If and when the government declares martial law following a major disaster, it will always be under the pretense of safety and security for the general public.
What this really means is the government is going to cut off all the roads, suspend your Constitutional rights, spread propaganda, arrest those who resist or whoever they deem a threat, and set up military and law enforcement checkpoints all over town.
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Another major concern you may have to contend with during martial law is the government forcibly confiscating essentials such as food and water.
Why would the authorities want to do this? After all, don’t people need food and water to survive?
But that’s exactly it: by taking away your food, water, and other essentials, the government will make you fully dependent on them for your very existence. Bread and water lines will be created and, just like that, they will have you and everyone you know under their control.
And don’t think that the government will stop with food and water. You can also be sure that they will come after your weapons, ammunition, first aid items, pet food, money, and anything else that they decide you don’t need. All of it will be part of their effort to control the local population and minimize the odds of resistance.
There’s nothing you can do about the military or law enforcement coming to your door during martial law. And they’re going to take some things whether you like it or not.
But even though you’ll have to give up at least some of your supplies to satisfy the authorities, you don’t have to give up everything. Assuming you don’t want to be dependent on the food and water lines for your survival, hiding your survival supplies during martial law will be of the utmost importance.
Hiding Places
Here are the top places to hide your survival supplies during martial law:
Among Storage
There is also a risk that the authorities will find your supplies hidden among your storage. But still, it’s worth a shot. If you have stacks of cardboard boxes filled with random items (documents, records, holiday decorations, etc.), then you can easily hide food, water, first aid supplies, and ammunition among all of it. Even if the authorities find some of it, if you hide it well then they may not find all of it.
Above The Door Frame
This won’t work for all doors, but it will work very well for doors in closets: secure a magnetic gun holder or safe above the door frame inside a closet. Then, you can attach firearms to the holder. It’s not likely that the searchers, in their haste to search as many houses as they can, will even think to look there.
Under The Floor
If your home has a crawl space, you could create a trap door in the floor. The authorities might think to look here, but if the door is well-hidden and blends into the surrounding floor, there’s a decent chance that they won’t notice.
Behind Air Vents
This one is easy. Just unscrew an air vent and put some food and supplies behind it. You could also create a false air vent and put supplies behind it. It’s unlikely that anyone would think to search for supplies there.
Under Floor Cabinets
No matter where you live, there is extra space beneath floor cabinets. All you have to do is remove the front panel and slide your supplies under the cabinets. Here’s a video showing how.
Inside Your Box Spring
Carefully cut through the fabric along the edge of the box spring, place supplies inside it, then reattach the fabric. Most burglars and authorities would never think to look inside a box spring.
In Furniture Cushions
This is a classic trick: cut open furniture cushions, hide your items in them, and then sew them back shut. Just be careful that you keep the sewn side of the cushions hidden and out of view.
In Fake Electrical Outlets
You’ll be able to hide small items in fake electrical outlets, such as wads of money or important documents. Here are some other things you can do to protect your supplies.
In The Cat Box
This may not sound very pleasant, but you can indeed hide items in your cat’s litter box (of course, you’ll need to own a cat for this to work). The idea is that you can wrap items in plastic bags and then store them underneath the litter. How would the authorities possibly think to look there?
To keep things more pleasant, consider having two cat boxes but only one cat box that you actually allow your cat to use. Keep the other box closed off from the cat so it won’t do its business in there (and potentially ruin whatever you have stored).
Buried In Your Backyard
This is probably the most obvious place to hide your supplies. While you may believe that burying your supplies in the backyard is a surefire way to make sure the authorities never find them, you may want to think twice.
If you think the authorities aren’t aware that people hide items by burying them in their backyard, you’re probably wrong. They may walk around your back and front lawn and look for any signs where the earth has been disturbed. They may also employ the use of metal detectors.
That being said, burying supplies in the backyard is still worth a shot. Just try to flatten the earth as best you can to hide it, and make use of food-grade plastics, pelican cases, metal ammo cans, or PVC pipes to hide them.
In A Survival Cache Away From Home
Another option, of course, would be to bury your supplies away from home. This is a common tactic used by preppers for bugging out: the idea is you can hide supplies en route to your bug out location so you can resupply along the way.
Of course, your mobility is going to be restricted by martial law, and you more than likely will not be allowed to leave the city. But still, it’s something to consider. Examples of places in town where you can hide items could include an abandoned building, a public park area, off the side of hiking trails not too far from town, and so on. Here’s a guide to survival caches and what to put in them.
In A Street Gutter
Are there street gutters in your neighborhood? If so, that could be a decent place to hide supplies as well. The obvious downside is you have to be careful your neighbors don’t spot you, so it’s risky (you can mitigate the risk by hiding and recollecting the supplies at night).
Other Ideas
Of course, there are plenty of other hiding places. Really, the only limit is your imagination. You just have to change your mindset. Instead of looking for hiding places, look at things that aren’t hiding places and think about how to turn them into hiding places.
Here are some other articles with more ideas:
- 8 Secret Gun Safes You Can Hide Around The House
- 11 Places To Hide Your Guns Where Nobody Will See Them
- 12 Best Hiding Spots For Valuables In Your Home
- 17 Places You Can Hide Your Food Storage
More Tips
There is more to protecting your survival supplies than simply hiding them. There are several other things you can do to throw authorities off the scent or convince them you don’t have anything worth taking. Here are a few ideas.
Get Some Decoys
If the authorities really do decide to confiscate guns, food, and other supplies during martial law, then when they come to your door they aren’t going to be satisfied until they take at least some items from you.
That’s why you need to have decoys set up to make them happy. Buy a really cheap gun or two that you are more than willing to give up, and have food and some other supplies that they will seize to make them happy before they move on to the next home.
Act Desperate
When the authorities barge down your door and begin searching your house, here’s a trick you can use in conjunction with the above strategy of having decoys: act like you’re desperate.
So when they confiscate your decoy firearms, act desperate say things like, “How can you take those?! How am I supposed to protect my family now that I’m unarmed!?”
All the same, when they go after your food say the same sort of things: “How am I supposed to feed my family now?! That’s all we have and the stores are all closed down!”
Just be careful that you don’t make it obvious that you really have more. You really need to pull off the desperation in the tone of your voice.
Build Ghost Guns
Ghost guns have become a rather controversial topic in our political discourse because there’s simply no way of tracking them. But this is exactly why they will be of much value during martial law.
For example, did you know that if you buy aftermarket Glock parts (such as a Brownells slide with a Polymer 80 frame) and put them together, there are no serial numbers and you can have those parts shipped directly to your home without going through an FFL dealer? There’s simply no remote way that the government could track that. You can do similar things with other types of firearms such as AR-15’s as well.
Report That Your Items Were Stolen
You can also report that many of your items were already stolen by burglars and looters, or taken by the authorities previously. If the authorities have a registry of firearms owners in the area and know exactly which guns you own (they knew this information about gun owners during Hurricane Katrina back in 2005), then you can report your firearms stolen to the authorities right before martial law has taken place.
Conclusion
There are many more places you can turn to in order to hide your valuable possessions during martial law. All you have to do is unlock the creative side of your brain. But the authorities will be likely to overlook most of the above places and ideas, so those will be a good place to start.
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I like your thought process of preparing and protecting yourself and family, no one wants the survival of their family to be forcibly dependent on the anything or anyone else. I just think maybe this post causes negative and resistful thinking on why we would be asked to comply With giving up our items of value and having to be OK with receiving basic survival essentials from them instead. If a time like this were to ever occur there would be a lot of people who aren’t fortunate enough to have what they need to survive. Then instead of worrying about the government coming into your house and taking your things you’ll have to be worrying about desperate people evading your home and doing Much worse to you and your family than the government would. If there is no reason to believe that anyone has anything more than the other person you’d be much safer. So yes by all means try to conceal what you can so that you don’t have to solely be dependent on the government But try to see the bigger picture Of just how chaotic and fearful things would be if you had to worry aboutYour family’s life every day because you have a few more boxes of food and toilet paper than most of your neighbors.
I get the point of hiding I plain sight, but some of these are a bit odd. The kitty litter will scatter with a mild kick.
The boxes in the storage area will be turned upside down and dumped. You will be asked if you have guns or ammo beforehand. Best have thought this one out a bit better. One answer to this dilemma..JOHN WICK….
Bury in back yard?? Yep–and put a shrub or plant on top. Then mulch. Perfect camouflage.
Half of my preps are poisoned. Only I know which half is which. You’ve got a fifty percent chance of dying if you take and eat or drink any of my food preps. Most likely the ones doing the confiscation (local cops, NATO, Military, etc.) will take the preps that are most desirable to them (commercially packaged foodstuffs metal can goods, Mylar packaged freeze dried and ready to eat foods, nitrogen packaged dried wheat beans, rice, etc.) and destroy the rest (home canned foods, frozen foods, garden crops and livestock. (None of the food or blankets or fuel will go to a distribution center to be rationed out equally to the people that would actually need it. All the people will get is Government MREs and water doled out at some control point. So make sure you have poisoned the food, put methyl alcohol in with the regular alcoholic beverages, reloaded military rounds with something useless like gunpowder and abrasive sand. Put ground glass, oxalic acid, or lye into foodstuffs. Make chocolate candies out of Ex-lax, roll up poisoned cigarettes with tobacco and poison ivy or jimson weed and repackage them into original packages, inject water bottles with magnesium citrate and Ipecac. Total Resistance is the name of the game.
I don`t agree at all with your poison food ideal. To many risks with this ideal.
Are you ok with killing children and babies who could be feed you poison? You need your head checked out fast.
Agree
Lol, martial law will never happen. They can’t even control sections of some cities now, what makes you think during an incident they’d be able too?
Even calling back every military member, calling up the National Guard and activating all reserve police officers we are still only talking 3-4 million people, in a country of 330,000 million. 1% of the population enforcing unjust laws will never go over. And don’t bring up “The UN Army”, there is no UN army, 50,000-70,000 3rd world country armed forces on loan for cash is not any army.
“””They can’t even control sections of some cities now”””
Only because they don’t want to–they love it when the Chicago thugs kill each other..and I don’t lose sleep either.
Are you familiar with the battle of Thermopolese
The U.S Military is highly trained and heavily armed so they will have no problem taking out the resisting people.
You think that anyone buying ghost gun parts are not being identified, think again. In the 70s it was discovered that most if not all of the child pron sites were government ran as traps. I will bet that the government has records of every ghost gun part that is shipped anywhere and because they know that you will only buy those if you want to hid from government, you will be the first target. They also are probably the ones selling the books on how to make ghost guns or at least get the address that every one of the books are sent to.
If you are going to make a ghost gun, get the book and parts at a gun show, and make sure no surveillance camera is recording your actions, and use cash only.
No internet in the 70’s Skippy…
Another thing to keep in mind is some of the people searching may well have extensive experience searching dope houses on raids. The dope man can be pretty imaginative when it comes to hiding his stuff and narcotics and SWAT officers have learned many of the tricks, including many not mentioned here.
Another location not mentioned is a concealed cupboard under stairs. This works best with paneling rather than drywall. Even though there’s a closet under the stairwell of my home, from 6′ at the back of the finished closet, there’s considerable unused space along the stair run. Don’t make your access in the closet (that’s too obvious), but make it in the room outside. Determine where you want to cut an opening, but make sure the edge of the opening won’t be at a panelling joint. After you’ve cut and finished off your stair cache to your satisfaction, panel that wall. That panel section is not glued with construction adhesive and nailed, but use a tacky but seperatable adhesive like 3M or double sided tape an then nail. Have the trim for the paneling cut to fit, but countersink screws rather than nails so it can be accessed easier and not damaging to the trim. Fill the holes with spackling (it comes loose easier than putty), but measure and write down where those screwholes are for when you need to access your supplies. A false wall plug at the bottom and a false cable TV box at the top, gives easy gripping for removing the panel. You can get creative and you’re only limited by your imagination. Rolling my great grandmother old upright piano into that spot also discourages searches. That 100+ year old piano also has space in the bottom for stacking canned goods without affecting the playability of the piano. I can store enough canned goods in it alone for a 2 month supply of 2x a day meals for two people. Soup, chili and stews might sound monotonous, but when you’re hungry it won’t be. If you’re wanting to keep uncanned foodstuffs (dried rice, beans or anything that usually comes in a box. Take it out of the box and put it in glass or heavy plastic container (glass is best for this really, as a rodent can chew through plastic), this keeps the creepy crawlies from getting into your stash. Sugar, flour, powdered milk, powdered eggs keep for a long time stored this way.
It really is up to you to determine what your needs are, and you’re only limited by your imagination. Yes, some cache projects require some skills with tools, but most folks have a family member or friend that has these skills and can teach you how, if you really want to learn.
I think by “street gutter” you actually meant storm drain. You can’t hide ANYTHING in a street gutter. And you would need a means of protecting and securing your items in the storm drain, like large sized pvc pipe with sealed caps, and chains or cables. Otherwise, good article.
All these ideas are great. As are similar ones from other sites. The only problem I have with all these posts is the fact that you can probably bet that some of the people doing the confiscations have also read them. If they don’t have time to properly check the first time around, they may come back for a more thorough search.
Karl, correct. But if the authorities have the time to check everywhere they will find everything. But you can only do what you can do. To find food they just need to bring in a customs inspection food sector dog. But those dogs are not common.
Case in point hiding things in back garden to find need a metal detector?! Naugh. Just need a very high tech watering can with water. Sprinkle water and where it runs into the ground dig and there is the survival cache. Easy counter to this is loosen up lots of spots in garden. But if they persist they will find.