EDC compass

[Mortblanc]

Pete, we have discussed firearms extensively on here and TPTB did not take your guns away 20 years ago. Except for handguns you can have a very useful battery of firearms suited for any occasion. Between your two levels of normal firearms certification you can accomplish a lot.

Our population density variations was also in my mind, and stays in my mind, while discussing things with you folks over there. But you also have wide variation in population density in the smaller overall land area. Your nation simply presents a smaller over all target for any destructive device.

While I am in a rural area, and the general density where I sit is lower here than in GB, remember that the majority of the population over here is in the same situation as you are in urban GB.

50%+ of our population lives in urban centers that are located within 50 miles of a coast line. Most of our east coast has a population density of more then 1000 psm. We have a single unbroken urban area of more than 1,000 psm that stretches from Boston in the north to North Carolina in the south, a distance of more than 1500 linear coast miles and reaching back 50 miles inland.

Our major cities will be much more dense than that. On 911 the World Trade Center contained a population of more than 40,000 people in the two buildings that were destroyed. Those urban centers pack them vertically, not horizontally.

1/4 of the U.S. population resides in California within 50 miles of the coast and the inclusive west coast contains 1/3 of the U.S. population and produces 1/3 of our GNP.

That leaves a huge mass of the interior core of our land area that is not worth bombing since it has less than 100 psm and almost 50% of the land west of the Mississippi has much less than that. Our state of Idaho, at my last check, had 5 psm over an area the size of Scotland. There are a half dozen states, an area larger than all of Europe, that are empty desert with small towns only along the national motorways and at desert oasis, like Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Phoenix and Santa Fe.

Our west is a vast empty zone due to lack of water. Nothing past the 100th meridian gets more than 25cm of rain a year. That is the reason for those vast wildfires you hear about over here. People have tried to turn the desert bushland into suburbs by piping water for hundreds of miles and it just does not work.

No need to crave the vast empty spaces of the American West, no one can live there. They tried, it did not work!

And keep in mind that most of our population is no more prepper oriented than your is. It is just that the small percentage we have forms a larger number than you have and the fact that due to our varied and dangerous weather patterns more people keep preps on hand even if they would not call themselves preppers.