Oh, yeah, I automatically assume that people out in the middle of nothing are armed. You are one failed gasket from survival mode, so it makes sense. When I traveled cross country on a semi-regular basis in the military, I always carried my survival kit with me in the car.

I like things that go boom. But I prefer to stick with things that don’t go boom *accidentally*, heh. Like, fireworks, shooting up poor innocent skeets with my shotgun, that sorta thing. Folks I was out in the desert with seem to feel the same way, I pity anybody who would stroll into that encampment and think they were going to hold it up at gunpoint or something, I think we were probably better armed than the Alaska National Guard :twisted:, nice thing about a sand dune as your backstop is that you don’t have to worry about ricochets. But that’s sane (sort of, heh). Anybody cooking up high explosives in his gardening shed, on the other hand, has a death wish…

— Badtux the Boomy Penguin

* Interesting thing about California gun laws: Concealed firearms — and loaded weapons in public — are generally illegal except in your home *or camp*. Something to think about next time you approach what looks like a homeless encampment on BLM land in the desert… the likelihood that they are armed approaches 100%, even if you see no visible weapons, and it’s 100% legal if they are.