Free Republic

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...

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...