protect your food. Food would be worth more than cash and people would take it.

as a young girl in the 70s, my dad told us in a FHE that we would need guns to protect our food storage if worse came to worst. I asked who he would shoot. He said even our neighbors if necessary. I was aghast. I said I would rather die of starvation sharing food, than shoot someone who was hungry. Especially my neighbors.

It may not be hungry people trying to take your food. Food would become a commodity like cash that could be traded for all sorts of things. It would have a value far more than just being sustenance.

If you had to live off of a years worth of food storage that would mean you would be living in a world far more colder than what you are used to.

I've always thought an economic collapse would be bad times. It just happened in Venezuela. Bad times. Looking at the current political/economic climate I don't things have ever looked nuttier. Add to that, people have been subjected to a butt load of apocalyptic zombie type of media. There's a lot of dumb people out there. Maybe having some of food put away to CYA might not be a bad idea.

That would hurt if someone bit into it... no matter how bad you needed it, that may not be a good place to keep it.