Mutant Zombie Bikers

The theme keeps cropping up, and it's time to dispel the nonsense and lore.
Overwhelmingly, it's fueled by both good and bad apocalyptic fiction, which is generally a poor source for serious factual information.

Most of the people yapping about their preps now aren't that bright, but the BS Fantasy Factor goes off the scale when one hears from those alleging that come the day, they're going all WROL to go take everybody's stuff, or trying to raise the alarm about the inevitable rise to dominance of such folks.

Ain't. Going. To. Happen. Like. That. At. All.

The best example: the dipshit from Doomsday Preppers was a felon with priors for child molestation, was subsequently arrested post-shooting his mouth off, and is now back in prison for some good time. If there's a collapse tomorrow, he'll be eaten by his fellow inmates, if the prison guards don't simply start solving that problem for everyone in the first place under Rule 308.

Other bad people travelling in a pack are going to have a life expectancy measured in days if not hours once things get sporty, chiefly because living outside the law means living outside all law, including gaining any assistance from anyone, and getting regularly back-stabbed by your erstwhile allies 24/7/365. To presume they won't be hunted like rabid dogs by mutual consent is historically ignorant.

Furthermore, positing that suddenly there will be honor among thieves runs contrary to every experience of 6000 years of recorded human history.
It isn't going to change when TSHTF, and those planning otherwise are in for the rudest surprise of all.

It's far likelier that "Wanted" posters will go up, and bounties offered, and they'll be shot at from hill to hedge, and hung from every tree and lightpole coast to coast, the day after the first ones arise, and in perpetuity.

Anybody actually prepared to hunker down for 6-12 months will face 30-70% less problems just from the probable die-off that would occur in a societal collapse, and there won't be any Marquis of Queensbury rules, ACLU, plea bargains, defense lawyers, lenient judges, or parole boards five minutes after things kick off for those who choose the mutant zombie biker route under those circumstances. There also won't be any medevacs, Red Cross, or safe havens. A convoy of them coming down the road like some sci-fi Hell's Angels is far more likely to fare about as well as the British march from Concord Bridge back to Boston than it is to openly ride roughshod over the plains like the riders of Genghis Khan. If you want to know how that tactic works, look up the James Gang's raid on Northfield MN. Note the box score.
Crime will be dealt with by drumhead courts, sentences will be a rope or a bullet, about a minute after the verdict, and the crops will grow green in the spring over the graves of those who took a me-first approach to life.

People who decide to live felony stupid in or after any sort of problem have been foolishly conditioned like hothouse flowers for two generations to expect that everyone will helpfully stand around and wait for The Police and The Courts to enforce law and order while being preyed upon.  The actual reality (as it is turning out even right this minute in places like Detroit to a more modest extent) is that crime will dwindle and virtually disappear, because the death penalty will be back in vogue, and the waiting period will be about as long as it takes any citizen to squeeze a trigger or tie a knot. Recidivism at that point will be about as prevalent as resurrection is now: zero. The official mascot of two-time offenders will be the passenger pigeon, or perhaps the dodo. Even the peones in Mexico have reached saturation on the amount of $#!^ they'll take from the cartels with the "government" still in place, and no history of self-reliance, and they've been disarmed down there forever, officially. That should be instructive to anyone.

The people on Flight 93 are a typical guide to the reaction - and the OODA loop timeframe - once the average American realizes the rules are changed.
About an hour, on average. With butter knives and kitchen implements, if necessary.
As the new normal is where our nation lived for nearly 300 years, it won't be a particularly difficult or strange transition to make, except for the people on the wrong side of "Let's Roll", and who are almost universally completely and utterly ignorant of both history and human nature.

Human existence, in the worst scenario, might revert to the Middle Ages.
It will not revert to Cro-magnons vs. Neanderthals, and if it did anywhere, however briefly, the Neanderthals would fare about as well in Round Two as they did in Round One.
Last I looked, my ancestors stopped operating in tribes around 1066AD at the latest, if not more like around 400 BC.
The people still operating tribally after those points in history were mainly sporting practice for those who didn't, as their lack of further human progress or history might helpfully portend. And the only tribes on this continent were virtually wiped out to man, except for those who could adapt to running casinos, on land so bad that nobody else wanted it. Not my idea of a successful paradigm.

Note what I'm not saying:
I'm not saying no one will try, nor that you shouldn't prepare for the possibility.
But the failure curve will preclude just about any serious suggestion that learning will occur before they achieve room temperature. Hell, crime doesn't even pay now - look at our prison population - and yet we have a never-ending conga line of the terminally stupid who still try it, firmly convinced that they're smarter than all of society, despite the evidence of 3,000,000 of their colleagues in stripes.

My counsel is to stop looking at examples from Bosnia or Mogadischu, let alone Road Warrior or The Walking Dead unless you want to know how Bosnians, Somalis, or Hollywood screenwriters react to societal disruption.
If you dropped Topeka or Spokane into any of those places, there would be a militia, posses, a big wave of hangings, and shortly afterwards a thriving city-state, probably inclined to start conquering the savages nearby and exerting their influence in ever-widening ripples, because that's how we roll, going back to at least 1603. We can count the number of times savages have gotten the better of this society on our fingers, and if we knock out the Lost Roanoke Colony and Custer at the Little Bighorn, you could probably do it on your thumbs.


If there is any risk or threat during or after a serious catastrophe or collapse from some faceless Them, it comes from where you'd expect it to: those prepared, organized, and operating under color of authority, but using that last for their own selfish ends, first, last, and always.

We joke that the scariest words now are "I'm from The Government, and I'm here to help you." And with only the evidence of our lying eyes in minor disaster to minor disaster stretching back to forever to fuel that suspicion.
If things get to the point that society gets set back a century or so, the minute The Man decides that the correct course of action is to take an interest in what you and your community of whatever size are up to, and what resources you possess, rather than working to coordinate the success of communities everywhere while leaving them largely alone to sort out local problems, rest assured that your primary target has probably just pulled into view.

Any enforced socialism, at that point, shall be a hanging offense.