What's disaster got to do with it?

WND has a shocking new survey out: 42% of Americans are gutless yellow turds:

Half of America: I'd kill to protect my own
Survey reveals stunning attitudes about surviving in catastrophe

...The sobering new poll by Wenzel Strategies, a public-opinion research and media consulting company, also shows a stunning number of Americans say they would be willing to kill a neighbor under such circumstances...

Those circumstances being that a neighbor attacked* them and their families during a "catastrophic emergency"  Now, I realize that WND is not exactly a paragon of American journalism, but in what sense is it "stunning" that 58% of Americans would be willing to kill someone who is coming after their families?  Have we become so wussified as a people that more than 4 in 10 of us really believe that armed miscreants breaking down our door just want to hug it out? I suspect the true number of willing is far closer to 100%, but if I am incorrect, and no more than 6 in 10 Americans are willing to physically protect their families from bad guys, then the survey truly is stunning, but not for the reason the author thinks.

What any of that has to do with a catastrophic emergency I have no idea. Either you are willing to protect your kids' lives or you are not.

However, the questions were interesting, and since for some odd reason I never had a chance to give my answers to a pollster, I'll give them to you instead.

1. Many people keep a few extra supplies around the house for emergencies, but there are some who make substantial preparations for such a catastrophe. They are known as “doomsday preppers.” Would you consider yourself to be a doomsday prepper or do you know someone who is?

No, and no, and if I was a prepper I wouldn't tell a stranger over the phone. FWIW, the idea that 10% of Americans, 30 million people, are making "substantial preparations" for disaster is ludicrous. Maybe 10% of that number are doing anything tangible. Maybe. 

2. One of the biggest weaknesses in American society today is thought to be its reliance on electrical power. Do you agree or disagree that Americans have become too dependent on the electrical grid?

"Thought by whom?" is my first response.  The biggest weaknesses in American society are debt, bad parenting, functional atheism, and collectivism, not necessarily in that order.  While I prefer to control a couple alternatives to the grid, the question itself is like asking if we are too dependent on freeways. Too dependent for what?

3. Thinking about the social order across America, if we were to lose electrical power nationwide either because of the explosion of an electro-magnetic pulse device, a computer hack, or some other attack on the electrical grid, how long do you think it would take for serious, sustained life-threatening civil unrest to break out?

It depends on where you live. No power nationwide would mean looting in within days in places that rely on external supplies of food and water. "Civil unrest" would become uncontrollable 10 minutes after the last looted Wal Mart ran out of bottled water. What did it take in New Orleans before the police themselves were looting? 2 days?  That's why I don't live there. 

4. If America, or your community, were struck with a catastrophic emergency, how long do you think you personally could survive without any support from such things as gas stations, electricity from the grid, grocery stores, or water from the tap?

Let's see, I'm 47 now. So another 30 years?  Actually, this question is almost unanswerable because it contains a variable that can change it entirely.  If "my community," a town of 7k people and its surrounding cattle farms in SE Kansas, were to lose power, it would be back on in days, or a couple weeks at the most, because there are places around that would still have power. Power has been out for weeks here before and no one died.

However, if the nation were to lose power and it stayed down - no banks, no gas, no refrigeration - my community would still have no one starving and no unrest for a lot longer than it would take for New York to become a ghost town. That's why I don't live on an island with millions of people whose main survival skills are political.

5. If America, or your community, were struck with a catastrophic emergency, how long do you think it would take before your home, your person, or a member of your immediate family would be physically attacked by someone desperate for food, money, or commodities like gasoline, or by someone taking advantage of social chaos? 

A long time. There are a lot of other houses on the way to mine and they have guns too. If the emergency were local, then it is most likely that those "gathering" gasoline and the like would be agents of the government. Sorry, officer, I don't rightly know where any might be.  If the emergency were national, all the officers would be manning the barricades to keep the zombies in the cities, in which case I expect my neighborhood would be very quiet indeed.

6. If you or a member of your family were threatened with attack by a neighbor under such a catastrophic emergency, how willing would you be to kill that attacker using a firearm or other method in self-defense?

The real question is, how willing is someone to die trying to attack me rather than to work for me in exchange for a hot meal or 2?  There's always work to be done around the farm, catastrophic emergency or not.

* The survey question here is vague, literally asking about a family member being "threatened with attack," which is certainly open to interpretation. But the quote of the pollster leaves no doubt that imminent physical attack is under consideration:,"...the survey also found that 58 percent of respondents would be perfectly willing to kill an attacker using a firearm or other method of self-defense."