Hello from Minnesota! I’ve been reading quite a few threads in the FSW forum for a while now; it’s about time I introduce myself, as I feel as if I know many of you quite well already.
My wife and I are living in a western suburb of Minneapolis, MN. I grew up not far from where we are living now, and my wife is a farm girl from southern Minnesota. We have been married 22 years. We are born again Christians. I am also a former Marine, so OOH RAH to all the other Marines out there.
We have always been conservative, interested in history, especially the American Revolution, and continue to self-educate through our reading, but I see we have a lot more to learn as I read the threads in the FSW forum.
Around August 2009, we started to form a clearer focus of what we needed to do…to become armed and trained, and to become self-sufficient. It came after reading Patriots, a Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse, by James Wesley, Rawles; One Second After, by William Forstchen; and, Molôn Labé, by Boston T. Party. These three books set us on a course of reexamining everything.
I did not grow up around guns. Neither my father nor his brothers were hunters, so I knew little about guns before joining the Marine Corps. When I was a teenager, my father bought a .22 rifle and a .410 shotgun, and we hunted a little, but were not very successful. I received the standard training for the M16, and shot the M1911A1, and I credit what I learned in the Marine Corps for the relative ease and substantial success I’ve recently experienced in purchasing and training with a handgun. Last December I took a training course at Front Site – see my forum entry in the “What about Front Sight” thread, dated January 14, 2010. My wife has also taken a basic handgun safety training course and purchased her own handgun. If anyone had told us at the beginning of last year that we were going to be doing this, we would never have believed them!
We are also looking into ways to become more self-sufficient, which is nearly impossible to do in the city. From everything we have read, it seems that the only answer to what we are looking for is to move, either to Wyoming or another western state. What recently happened in Haiti just reinforces our thinking. A breakdown in society leads to hungry and desperate people, which then leads to violence and people streaming out of the cities with no destination.
We are planning a trip to Wyoming (in Weston and Crook counties) in May, and we will see how we feel after a visit. Of concern is finding work. Here we both have jobs; I’m an architectural draftsmen and my wife is an administrative assistant. But we are feeling the call of freedom and liberty, and we don’t want the illusion of our job security to cloud our judgment. We are trusting in God to lead.
