Free Republic

ASKED by an out-of-stater where the nearest shooting range is, Patrick Leavitt, an affable gunsmith at Riverman Gun Works in Coeur d’Alene, says: “This is Idaho—you can shoot pretty much anywhere away from buildings.” That is one reason why the sparsely populated state is attracting a growing number of “political refugees” keen to slip free from bureaucrats in America’s liberal states, says James Wesley, Rawles (yes, with a comma), an author of bestselling survivalist novels. In a widely read manifesto posted in 2011 on his survivalblog.com, Mr Rawles, a former army intelligence officer, urged libertarian-leaning Christians and Jews to move...

Fighting Words: An Open Letter to Publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. The New York Times just published the newspaper's first front page editorial in 95 years. It urged America's legislators to outlaw civilian ownership of semiautomatic battle rifles. This editorial twisted words to castigate our militia arms as follows: "These are weapons of war, barely modified and deliberately marketed as tools of macho vigilantism and even insurrection." The editor went on to urge: " Certain kinds of weapons, like the slightly modified combat rifles used in California, and certain kinds of ammunition, must be outlawed for civilian ownership. It is possible...

Survivors: A Novel of the Coming Collapse is the second volume in Rawles’ series of novels about the coming collapse of American society — and the global economy. Survivors — like his previous novel, Patriots — is set in the very near future, in a time which Rawles calls “The Crunch.” The Crunch is the time in which the all the “bills” of living in a post-industrial, post-agricultural nation built on fiat money have “come due.” With the vast majority of its citizens addicted to the unsustainable, post-modern “American way of life” — a life defined by an ignorance of...

I recently finally read all of Survivalblog (link) author James Wesley, RawlesÂ’ book Patriots: Surviving the Coming Collapse. I kind of false started on it and never got more than a few pages in around the time our second son was born, and recently I was craving some Winter reading material unrelated to work and found Patriots to be quite riveting. IÂ’ve been struggling greatly finding recreational reading (and if you didnÂ’t notice, time to blog), and this filled a need. It is to preparedness what Stephen AmbroseÂ’s books are to WW2 history: good reads that are as informative but...

Things could go bad like Iran sinking boats in the Strait of Hormuz and oils goes up to 200 dollars a barrel. A severe storm sweeps across the Country bringing us to our knees. The Government has to implement Martial Law. The more we can take care of ourselves the less we need outside help.

So, a title shoots to the top of Amazon.com’s sales ranking within days of its release and libraries are caught off-guard—only a handful have it on hand and another few wait for its delivery; it’s already on backorder at Baker & Taylor (B&T). This scenario occurred with the April 7 release of Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse by James Wesley Rawles, which hit #6 last week on Amazon but was #33 today. (The book, initially published as shareware and then by a Christian publishing house and POD house Xlibris, has been reissued by Ulysses Press, which...

Neil Strauss hardly seems like a guy who'd kill a goat and gut it with his own hands. A slim intellectual in silver jewelry and designer jeans, he doesn't appear to be the kind of person who would stash food in a forest or plot an escape from his Los Angeles-area home using fire trails and a motorcycle he barely knows how to ride. Yet that's precisely what Strauss has learned to do in the past three years in an effort to prepare himself should society collapse. It's a journey he not only chronicles in his new book, "Emergency: This...

Somewhere West of the Rockies - -(AmmoLand.com)- AmmoLand.com’s featured Gun Blogger of the Month, for August 2009, is the SurvivalBlog.com. James Wesley, Rawles (JWR) is a survivalist author and lecturer. JWR is also the editor of www.SurvivalBlog.com. “I’m also a former U.S. Army intelligence officer, and now work as a full-time blogger and freelance writer. This blog reflects my interests. I’ve been an enthusiastic survivalist since my teenage years. I grew up in the Bomb Shelter era, and that mind set just never wore off” says James Wesley, Rawles. The first amazing thing about the SurvivalBlog.com is JWR has not...

James Wesley Rawles is probably one of the foremost survival preparation experts in America today. His survivalblog.com website has more than 135,000 readers, he is frequently a guest on national radio shows, and he has been interviewed in many influential newspapers and magazines. The new reprint of his novel “Patriots: Surviving the Coming Collapse” has been hovering around the #100 mark on the Amazon ranking list for many months, which is a remarkable record. “Patriots” is a combination of a novel and a survivalism textbook, which made it difficult for the book to excel in both directions at the...

Sunday October 4 2009 Notes from JWR: I'm scheduled to be guest on the Laura Ingraham syndicated talk radio show tomorrow (Monday, October 5th), to discuss preparedness topics, from 11:15 AM to 11:45 AM Eastern Time (8:15 AM to 8:45 AM Pacific Time.) She is heard on more than 300 radio stations, on XM Radio, and on the Internet in both live streaming and podcasts.

In my survivalist novel "Patriots", I included lots of descriptions of firearms used in various situations in order to illustrate that there is no single "perfect survival gun." Different situations are best handled by using different firearms. There are several requirements that must be considered in selecting guns for use on a farm, ranch, or survival retreat. First, and foremost, they must be versatile. A single gun might be pressed into service for shooting crows or starlings at 10 yards, rabbits or coyotes at 100 yards, or rattlesnakes at five feet. While there is no single gun that can handle...

...Preparedness activity is difficult to track statistically, since people who take measures are usually highly circumspect by nature, said Jim Rawles, the editor of www.survivalblog.com, a preparedness Web site. Nevertheless, interest in the survivalist movement “is experiencing its largest growth since the late 1970s,” Mr. Rawles said in an e-mail, adding that traffic at his blog has more than doubled in the past 11 months, with more than 67,000 unique visitors per week. And its base is growing. “Our core readership is still solidly conservative,” he said. “But in recent months I’ve noticed an increasing number of stridently green and...