Rhawn,<br><br>Now you know there is a difference. <br><br>A few decades ago, a survivalist was someone who was interested in the tools and methods used to survive in an emergency. More recently the term has been usurped by the popular media to describe individuals and groups that foresee the breakdown of civilization, nuclear war and other such unlikely (though not impossible) holocausts, and who often, though not always, have very extremist political views. Thus we have an example of how dynamic language is, meanings change as society changes.<br><br>While there are those who participate here that are concerned about the ills of society and how it might affect their own and civilization's long term survival, we don't deal with those issues here. We deal with the tools used to survive conventional emergency and survival situations, which just so happen to often be the same tools and techniques these modern "survivalists" are interested in for their own purposes. There's a lot of cross-pollination, as it were, between the groups.<br><br><br><br>Doug Ritter<br>Editor<br>Equipped To Survive