Many stocking up, just in case

By RICK MONTGOMERY

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Ammo. Canned goods. Vegetable seeds. Fortified water by the case.

They are reportedly flying off the shelves, these staples of the stockpile crowd.

“Survivalist” isn’t the right term, not in a downturn that has got everyone nervous. “Preparedness” or “self-sufficiency” — that is what they are saying.

Adhesive bandages. Gardens in the works — be they victory gardens or, as some prefer, “crisis gardens.”

The closet off the living room in the Owens home near Lawson, Mo., isn’t huge, but it’s organized.

Heavy coats, sweat shirts and Ron Owens’ cap collection greet his wife, Jan, as she enters and flips the light. She pulls back the heavy coats.

There, on a rack covering the wall: nonfat dry milk. Rice. A cast-iron skillet.

“You never know when you’ll need it,” she said of the food supplies she began stockpiling five months ago.

Jan is a cheery person who works in a nursing home. She apologizes for the cramped closet, just up the stairs from the cramped basement bathroom where more essentials are stuffed behind a curtain: stewed tomatoes. First aid in a suitcase. Large bottles of liquor.

“Er ... that’s for snakebite,” deadpans Ron, who works in alternative fuels and holds an MBA.

The couple’s easy disposition — Ron plays mandolin on the porch — belies a worry shared by many in this final year of a stormy decade.

If Sept. 11 wasn’t enough, if Hurricane Katrina and spiking oil prices weren’t enough, if a federal government diving into 14-digit debt wasn’t enough, Jan and others now ask, “What if the banks close?”

Are times that perilous?

Frankly, not to Joe Levy, a clerk at Mickey’s Surplus in Kansas City, Kan., where mannequin heads sport gas masks.

“Compared to the Depression, this is nothing!” said Levy, 78, whose family of German Jews fled the Nazi regime and came to America in 1937. “I have faith in this country. Things will come around.”

Many agree. For the first time in five years, more Americans than not say the country is headed in the right direction, according to a recent Associated Press poll.

But among the 44 percent who say “wrong direction” and countless others who just wonder if they are prepared for the next blow, natural or man-made, it makes sense to grab 10 cans of corn on sale instead of two.

Nationwide, retailers report shortages of canning jars, water-purification tablets and ammunition — especially ammunition.

For many gun owners, the stockpiling “isn’t just kind of — it’s full on,” said Jeff Neuman of The Bullet Hole gun store and firing range in Overland Park. “We’re real thin on ammunition, same as everywhere.”

The Department of Homeland Security in April issued a report to law enforcement officials warning that home foreclosures, unemployment and the recession “could create a fertile recruiting environment for right-wing extremists.”

The report ignited conservatives and veterans groups with its suggestion that military personnel returning from war could be ripe for the picking.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has apologized to veterans.

The extreme right hardly has a corner on today’s doom market.

Web sites such as LifeAftertheOilCrash.net and TheNewSurvivalist.com foresee escalating violence and cascading calamities in the aftermath of “peak oil” production, global warming or other world-changing crises.