When we start talking about prepping, or Preppers, the root of that word or concept is prepare. All prepare means and Prepping by extension, is to get ready. The obvious question that follows is to get ready “for what”? The what, in that question determines the activity that you choose to take part in and determining “what” to prepare for has already been done by most of you out there or you wouldn’t be reading this article most likely.

If your “what” is a power outage like they demonstrated in American Blackout, you would prepare (get ready) for that situation and possibly purchase spare batteries, a generator and start thinking about how to get around in your world without electricity. You would do this to offset some of the inconveniences and possibly safety risks of living without power. If the situation (what you are preparing for) is a lack of ammunition as another example, you would purchase more logically so as to not be as adversely impacted by a shortage. This has led certain people in society to label anyone who purchases extra of anything as a Hoarder. They seem to try and equate someone who is “getting ready” with the same people who have some type of mental issue portrayed on another T.V show, Hoarders.

I wanted to address this subject a while back, but got off into other things obviously. I get a little irritated when I hear preppers called hoarders and even more ticked when we are admonished to stop hoarding anything like we are little children being scolded by our parents. Are Preppers Hoarders? I certainly don’t think so and even advocate hoarding in my own way. I choose to present what the naysayers call hoarding as stocking up, but I’ll get into the differences and some of my opinions as to why this is a ridiculous correlation and why I think people who try to tell you how much of anything you can have are no better than the people who are trying to take away what you have in the first place.

Arguments against stocking up

I have seen a lot of posts in the past and YouTube videos complaining about most recently the ammo shortage. Six months ago, you couldn’t find ammo easily.  Now it seems to have cleared up considerably, but back then, when stores would receive a shipment, they would only get a small amount of ammo and that would be gone quickly. Prices doubled and quadrupled in some cases and everyone was running around trying to get their hands on a box or two without much success. There was ammo to be had, but it wasn’t as easy as running down to the local Wal-Mart anymore and the prices did go up.

The ammo shortage made me change my behavior in a couple of ways. For starters, I wasn’t able to go buy a box of my common calibers anymore when I went to the store. On some days I got lucky, but I didn’t want to pay $40 for a box that not too long ago was $16. I had my own supply of ammo already so I didn’t need to. I didn’t have millions of rounds, but I had enough to make up what I’ll call my minimum recommended amounts for each caliber, or relatively close to it. By tracking all of my ammunition inventory on a spreadsheet, I knew exactly what I had and what I needed. When the crunch hit, I didn’t really need anything else, but it would have been nice to have.

The second way the ammunition shortage changed my behavior was that I didn’t go to the range for a long time. It was simply too expensive and with the shortage, I had a hard time rationalizing buying any ammo to go shoot in the first place. I was not going to eat into my ammunition minimum storage so I abstained and waited.

You are being greedy

Now, I made a decision not to purchase because it was expensive, not because it was gone. You could still find plenty of ammo at online vendors and at gun shows. If you wanted to get ammo you could, it was just more difficult and expensive. I did find some deals and purchased several hundred rounds when it made sense, and I had the funds. This is around the time that people started whining about this predicament and started writing articles about how mean and even wrong we preppers were. I heard so many times about how “those preppers are causing this” or how people are panicking and that is ruining it for “the rest of us”. Who is the rest of us?

What makes anyone think they are more entitled to any commodity than anyone else? Why do you think I need to modify my behavior so that you can keep doing what you want to, the way you want to? I wrote about this in another post a little about how I heard a grown man complaining to the clerk at Wal-Mart because he couldn’t buy any .22 ammo. Life sucks pal, get over it.

These same individuals who are talking about how the people who are trying to prepare are ruining it for the rest of the world will try and give their rationale for this belief. They will say that there isn’t enough to go around; you are being greedy if you take more than you need. Sometimes they will put conditions on how much or what you can take and say, training ammo is fine, but don’t buy all the tactical ammo. The biggest reason why you don’t need any more ammo than one box or two is that “you can’t carry all of it”. I can’t carry my truck either, does that mean I shouldn’t buy one?

Give me a break!

Here’s the way I look at it. We all have access to the same information about what is happening in the world. More importantly, we all have the same opportunities to learn from history. The people who are complaining about preppers stockpiling are adults who should know better. If you choose not to prepare for a situation in which you might not be able to get something you need, that is your choice.  Don’t call me an idiot for planning ahead when you didn’t. I am not a hoarder because I am storing up food for when there isn’t any or I am unable to get to it. I don’t have some deviant medical condition because I can see the writing on the wall and I am taking steps to protect my family when there are shortages. I don’t need your permission or blessing to do what I can to ensure my family’s survival and I really could care less if you are inconvenienced and aren’t able to go plinking with your .22 whenever you want.

If you want to prevent this from happening to your family my advice is to get off your butt and start stockpiling yourself. That way, whenever the ammunition is in short supply again, you will already have your own and then you too will be one less person out there scratching around trying to find it. Be proactive about the situation and stop writing articles or making videos about how Preppers aren’t making it easy for you to be lazy. If you want something in this world, go out and get it. If you aren’t motivated enough to take care of your needs when you can, don’t cry about it when you can’t.