# Government Quarantines in the City Will They Take Your Personal Food Supplies Away?



## PeachesBackwards (Sep 8, 2015)

I don't know if there have ever been any mass, lengthy Quarantines in American Cities, but I was wondering if there was a lengthy mass Government Quarantine because of a disease outbreak in a US City, is it within the realm of the Federal/State/Local Government to actually confiscate food supplies and water you've maintained in your residence? I live in an Apartment Building. Could the Government very easily decide that besides not letting one go outside their door, they will be rationing off food supplies and confiscating food and water you have for redistribution? 

I realize that the chances for a long quarantine are pretty slim but if there is one, is Government confiscation of your personal food prep within the realm of probability? Obviously even if they don't confiscate your resources, you will still need to protect them, but that's another topic.


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## hiwall (Jun 15, 2012)

The federal gov in certain emergency situations has the legal power to take ANYTHING. This authority is more aimed at commercial quantities of food, fuel, etc. The logistics of retrieving relatively small amounts supplies from individuals would require the expenditure of way more man power than any recovered supplies would warrant. 
In your listed situation it would also put the gov workers at severe risk of contracting the disease and would be counter-productive.


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## readytogo (Apr 6, 2013)

Why would the government want with your contaminated goods?,it makes no sense to take something that is sick ,the less is moved the less chances of spreading the zombies.


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## PeachesBackwards (Sep 8, 2015)

*Interesting Points But Can Canned Foods Be Contaminated?*

Very good points. I was under the impression, perhaps wrong, that unopened canned foods, unopened items like pasta, etc., and unopened bottled water are not contaminated. Am I wrong?


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## Caribou (Aug 18, 2012)

No, you are not wrong but to take my can of tomatoes you need to come in contact with me.

Can the government come and take your food? barry wrote an executive order that says that exact thing. They can take your food, your water, your tractor, anything. In certain areas of the country that would be a very unhealthy endeavor. It is probably unconstitutional but the time it would take to work through the courts would make it a moot question in an emergency.

They will start with the low hanging fruit. The grocery stores will probably be sold out but the distribution centers may well have a significant inventory. Next the canneries and cold storage. The farmers and ranchers will also be on their radar. 

If it comes to going door to door they are taking food to feed themselves and their families. It is likely that your neighbors, or zombies, will be knocking on your doors before that. This is why OPSEC is so important.


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## Marcus (May 13, 2012)

Caribou said:


> The farmers and ranchers will also be on their radar.


That's all right since they'll be in my sights too at that point. 

One of the things people don't understand is the limits on Executive Orders.
EOs are orders to the Executive branch of the government only unless there is some statutory basis for the order. In other words, our Dear Leader can the Executive branch to seize say all the history books in the country. But without Congress passing a law allowing him to do so, the only books that will be seized are those the government owns.

Most of the time, the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) has language in it that allows the seizing of all sorts of things including cars and planes. The question is what will *you* do when they come to seize your property. Will they get the burned out hulk, or will you meekly submit?


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## FrankW (Mar 10, 2012)

It would make no sense for even the most nefarious scenario to take the food of quarantined PPL.

Source: I do official emergency response planning for a living.


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## Tirediron (Jul 12, 2010)

And since when does sense have anything to do with the actions of government???


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## Dakine (Sep 4, 2012)

PeachesBackwards said:


> I don't know if there have ever been any mass, lengthy Quarantines in American Cities, but I was wondering if there was a lengthy mass Government Quarantine because of a disease outbreak in a US City, is it within the realm of the Federal/State/Local Government to actually confiscate food supplies and water you've maintained in your residence? I live in an Apartment Building. Could the Government very easily decide that besides not letting one go outside their door, they will be rationing off food supplies and confiscating food and water you have for redistribution?
> 
> I realize that the chances for a long quarantine are pretty slim but if there is one, is Government confiscation of your personal food prep within the realm of probability? Obviously even if they don't confiscate your resources, you will still need to protect them, but that's another topic.


short term, I think most likely... No. like others mentioned the manpower to even try to attempt that is so far over the top it's prohibitive, and some people are going to say "no" and while they would lose to a .gov sanctioned "raiding party" they would likely still send one or two of the of thugs to the next world as well, and that's gonna make everyone else stop and pause.

(and that's a REALLY BIG.. "IF" to get there in the first place!)

now if there were a long term, really bad outbreak, something that due to the nature of our society (rapid transit via air travel) and then BOOM!!!! LA, Dallas, NYC, SF, etc all wake up in the morning with the zombie plague... okay SHTF! the .gov is going to do all sorts of things.

While I agree that there are things mentioned in above posts about the legality of EO's and PD's that make them unconstitutional, that is naive, because our .gov has a very long track record of poor judgement and illegal activity within our own boarders, so for some quisling to say "authorized" to a blatantly illegal operation because it's in their best interests isn't a stretch by any means whatsoever...

a couple examples of what should be harmless directives...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_and_Homeland_Security_Presidential_Directive

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13603

depending on the view point you read these, they make perfect sense. You're either for it, against it, or very nervous LOL! and the problem is they look very legit! the real problem is what are the circumstances that such an action would be authorized and who is doing it?

want a recent relevant example? Katrina. and that was only a rain storm compared to a complete US/Global economic collapse, right?


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## Balls004 (Feb 28, 2015)

Don't lose any sleep over it.

If things have gotten so bad that the government has resorted to liberating individual's supplies, then you really have problems way greater than that. 

I'm thinking that by the time someone comes knocking (or kicking down) under the color of authority, your door for foodstuffs, that we no longer have a functional government. Then they are just pirates, and we'll settle it in a pirate manner.


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## Starcreek (Feb 4, 2015)

PeachesBackwards said:


> I don't know if there have ever been any mass, lengthy Quarantines in American Cities, but I was wondering if there was a lengthy mass Government Quarantine because of a disease outbreak in a US City, is it within the realm of the Federal/State/Local Government to actually confiscate food supplies and water you've maintained in your residence? I live in an Apartment Building. Could the Government very easily decide that besides not letting one go outside their door, they will be rationing off food supplies and confiscating food and water you have for redistribution?
> 
> I realize that the chances for a long quarantine are pretty slim but if there is one, is Government confiscation of your personal food prep within the realm of probability? Obviously even if they don't confiscate your resources, you will still need to protect them, but that's another topic.


I live in the country, but I do know the federal government has been taking steps to document the location of sources of privately held food and water. They have been putting a sticker on every well labeling such as the property of the federal government. They also now require that every bee hive be on file with the government, including location and any change of location. Registered livestock are on file with the government, because the various registries are working hand-in-glove with the government to share the information.....in case of disease outbreaks, you know. Unregistered animals are not allowed to be carried over state lines without documentation.

People who make bakes goods to sell in local stores are required to have their kitchen inspected and certified.

The list goes on. But my guess would be, yeah, they'll take your food, for distribution as they see fit.


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## BillS (May 30, 2011)

readytogo said:


> Why would the government want with your contaminated goods?,it makes no sense to take something that is sick ,the less is moved the less chances of spreading the zombies.


Canned goods and bottled water wouldn't be contaminated.


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## TheLazyL (Jun 5, 2012)

BillS said:


> Canned goods and bottled water wouldn't be contaminated.


Why wouldn't it be contaminated? 

As I recall we played with the Viet Cong ammo supplies. Special Forces would insert "special" rounds into VC ammo caches that caused the VC arms to jam and/or blow up.

Feds might like twice if the stolen goods started killing them off. :congrat:






During the Vietnam War, the Studies And Observations Group (SOG) created an ingenious top-secret program called Project Eldest Son to wreak general mayhem and cause the Viet Cong and NVA to doubt the safety of their guns and ammunition.

Amid a firefight near the Cambodian border on June 6, 1968, a North Vietnamese Army soldier spotted an American G.I. raising his rifle, and the NVA infantryman pulled his trigger, anticipating a muzzle blast. He got a blast, alright, but not quite what he'd expected.
United States 1st Infantry Division troops later found the enemy soldier, sprawled beside his Chinese Type 56 AK, quite dead - but not from small-arms fire. Peculiarly, they could see, his rifle had exploded, its shattered receiver killing him instantly. It seemed a great mystery that his AK had blown up since nothing was blocking the bore. Bad metallurgy, the G.I.s concluded, or possibly defective ammo. It was neither.

In reality, this actual incident was the calculated handiwork of one the Vietnam War's most secret and least understood covert operations: Project Eldest Son. So secret was this sabotage effort that few G.I.s in Southeast Asia ever heard of it or the organization behind it, the innocuously named Studies and Observations Group. As the Vietnam War's top-secret special ops task force, SOG's operators - Army Special Forces, Air Force Air Commandos and Navy SEALs - worked directly for the Joint Chiefs, executing highly classified, deniable missions in the enemy's backyard of Laos, Cambodia and North Vietnam.

The genesis of Eldest Son was the fertile mind of SOG's commander, 1966-68, Colonel John K. Singlaub, a World War II veteran of covert actions with the Office of Strategic Services. "I was frustrated by the fact that I couldn't airlift the ammunition we were discovering on the [Ho Chi Minh] Trail" in Laos, Singlaub explained. It was not unusual for SOG's small recon teams - composed of two or three American Green Berets and four to six native soldiers - to find tons of ammunition in enemy base camps and caches along the Laotian highway system. But SOG teams lacked the manpower to secure the sites or carry the ordnance away. Further, it could not be burned up, and demolition would only scatter small-arms ammunition, not destroy it. "Initially I thought of just boobytrapping it so that when they'd pick up a case it would blow up," Singlaub recalled. Then it hit him - boobytrap the ammunition itself!

Though obscure, this trick was not new. In the 1930s, to combat rebellious tribesmen in northwest India's Waziristan - the same lawless region where Taliban and al Qaeda terrorists hide today - the British army planted sabotaged .303 rifle ammunition. Even before that, during the Second Metabele War (1896-97) in today's Zimbabwe, British scouts (led by the American adventurer Frederick Russell Burnham) had slipped explosive- packed rifle cartridges into hostile stockpiles, to deadly effect. SOG would do likewise, the Joint Chiefs decided on August 30, 1967, but first Col. Singlaub arranged for CIA ordnance experts to conduct a quick feasibility study.

A few weeks later, at Camp Chinen, Okinawa, Singlaub watched a CIA technician load a sabotaged 7.62x39 mm cartridge into a bench-mounted AK rifle. "It completely blew up the receiver and the bolt was projected backwards," Singlaub observed, "I would imagine into the head of the firer."

After that success began a month of tedious bullet pulling to manually disassemble thousands of 7.62 mm cartridges, made more difficult because Chinese ammo had a tough lacquer seal where the bullet seated into the case. In this process, some bullets suffered tiny scrapes, but when reloaded these marks seated out of sight below the case mouth. Rounds were inspected to ensure they showed no signs of tampering. When the job was done, 11,565 AK rounds had been sabotaged, along with 556 rounds for the Communist Bloc's heavy 12.7 mm machine gun, a major anti-helicopter weapon.

Eldest Son cartridges originally were reloaded with a powder similar to PETN high explosive, but sufficiently shock-sensitive that an ordinary rifle primer would detonate it. This white powder, however, did not even faintly resemble gunpowder. SOG's technical wizard, Ben Baker - our answer to James Bond's "Q" - decided this powder might compromise the program if ever an enemy soldier pulled apart an Eldest Son round. He obtained a substitute explosive that so closely resembled gunpowder that it would pass inspection by anyone but an ordnance expert.

While the AKM and Type 56 AKs and the RPD light machine gun could accommodate a chamber pressure of 45,000 p.s.i., Baker's deadly powder generated a whopping 250,000 p.s.i.

Sabotaging the ammunition proved the easiest challenge. The CIA's Okinawa lab also did a very professional job of prying open ammo crates, unsealing the interior metal cans and then repacking them so there was no sign of tampering. In addition to SOG sabotaging 7.62 mm and 12.7 mm rounds, these CIA ordnance experts perfected a special fuse for the Communist 82 mm mortar round that would detonate the hand-dropped projectile while inside the mortar tube, for especially devastating effect. Exactly 1,968 of these mortar rounds were sabotaged, too.

Project Eldest Son's greatest challenge was "placement" - getting the infernal devices into the enemy logistical system without detection. That's where SOG's Green Beret-led recon teams came in. Since the fall of 1965, our small teams had been running deniable missions into Laos to gather intelligence, wiretap enemy communications, kidnap key enemy personnel, ambush convoys, raid supply dumps, plant mines and generally make life as difficult as possible in enemy rear areas.

As an additional mission, each team carried along a few Eldest Son rounds - usually as a single round in an otherwise full AK magazine or one round in an RPD machine gun belt or a sealed ammo can - to plant whenever an opportunity arose.

When an SOG team discovered an ammo dump, they planted Eldest Son; when a SOG team ambushed an enemy patrol, they switched magazines in a dead soldier's AK. It was critically important never to plant more than one round per magazine, belt or ammo can, so no amount of searching after a gun exploded would uncover a second round, to preclude the enemy from determining this was sabotage.

Planting sabotaged 82 mm mortar ammo proved more cumbersome because these were not transported as loose rounds, but in three-round, wooden cases. Thus, you had to tote a whole case, which must have weighed more than 25 lbs. Twice I recall carrying such crates for insertion in enemy rear areas, and to our surprise, my team once witnessed a platoon of NVA soldiers carry one away. SOG's most clever insertion was accomplished by SOG SEALS operating in the Mekong Delta, where they filled a captured sampan with tainted cases of ammunition, shot it tastefully full of bullet holes, then spilled chicken blood over it and set it adrift upstream from a known Viet Cong village. Of course, the VC assumed the boat's Communist crew had fallen overboard during an ambush. The Viet Cong took the ammunition, hook, line and sinker.

In Laos, American B-52s constantly targeted enemy logistical areas, which churned up sizeable pieces of terrain. SOG exploited this opportunity by organizing a special team that landed just after B-52 strikes to construct false bunkers in such devastated tracts, then "salt" these stockpiles with Eldest Son ammunition. However, on November 30, 1968, the helicopter carrying SOG's secret Eldest Son team, flying some 20 miles west of the Khe Sanh Marine base, was hit by an enemy 37 mm anti-aircraft round, setting off a tremendous mid-air explosion. Seven cases of tainted 82 mm mortar ammunition detonated, killing everyone on board, including Maj. Samuel Toomey and seven U.S. Army Green Berets. Their remains were not recovered for 20 years.

But as a result of these cross- border efforts, Eldest Son rounds began to turn up inside South Vietnam. In a northern province, 101st Airborne Division paratroopers found a dead Communist soldier grasping his exploded rifle, while an officer at SOG's Saigon headquarters, Captain Ed Lesesne, received the photo of a dead enemy soldier with his bolt blown out the back of his AK. "It had gone right through his eye socket," Lesesne reported.

Chad Spawr, an intelligence specialist with the 1st Infantry Division, heard of such a case but, "didn't believe it until they walked me over and opened up the body bag, and there he was, with the weapon in the bag." Unaware of SOG's covert program, Spawr attributed the incident to inferior weapons and ammo.
Boobytrapped mortar rounds took their toll, too. Twenty-Fifth Infantry Division soldiers came upon an entire enemy mortar battery destroyed - four peeled back tubes with dead gunners. In another incident, a 101st Airborne firebase was taking mortar fire when there was an odd-sounding, "boom-pff!" A patrol later found two enemy bodies beside a split mortar tube and blood trails going off into the jungle.

On July 3, 1968, after an enemy mortar attack on Ban Me Thuot airstrip, nine Communist soldiers were found dead in one firing position, their tube so badly shattered that it had vanished but for two small fragments.

Boobytrapped ammunition clearly was getting into enemy hands, so it was time to initiate SOG's insidious "black psyop" exploitation. "Our interest was not in killing the soldier that was using the weapon," explained Colonel Steve Cavanaugh, who replaced Singlaub in 1968. "We were trying to leave in the minds of the North Vietnamese that the ammunition they were getting from China was bad ammunition." Hopefully, this would aggravate Hanoi's leadership - which traditionally distrusted the Chinese - and cause individual soldiers to question the reliability (and safety) of their Chinese-supplied arms and ordnance.

One Viet Cong document - forged by SOG and insinuated into enemy channels through a double-agent - made light of exploding weapons, claiming, "We know that it is rumored some of the ammunition has exploded in the AK-47. This report is greatly exaggerated. It is a very, very small percentage of the ammunition that has exploded."

Another forged document announced, "Only a few thousand such cases have been found thus far," and concluded, "The People's Republic of China may have been having some quality control problems [but] these are being worked out and we think that in the future there will be very little chance of this happening."
That, "in the future," hook was especially devious, because an enemy soldier looking at lot numbers could see that virtually all his ammo had been loaded years earlier. No fresh ammo could possibly reach soldiers fighting in the South for many years.

Next came an overt "safety" campaign, with Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) publishing Technical Intelligence Brief No. 2-68, "Analysis of Damaged Weapons." Openly circulated to U.S. and South Vietnamese units, this SOG-inspired study examined several exploded AKs, concluding they were destroyed by "defective metallurgy resulting in fatigue cracks" or "faulty ammunition, which produced excessive chamber pressure." An SOG operative left a copy at a Saigon bar whose owners were suspected enemy agents.

Under the guise of cautioning G.I.s against using enemy weapons, warnings were sent to Armed Forces Radio and TV. The civilian Stateside tabloid Army Times warned, "Numerous incidents have caused injury and sometimes death to the operators of enemy weapons," the cause of which was, "defective metallurgy" or "faulty ammo."

The 25th Infantry Division newspaper similarly warned soldiers on July 14, 1969, that, "because of poor quality control procedures in Communist Bloc factories, many AKs with even a slight malfunction will blow up when fired." Despite such warnings, some G.I.s fired captured arms, and inevitably one American's souvenir AK exploded, inflicting serious (but not fatal) injuries.

That incident spurned SOG itself to stop using captured ammunition in our own AKs and RPD machine guns. SOG purchased commercial 7.62 mm ammunition through a Finnish middleman - and, ironically, this ammo, which SOG's covert operators fired at their Communist foes - had been manufactured in a Soviet arsenal in Petrograd.

By mid-1969, word about Eldest Son began leaking out, with articles in the New York Times and Time, compelling SOG to change the codename to Italian Green, and later, to Pole Bean. As of July 1, 1969, a declassified report discloses, SOG operatives had inserted 3,638 rounds of sabotaged 7.62 mm, plus 167 rounds of 12.7 mm and 821 rounds of 82 mm mortar ammunition.

That fall, the Joint Chiefs directed SOG to dispose of its remaining stockpile and end the program. In November, my team was specially tasked to insert as much Eldest Son as possible, making multiple landings on the Laotian border to get rid of the stuff before authority expired.

Lacking the earlier finesse, such insertions had to have confirmed to the enemy that we were sabotaging his ammunition-but even this, SOG believed, was psychologically useful, creating a big shell game in which the enemy had to question endlessly which ammunition was polluted and which was not.

The enemy came to fear any cache where there was evidence that SOG recon teams got near it and, thanks to radio intercepts, SOG headquarters learned that the enemy's highest levels of command had expressed concerns about exploding arms, Chinese quality control and sabotage.

In that sense, Project Eldest Son was a total success - but as with any such covert deception program, you can never quite be sure.

SOURCE: Major John L. Plaster, USAR (Ret.). Wreaking Havoc One Round At A Time. American Rifleman. May 2008.


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## Marcus (May 13, 2012)

Balls004 said:


> Then they are just pirates, and we'll settle it in a pirate manner.


Damn, now I have to put a yardarm on the to-do list.


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## BillS (May 30, 2011)

hiwall said:


> *The federal gov in certain emergency situations has the legal power to take ANYTHING*. This authority is more aimed at commercial quantities of food, fuel, etc. The logistics of retrieving relatively small amounts supplies from individuals would require the expenditure of way more man power than any recovered supplies would warrant.
> In your listed situation it would also put the gov workers at severe risk of contracting the disease and would be counter-productive.


I think the government will do anything it wants in an emergency situation regardless of the law. We saw that with gun confiscations in New Orleans after Katrina.


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## hiwall (Jun 15, 2012)

BillS said:


> I think the government will do anything it wants in an emergency situation regardless of the law. We saw that with gun confiscations in New Orleans after Katrina.


Very likely true! Especially local personnel.


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## FrankW (Mar 10, 2012)

Tirediron said:


> And since when does sense have anything to do with the actions of government???


The point is you dont remove anything out of a quarantined area, that's why they call it quarantined.. (sigh)


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## Balls004 (Feb 28, 2015)

Marcus said:


> Damn, now I have to put a yardarm on the to-do list.


Don't forget keel-hauling as an option... or walking the plank, Pirates are a creative bunch!


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## Grimm (Sep 5, 2012)

Balls004 said:


> Don't forget keel-hauling as an option... or walking the plank, Pirates are a creative bunch!


The boo box!


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## Balls004 (Feb 28, 2015)

Marcus said:


> Damn, now I have to put a yardarm on the to-do list.


Don't forget keel-hauling as an option... or walking the plank, Pirates are a creative bunch!


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## Marcus (May 13, 2012)

Balls004 said:


> Don't forget keel-hauling as an option... or walking the plank, Pirates are a creative bunch!


So where can I get a bulk discount on barnacles? irate:


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## Balls004 (Feb 28, 2015)

Marcus said:


> So where can I get a bulk discount on barnacles? irate:


Just drag them through some yucca or young mesquite...That ought to do the trick!

:idea:


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## Wikkador (Oct 22, 2014)

can you imagine the resources necessary to quarantine and confiscate goods in even a small city of say 150k? Think about it... this is not a likely scenario.


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## Dakine (Sep 4, 2012)

Wikkador said:


> can you imagine the resources necessary to quarantine and confiscate goods in even a small city of say 150k? Think about it... this is not a likely scenario.


what seems far more likely than jack-booted thugs kicking doors is illusion of a lawful order "I as president decree lie lie lie blah blah blah lie lie lie" and then all of a sudden food "hoarding" or "stockpiles" are now kontrary to the kollective good of the greater society.

Okay... so Mr. Mouthpiece got on national prime time and said that... now what?

Nothing immediate. They aren't stupid. They know that kicking doors and seizing food is just about the same as kicking doors and seizing guns. If you jut kicked over a barrel of gasoline why on earth would you throw a lit match into the fumes???

No... at that point they start biding their time. They can pick and choose, because they know from 4473's who has arms, and what. They know from data mining where you shop and what you buy. They know what you post and what you read.

So, they use this as a way to scoop up their enemies (especially patriots) one by one, instead of in some giant collective sweep which would surely get them their ass handed to them. Plus it gives them leverage, they arrest someone else on something that should be minor... okay, no problem we can work this out, just tell me about who in your area stockpiles food, guns, and ammo? what kind of group and community meetings are there? who attends? who organizes it? how do they announce it? where do they hold them?

This is just investigative work and always has been, the only difference is the theoretical imposed unconstitutional act to build a case against law abiding citizens for daring to own/produce their own food and look after their own security without the nanny state doing it for them while dictating how it's done and the burdens that go with that.

Do you think society cares about the guy buying a $50 bag of weed? no, they want the seller, then the dealer, then the distributor and then the importer and then the grower.

It's the same thing to start with someone you can manipulate and they'll trade out (rat out) anyone they can think of to save their skin, so be very cautious because you may not tell anyone but your sister in law is blabby, now all of a sudden... ?


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