Always be prepared

It's always a good idea to have emergency supplies of long-shelf-life food, fire-making tools, medical supplies for at least two weeks. One month would be better. Six months even better. One year is full insurance but few people want to make that kind of investment, especially as it takes up space. The assumption is that despite any nation-wide disaster, the government, local and state-wide, should re-establish some control after 2 to 4 weeks, depending upon where you reside.

I've seen documentaries including a scary National Geographic one.

I had never considered this but someone else posted a warning, too. We assume that a Mad Max situation will occur that involves only the bad people. That could happen with a high degree of possibility but I didn't consider that we would have to worry about the GOOD people, too.

Someone once mentioned that in a national apocalypse, one of the most dangerous human predators would be a PARENT. A desperate parent would go to any extremes to protect the lives of their families if food ran low. In the National Geographic documentary, a prepared man and his family finds themselves besieged by desperate hungry neighbors in the countryside when he refuses to give or sell his food supplies. Almost all of these neighbors were 'good' people before the national disaster. In the near final scene when the neighbors have corralled the man and his family in their neighborhood and things are really about to get truly ugly, the power comes back on (after two weeks), leading to a 'happy' ending. But had the power not come back on for another five minutes, it would have been a tragic ending. The point is, be prepared for anything. When people become hungry and desperate, basic survival and mammalian instincts surface and the line between good and bad people blurs. I suspect that many a person who served in the fictional Mad Max movie gangs may have once been decent, law-abiding folk who chose survival over starvation or enslavement.

That is why, among your essentially survival supplies, you should have, weapons. It will also greatly help if you can count on the mutual support of neighbors to back you up in self defense. As prepared as you might be, even with a black belt in martial arts, you're no match for a large gang or mob of desperate, armed people.