New Yorkers Prepare for Hobbes' State of War

Because they won't give up on New York and they can no longer trust the government to maintain order. Here’s who’s buying panic rooms and bullet-proof doors amid crime fears in NYC — and it’s not who you’d think

New Yorkers are fortifying their homes with panic rooms and bullet-proof doors like never before over fears about crime, migrants and national turmoil — and it’s not just the city’s elite partaking in the trend.

“Not every [customer] is an ultra-rich stockbroker — a lot of them are just people, middle-class kind of people,” said Steve Humble, founder of the home-defense contractor Creative Home Engineering.

Some of those "just people" are probably trapped by falling real estate values. Although I don't know specifically about New York, I know real estate is falling in some cities. Some of them are the stereotypical New York resident who can't imagine that there is anyplace else worth living. Fine. A difference of opinion makes a horse race. You couldn't pay me enough to live in NYC.

The driving force is a decline in New Yorkers’ sense of safety — assaults in the Big Apple reached 28,000 for the first time on record last year — and the perceptible shift toward volatile instability that many people feel is ramping up across all of American society, Humble and others say.

This story isn't in Preppers Weekly or Paranoid Times, but in The New York Post. Maybe people are waking up to the shit show that is likely coming for them.

For those of you who don't know Hobbes' and the State of War. Thomas Hobbes wrote The Leviathan in 1651, in which he discusses the role of government. In that he describes what happens when law and order break down. He calls what ensues the State of War.

He goes to describe what happens when people are no longer afraid the government will punish them for breaking the law. What happens? They break the law.

Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time or war where every man is enemy to every man, the same is consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal.

Building a panic room is one of the ways that people provide for their own security. And the heartening thing is that it requires a fair amount of foresight. You can't build a panic room at the last minute, or after trouble has begun.

One can have only as much preparation as he has foresight.

    — Jim Butcher, Changes. Ms. Guard to Harry Dresden

I wonder if all the people with those panic rooms are now labeled as Right Wing Extremists by the government?