The world is increasingly becoming a less comfortable place. You, as a teenage or young adult man reading this, have hopefully recognized this. You’d have to be oblivious not to. A lot of us are. This guide is meant to help give a high school to college-aged guy some ideas on how to increase his own personal preparedness. I have some small experience with this: I grew up in a moderately prepared family, and due to the intersection of theirs and my interests, I have what I think is a relatively realistic view of what is an attainable level of preparedness for your average guy without a lot of resources and support. I admit that this article will likely strike some as unbalanced in scope.
Let’s talk about personal situations. Yours is going to be critical. A lot of this information is going to be of differing levels of usefulness. Some things you need to consider include:
How old are you? There may not be much difference biologically and mentally between a seventeen, eighteen, and twenty-one-year-old you. But there sure is a great big legal one, and that will affect what is available to you. Having only recently turned twenty-one, a lot more things are open to me in terms of what I can now purchase, but they were mostly things I’d already tried, (handguns, alcohol, and tobacco) so the efficacy of the laws should also be considered.
Disclaimer: Do not do anything illegal, I am a fine upstanding pastor’s son who pays his taxes, volunteers during local elections, helps out the elderly, definitely supports women’s suffrage, and definitely has not made his own guns and alcohol. Did I mention that I pay my taxes?
Where do you live? Are you in the US, Poland, or Brazil? Urban or rural? How much space do you have for gardening or shooting practice? Your neighborhood alone can make a world of difference regarding what you’re able to practice. In one house we lived in, we only kept rabbits and four “pet” chickens because of neighborhood restrictions. In another house in the same county we’re able to have pigs, goats, and a steer. Can you shoot an air gun or practice fire starting in your yard, or will your cat lady neighbor call the cops on you if she sees you with so much as a Swiss Army Knife?
What’s your family situation? Are you on your own in an apartment, or still in your parent’s house, or some other arrangement? Are your parents like mine, fine with letting a fifteen-year-old have guns and ammo in his closet, allowed to buy whatever blade he has money for? Or is your mother a raging hoplophobe? (It’s usually the mother, if your father is a raging hoplophobe then you have two mothers.) Are your parents divorced or together? Moving kits between houses might get complicated, but so would maintaining duplicate kits. Sharing a room with a sibling could also complicate your plans; a friend of…