Some times the best defense is one that people can not see. Take privacy fences, 6 foot chain link fencing, stone walls. All these scream to passerbys that you have something valuebale you are trying to protect. The same goes for motion lights, drive way sensors, cameras and all the other fancy protection devices that are on the market for people to buy
The first thing people think when they see these kinds fo defense items is "Wow the people in that house must be rich to afford all those fancy gizmos!" When SHTF the roaming gangs will be thinking along those lines to but with the added thoughts of "We need to get inside that house. There is no telling how much loot we can get" And in most cases they will not stop until they gain entry and take what they want. Be it food, water, guns, your life, your females in the house.
Once they get all they want from your home they walk away not even bothering to give the plain, simple, unassuming house across the street from you more then a passing glance. Since they see no protection devices they feel there is nothing there worth taking so they go on their merry litte way looking for more houses that will hold the treasures they seek.
All your fancy equipement did was make you more of a target while lining the people who sold you the products richer. What good is that to you and your family? NONE!! That's what good it is. All you have done is wasted your money that could have been spent better on other areas of prepping and made your home a target with a big bull's eye painted right in the center of it.
But looks can be decieving. The house across the street from you could have all types of defense around it that can't see or are not recongized as a line of defence. Very low key, inexpensive line of defense that makes others not see a defence at all.
Now by this time you probley think I am nuts when it comes to saying the best defense protection that money can buy is not good to have but think about it. Motion lights have a range they can handle. Beyond that range they are useless. It is easy to study a house for a night to see what range does something have to be in in order to set off the motion light. Once they know that it's easy for them to work their way to the house with out tripping the motion light.
The same goes for drive way senors and trip wires. If they take a day or two to covertly study you around your home and see you lifting your foot a little higher than normal or bending down while walking past a sensor of trip wire they will know you are trying to avoid setting something off.
Now lets get a closer look at the house across the street. At first you can not see anything that even remotely resembles some type of defence but on closer inspection you notice that the hedge growth on the 4 foot chain link fence that goes around the yard actually has a lot of sharp, stinging briars on it. The arbor that lines the length of the sidewalk up to the front door is not covered in flowering vines. Its covered in raspberry vines that a full of briars that have grown so big and full that you can barely walk side ways single file through them with out getting caught by the briars.
Upon taking closer look at all the flower beds that are growing under most the windows of the house you see something that looks like a few nails sticking up through the mulch all through the beds. You reach down to see if you are correct in what you are seeing and accidently stick you hand on a nail you didn't see. Now you can see there are hundreds nails in the flower beds, Not just a few, and you can see that they were driven through boards that have been laid nail point side up and covered with mulch. There doesn't seem to be an inch of space in the bed that does not have nails sticking up in it.
Under the rest of the windows low neatly trimmed bushes are growing under the windows. You have learned you lesson and this time you appoarch them more carefully. In the bushes you find lots of thick branches sticking up in them. Each branch has been sharpened to a point. If any one steps on those or falls on them the spikes are going to go straight through the body from the force of the contact. You realize that that would not be a pretty picture but an effective one.
You make your way around to the back yard and you see piles of dead leaves surrounding the garden and one a few feet from the back door. Looking closer you see what you think may be a very tiny piece of netting sticking out from one corner of one of the piles of leaves. You bend down and brush a little of the leaves back from the netting and see that it a bigger piece that it tacked down in the corner with a stake. Your interest is peaked so you go all around the pile looking under the very edges of the weed pile and you can see the netting goes underneath the whole pile of weeds and has been spiked at every corner to hold it in place. Now you just have to see why that netting is under the leaves. What might it be hiding?
You very slowly work your way to the middle of the pile, brushing leaves aside so you can see the netting. Finally you reach what seems like a depression under the netting. You proceed more carefully now with brushing the leaves aside but you do not move from you spot of hard ground. Finally you get enough leaves moved to see through the netting that a deep hole has been dug and that sharp spikes have been driven it the the ground at the bottom of the hole. The hole its self is about 6 feet deep and 3 feet by 3 feet in diameter and there are 8 - 10 five foot long spikes sticking up. There is no way a person can fit down there unless they are the spikes. You notice that the pile of leaves are not real thick so that the weight of them will cause the net to pull lose from the spikes holding it in place but the weight of a body stepping on the netting would cause it to give and fall into the pit along with the body which will be impaled once its it the pit. Not a pretty sight or even a pretty thought but you can see it is a very effective tool in the line of defense.
You continue walking slowly around the yard looking for other signs of defense. You didn't see the clear thin fishing line that is just inches from the ground. One end runs from the bottom of the bush next to the back door and the other end runs to a tree in the back yard then up the tree to a big cow bell hiding amongst the branches. You trip over the fishing line and as you are falling face first on to the ground you can hear the cow bell giving off a bunch of loud rings. Suddenly while you are trying to get off the ground you neighbor (an old man in his 70's) appears at the back door with a gun in his hands. He has been watching you the whole time. He knows you live across the street so he is giving you time to explain just what the heck you are doing in his yard.
You tell him about all the expensive defense items you had placed around your home which did you no good at all and how you saw the gang give his house no more then a passing glance when they walked away. And that you want to know why they did not bother with his home.
He invites you in for a cup of coffee and he is going to tell you a story. Once you are setted at his table and both of you have your cups of coffee he starts to tell you the story. When he was 18 he was drafted in to the Army and was sent to Viet Nam. The people over there were poor and had no money to spend on defense. They had to use what Mother Nature had provided to protect their homes. They used sharp spikes, nails, hidden pits. Tin cans and other pieces of scrap metal were attached to thin wire and trip lines were run. When people hit the trip wire the tin cans and pieces of metal would make a noise loud enough to alert the people in the house of intruders. They had trip wires attached to bambo frames that had thick sharp spikes in them. The frames were hidden in the dense leaves on the trees. When some one stepped on the trip wire the frame would swing down for the tree impaleing the unexpecting intruder.
He has seen some of his own friends and commrades killed by these simple devices that cost only the labor of harvesting the resources, putting them together then setting them up. He promised himself if there every came a time when he would need to defend his own home and family he would not waste money on fancy things that do not work and would stay with the simple yet effective lessons that he learned from those simple poor people.
Now that you have listened to his story and seen the errors of what you did you have decided you are going to go home and follow his lead. You are no longer let your home scream " Come rob me. I have lots of goodies inside that you want!" You are now going to make your house simply say "I have nothing you want so don't waste your time."
Prepping Granny
The first thing people think when they see these kinds fo defense items is "Wow the people in that house must be rich to afford all those fancy gizmos!" When SHTF the roaming gangs will be thinking along those lines to but with the added thoughts of "We need to get inside that house. There is no telling how much loot we can get" And in most cases they will not stop until they gain entry and take what they want. Be it food, water, guns, your life, your females in the house.
Once they get all they want from your home they walk away not even bothering to give the plain, simple, unassuming house across the street from you more then a passing glance. Since they see no protection devices they feel there is nothing there worth taking so they go on their merry litte way looking for more houses that will hold the treasures they seek.
All your fancy equipement did was make you more of a target while lining the people who sold you the products richer. What good is that to you and your family? NONE!! That's what good it is. All you have done is wasted your money that could have been spent better on other areas of prepping and made your home a target with a big bull's eye painted right in the center of it.
But looks can be decieving. The house across the street from you could have all types of defense around it that can't see or are not recongized as a line of defence. Very low key, inexpensive line of defense that makes others not see a defence at all.
Now by this time you probley think I am nuts when it comes to saying the best defense protection that money can buy is not good to have but think about it. Motion lights have a range they can handle. Beyond that range they are useless. It is easy to study a house for a night to see what range does something have to be in in order to set off the motion light. Once they know that it's easy for them to work their way to the house with out tripping the motion light.
The same goes for drive way senors and trip wires. If they take a day or two to covertly study you around your home and see you lifting your foot a little higher than normal or bending down while walking past a sensor of trip wire they will know you are trying to avoid setting something off.
Now lets get a closer look at the house across the street. At first you can not see anything that even remotely resembles some type of defence but on closer inspection you notice that the hedge growth on the 4 foot chain link fence that goes around the yard actually has a lot of sharp, stinging briars on it. The arbor that lines the length of the sidewalk up to the front door is not covered in flowering vines. Its covered in raspberry vines that a full of briars that have grown so big and full that you can barely walk side ways single file through them with out getting caught by the briars.
Upon taking closer look at all the flower beds that are growing under most the windows of the house you see something that looks like a few nails sticking up through the mulch all through the beds. You reach down to see if you are correct in what you are seeing and accidently stick you hand on a nail you didn't see. Now you can see there are hundreds nails in the flower beds, Not just a few, and you can see that they were driven through boards that have been laid nail point side up and covered with mulch. There doesn't seem to be an inch of space in the bed that does not have nails sticking up in it.
Under the rest of the windows low neatly trimmed bushes are growing under the windows. You have learned you lesson and this time you appoarch them more carefully. In the bushes you find lots of thick branches sticking up in them. Each branch has been sharpened to a point. If any one steps on those or falls on them the spikes are going to go straight through the body from the force of the contact. You realize that that would not be a pretty picture but an effective one.
You make your way around to the back yard and you see piles of dead leaves surrounding the garden and one a few feet from the back door. Looking closer you see what you think may be a very tiny piece of netting sticking out from one corner of one of the piles of leaves. You bend down and brush a little of the leaves back from the netting and see that it a bigger piece that it tacked down in the corner with a stake. Your interest is peaked so you go all around the pile looking under the very edges of the weed pile and you can see the netting goes underneath the whole pile of weeds and has been spiked at every corner to hold it in place. Now you just have to see why that netting is under the leaves. What might it be hiding?
You very slowly work your way to the middle of the pile, brushing leaves aside so you can see the netting. Finally you reach what seems like a depression under the netting. You proceed more carefully now with brushing the leaves aside but you do not move from you spot of hard ground. Finally you get enough leaves moved to see through the netting that a deep hole has been dug and that sharp spikes have been driven it the the ground at the bottom of the hole. The hole its self is about 6 feet deep and 3 feet by 3 feet in diameter and there are 8 - 10 five foot long spikes sticking up. There is no way a person can fit down there unless they are the spikes. You notice that the pile of leaves are not real thick so that the weight of them will cause the net to pull lose from the spikes holding it in place but the weight of a body stepping on the netting would cause it to give and fall into the pit along with the body which will be impaled once its it the pit. Not a pretty sight or even a pretty thought but you can see it is a very effective tool in the line of defense.
You continue walking slowly around the yard looking for other signs of defense. You didn't see the clear thin fishing line that is just inches from the ground. One end runs from the bottom of the bush next to the back door and the other end runs to a tree in the back yard then up the tree to a big cow bell hiding amongst the branches. You trip over the fishing line and as you are falling face first on to the ground you can hear the cow bell giving off a bunch of loud rings. Suddenly while you are trying to get off the ground you neighbor (an old man in his 70's) appears at the back door with a gun in his hands. He has been watching you the whole time. He knows you live across the street so he is giving you time to explain just what the heck you are doing in his yard.
You tell him about all the expensive defense items you had placed around your home which did you no good at all and how you saw the gang give his house no more then a passing glance when they walked away. And that you want to know why they did not bother with his home.
He invites you in for a cup of coffee and he is going to tell you a story. Once you are setted at his table and both of you have your cups of coffee he starts to tell you the story. When he was 18 he was drafted in to the Army and was sent to Viet Nam. The people over there were poor and had no money to spend on defense. They had to use what Mother Nature had provided to protect their homes. They used sharp spikes, nails, hidden pits. Tin cans and other pieces of scrap metal were attached to thin wire and trip lines were run. When people hit the trip wire the tin cans and pieces of metal would make a noise loud enough to alert the people in the house of intruders. They had trip wires attached to bambo frames that had thick sharp spikes in them. The frames were hidden in the dense leaves on the trees. When some one stepped on the trip wire the frame would swing down for the tree impaleing the unexpecting intruder.
He has seen some of his own friends and commrades killed by these simple devices that cost only the labor of harvesting the resources, putting them together then setting them up. He promised himself if there every came a time when he would need to defend his own home and family he would not waste money on fancy things that do not work and would stay with the simple yet effective lessons that he learned from those simple poor people.
Now that you have listened to his story and seen the errors of what you did you have decided you are going to go home and follow his lead. You are no longer let your home scream " Come rob me. I have lots of goodies inside that you want!" You are now going to make your house simply say "I have nothing you want so don't waste your time."
Prepping Granny