Constantly see people online talk about "when the robber comes thru my door" or whatever, and some of it is memes, but a lot of it is just people legit discussing what the "best weapon" to fight robbers breaking into your house at night would be - Giving it so much thought as if it is a legitimate concern. So is it? Does it happen a lot?
Masturbatory fantasies of getting to kill someone with a gun, and then get praised for it
I've lived in cities in the US most of my life and I routinely forget to lock my door, I've never had anything happen. Nobody is desperate enough to go rooting through my dirty laundry, shoes, and old electronics for something of value.
It's just suburban psychosis
I woke up from a nap to someone rooting through my shit in the living room in the middle of the day.
I think people like to fantasize about what they would do in certain scenarios, but the truth is you don't really know. It felt so surreal that I actually just passed him and went to the bathroom.
When it dawned on me what was happening, I just asked him to leave. He just said he meant no harm and actually asked me if he could stay a while to get out of the rain.
I was like well I don't know about that haha
I woke up from a nap to someone rooting through my shit in the living room in the middle of the day.
The only time I've had someone do something like that it was my landlord, fucker was trying to show off my apartment while I was still living there
Should have started blasting, free kill on a landlord and you missed it smh (this is a joke for whoever screenshots this)
TBH I wish I was armed but then I'd have something for people to steal too. Xi pls arm me
I was on the other end of this once. I was being shown an apartment and the tenant was clearly not expecting it (or just didn’t give a fuck, which I respect). I just cut it short and left because there were several other red flags anyway
Full disclosure I personally support an an armed proletariat. That said my favorite thing to ask home protection people is, "when is the last time you had your fire extinguisher tested?"
Its a free service offered by most fire departments. Far, far more children are killed by fires than roving packs of murderers. Guns are much more likely to be used for suicide or domestic violence. If you own a gun but not a fire extinguisher you don't really care about protecting your family, you just want to kill someone
This made me realize that I didn't even know where to look for a fire extinguisher because I've never noticed one in any store I've been to. Apparently they're mostly available in some section of hardware stores that I haven't been to often
Meanwhile there was a prominent booth for buying guns in every walmart near me until walmart stopped selling them altogether
Some grocery stores sell the smaller ones also. But yeah, Americans are super weird about safety. Taking a basic first aid course is going to help you save lives far better than shoving a pistol in your pants or learning krav maga
Always make notice of fire exits when you enter a building. That will more likely be useful than carrying a gun ever will
That's another good one. If you're bowling with your kids and a rogue firearms instructor starts shooting the place up and you know where the exit is, you might get your family out of there. If you pull out your piece and return fire there are now two unhinged idiots filling the air with lead
Wherever you go, always have a plan to evacuate everyone in the room
aldi and harbor freight sell some shitty little $20 ones
They’re right next to the smoke alarms.
Test your smoke alarms too btw
Don't forget CO detectors as well. Carbon monoxide is sneaky, and a simple detector could save your life someday
An armed proletariat should probably take the form of an organized and coordinated militia, with everyone trained on how to use their weapons and checks on their health to ensure they're able. Randomly strewn about weapons purchased on credit for anyone who shows up to a gun store seems bad.
Ideally, but under no pretext and all of that. I was mostly just stating that I didn't support blanket gun bans though I have to admit I don't really trust Americans with them
Additional pro tip: don’t just keep a fire extinguisher in your kitchen. You need one in your bedroom, too (in the event there is a fire when you are asleep and you need an extinguisher to get out or get your kids).
also kids don't kill people with fire extinguishers, but every year toddlers kill people with guns in the US so lmao
They also make small extinguishers for your car. Though EV fires are nearly impossible to put out, so perhaps it’s not necessary anymore…
Someone should design a tactical fire extinguisher with picatinny rails and shit to get chuds to fantasize about putting out a fire with. Then they could just fetishize those and own like 40 of them and maybe actually do some good with their lives
Design a fire extinguisher that looks like a flamethrower and chuds would be all over that shit.
Sorta tangentially, many American suburban developments are arranged primarily to be as defensible as possible in a way that makes the people living there extremely paranoid. Suburbs often have one or two entrances / exits branching into one looping and some number of non-looping paths. As a result, there will almost never be anyone driving through the suburb without a deliberate reason to be there. Most often, it's because they live there. Neighbors will quickly recognize each other's cars and be able to identify each other's comings and goings. Seeing an unexpected car (or any person of color as many of these spaces are entirely white) will immediately raise questions on the neighborhood snitch app or text group. Also, neighbors are constantly spying on each other because the structure of suburbia highly encourages it. This type of suburban design was created explicitly because of and for the purpose of racist paranoia.
Show
Also people were compelled to root out secret "commies" hiding among them, as that was another thread of McCarthy era paranoia.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Nextdoor.com and ring doorbells also enable techno-surveillance and maximum freakouts anytime a black guy walks through
I saw a documentary once about Americans who have a lot of guns, and there was one guy in it who kept loaded guns stashed all over his house so he'd "always be ready" if someone broke in. The interviewer didn't bring up that he was probably also leaving weapons everywhere for the burglar to use against him, and I wonder if he'd ever even considered why that might be a bad idea.
burgler is going to the big cartoon safe in the freedom room, he ain't looking for rando rifles hidden under floor boards or false bottom in inflatable waifu
If you report a home burglary to the police they immediately assume that you're a drug dealer as they're not generally worth the risk except for the kind of target who tends to have cash and guns and drugs around
So is it? Does it happen a lot?
No, it’s the paranoid delusions of lead poisoned white Christians who’ve been told their entire lives that they’re persecuted and need to be vigilant against the masses that want to harm them
Closest thing to a home invasion I've ever experienced was an elderly couple that walked in on me taking a massive bong rip and asking if some guy named Jake or John or something lived here, turned out they were in the right place but the wrong floor.
Americans always seem to think that everybody is out to get them all of the time.
I think it's the inevitable end state of liberal ideology: "there is no society, just atomized individuals, everyone's in competition with each other, every man for himself."
they have only one filter that they use to see the world "threat"
Upper middle class white devils living in suburbs have a dim awareness of how their lives are situated on a mountain of corpses. Their imagination thus conjures for them an image of lower class rebellion against them. These suburban whites are already paranoid, since they're caught between two poles. They're not rich enough to be ghoulish, grinning bourgeoisie, and they're not desperate enough to identify with the working class. And these are the people who collect the most guns and obsess over home invasion. Not poorer people living in high crime neighborhoods, but sheltered whities in gated communities
So they're paranoid from two angles. With the capitalist class they'll concoct wild conspiracy theories about mind control or vaccines or whatever. With lower class people, it's just racist panic over black or Latino people existing.
A lot of the home invasion prepper types also claim they'll be prepared in the case of a tyrannical government takeover, but I seriously do not believe them. None of them are going to shoot a cop or national guard solider. I don't remember a single instance of that happening in the midst of covid curfews. Their criteria for when tyranny starts is ridiculous too. Tyranny is just gun control, and that's it. So long as suburban whitey still has small arms to play with, America is still apparently trucking along just fine.
All true. I'd just add that nonwhite Americans in poor neighborhoods absolutely do own guns as well, mostly for personal protection. They just tend not to fetishize them or own dozens
Damn you've just described my dad lol. I always thought it was weird that he seems to be aware that things are unsustainable and will collapse, yet at the same time he concludes that this will lead to "city people flooding into our neighborhoods to steal and kill everything", and seems to think the solution is to "prep" with food and supplies and fortify his house into a bunker to hide away from everyone, instead of like... working together with community to survive? The more likely thing to happen? But yeah I know now that it's just the racism talking.
Preppers never made sense even by their own logic. If they're so worried about a sudden collapse and post-apocalypse raiders coming to steal everything, they're going to immediately go for stockpiles of food and guns. Yeah, it's got to be racism. Preppers see their potential enemies (probably caricatured as black/latino gangs) as less than human and less capable of making plans. They see other people as zombies or animals. They can only imagine a future where every single person on Earth is against them, but are also incapable of defeating a single old man in a bunker. It's a twisted mindset that could only have come from American suburbia.
My uncle is a prepper type too, although he's slightly more community oriented in a certain way. He's convinced the apocalypse will be a religious war, with a coalition of atheists coming together to murder all Christians (also when he describes atheists he uses the same terminology and framework that antisemites use when describing Jews). He's convinced the local Methodist church to build panic rooms and long term storage into their community center, which otherwise just hosts school dances and basketball games. He teaches gun stuff through the church too, and he spends a lot of time gardening and doing carpentry, which he also says will be important. Honestly if the weird racist apocalypse stuff weren't involved, my uncle would have pretty healthy hobbies and a good relationship with people in his church. It's too bad he's also a racist, transphobic lunatic.
I've always considered writing a post-apocalyptic story based around this. One where it's actually a group of survivors doing community outreach that manage to survive and have to deal with violent lone wolf freaks every now and again. Instead of the usual Burgerland story take where the community centred survivors are weak, small bean gentle folk who can't deal with the harsh reality of the wastelands.
Depending on the community it's being discussed in, "robber" might be short hand for "cop" since they do really like to do no-knock raids for the dumbest shit in America
I know a guy who constantly talks about the guns he owns and the ammo he uses and and how he'd kill anyone who tries to hurt his horses. He lives in bumfuck nowhere and, as far as he's told me, has never had any issues with his tiny handful of neighbors. It's like someone who lives in Colorado obsessively preparing for hurricanes.
Or some boomer retiree fox news watching old fucker living in a Michigan townhouse on the lakefront worrying about ISIS and MS13 racing across the border of Mexico to personally kick down their door and eat their ice cream
We did a genocide founded on "I live here now if you invade my home I'll kill you" and then followed those people to do it again, playing the victim the whole time
The crimes of this guilty land will not be purged away, but with blood.
No it doesn't. It's the expression of the collective subconscious of the settler in all Americans. Even many non whyite muricans still internalize this psychology.
It's really weird because home invasions are much more common in South Africa than the US, yet we don't obsess about it but nearly as much, even if most doors have security gates and windows are barred over here. Mainly some deranged chuds obsess about it, but not your average person, even those that have unfortunately experienced it. Here it's more a vigilance thing, lock the doors and gates, make sure your car is locked, make sure no one is following you home, etc.
I thought y'all had like broken glass and debris on top of y'alls' stone walls.....
Was this western propaganda?
We do have spikes or barbed wire on the top of walls (and even electric fences in the richer areas), and when I say security gate, I mean similar to the kind you see at prisons. It's not entirely propaganda, South Africa is a very dangerous country. Crime is very bad, especially violent crime/robberies and gender based violence against women. But we don't have broken glass on walls, barbed condoms, or cars with flamethrowers, that's just fake news really, and that's the propaganda.
Ic. there are certainly parts of america this way as well.
Especially very expensive houses next too straight up slums. idk why, but Rich people love to overlook the slums.
I always joke that if there was a zombie apocalypse South Africa would come out on top because all our houses are already fortified lol.
I used to work at a place that had a department in South Africa and would meet up with them every so often. I've always struggled to come up with a Marxist analysis of the situation (mostly due to ignorance) in an attempt to redirect the chuds I worked with away from the 'poor blacks causing trouble because that's just how they are' type thinking that they were predisposed to. Have you done a post about something like this anywhere on Hexbear?
