The prepper who says he's ready to kill: 'as soon as it's legal'

The prepper who would only kill once it's legal

The scene is almost a bar joke: someone asks who would be willing to kill in a civilizational collapse, and the first emphatic answer is yes, but only once it's decriminalized. Behind the joke lies a more uncomfortable question running through the whole discussion: does the ethics of a peaceful, abundant society rest on the law, or on something deeper? Because the scenario being posed — extreme scarcity, no state, no witnesses — doesn't eliminate conscience, only the alibi.

The starting premise is that material preparation (food, water, tools, escape routes) is the easy part. The hard part is the other one: knowing whether you would be capable of taking the life of an animal or another human being when the alternative is dying. And whether that capacity can be trained in a world where mistreating a dog in public is a crime.

The law as a brake and the law as an excuse

The most common answer is self-defense. Almost no one disputes that, faced with a lethal attack, they would respond in kind. But that's where the consensus ends. Some argue that legality is an artificial brake that disappears with the state; others warn that confusing the absence of law with the absence of consequences is a miscalculation. Those who have been in conflict zones say it bluntly: the restraints that prevent massacres aren't just legal, they're also disciplinary and social, and in a Mad Max scenario those restraints fall away.

Some go further and talk about going out to kill before you get killed. The logic is that of the preemptive strike: if the neighbor might see you as prey, see him as a threat first. It's a minority but explicit current, and it coexists with the opposite one — those who claim that in such a situation the priority is resources and escape, not hand-to-hand combat.

The slaughterhouse as an aptitude test

The most common objection to armchair heroism is the lack of practice. Shooting a boar from two hundred meters is not the same as slitting the throat of a lamb that trinc you around the pen. Several posts insist on the gradual process: contact sports to get used to hurting someone you don't hate, slaughtering animals to understand what taking a life up close really means. The thesis is that anyone who hasn't been able to do that will hardly be able to do the other.

The counterargument is that preparation is an illusion. In an extreme situation, prior reasoning shuts off and instinct takes over. Those who have experienced a real assault confirm it: the initial freeze is overcome with experience, not theory. And experience, in a world at peace, is something you don't have.

Hunger isn't the scenario we imagine

One of the most uncomfortable posts brings family memory into it: in the postwar years there were families that didn't eat every day, there were no firearms, and crime was lower than today. The implicit conclusion is that collapse doesn't automatically turn people into predators. Real scarcity doesn't always produce looting; sometimes it produces order, barter, and neighborliness.

Against that, there's the current that holds that violence is sarracena when there's no alternative. There's no ethical conflict, they say, if there's no choice. War is legitimate, and so is survival. The problem is defining when there's no choice, and who decides.

The gap between saying it and doing it

The striking datum isn't how many declare themselves willing, but how many add caveats. Most of the enthusiastic answers end in conditions: if I'm attacked, if it's legal, if it's self-defense, if I have no other choice. Absolute willingness is rare. And what there is sounds more like a movie fantasy than a survival plan.

The conclusion that prevails is the usual one: it's easier to picture yourself with a rifle in a lawless world than to look someone in the eye who just wants the same sandwich as you. Material preparation can be bought. The other kind can't.