In a landmark decision upholding a future wasteland dweller’s legal right to use lethal force to defend oneself against a perceived threat to life, liberty, and 15 year supply of freeze-dried lentils, the South Dakota Supreme Court this week ruled in favor of a resident of an apocalypse survival bunker-themed gated community who shot a property management employee as he approached the unit amid the man’s heated disputes with the management firm, South Dakota Searchlight reports.

The trouble at the Igloo Bunker complex began in the summer of 2024, when the resident, David Streeter, became increasingly frustrated with the property management firm Vivos xPoint’s handling of his complaints about ongoing issues with community’s septic system and yes the whole fucking point of prepper culture is NOT having to rely on timely maintenance service by some slapdick real estate syndicate like you’re living in the goddamned Villages, but let’s not get sidetracked here.

On August 23rd of that year Streeter, a former cop, chased down a Vivos vehicle that sped past his bunker and shoved the employee back into his seat during the confrontation. Later on there was a second verbal altercation with a different staff member, leading a third, Kelly Anderson, to declare via text message to another resident that he was going to teach Streeter a lesson. That resident, a mutual acquaintance, then warned Streeter that Anderson was on the way. That was also via text, rather than a crank-powered CB shortwave radio that they should be practiced in using now so they can coordinate defense against hordes of the ghoulishly luminescent 5G nanobot-zomb…

ANYWAY, Streeter was armed when he met Anderson outside of the 1940s US military weapons storage depot structure and words about their respective prior experiences of having killed other human beings were exchanged – Streeter, who in 2010 fatally shot a guy in Montana and possibly more during his deployment to Bosnia in the 1990s, said yes, to which Anderson replied the same and “with his bare hands,” per the Supreme Court opinion. It was then that Streeter shot Anderson, after which he told his 12 year-old daughter to call 911 while he applied compression to the wound that he’d just inflicted on the other man rather than using a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wi…

So yeah, Anderson survived and a grand jury declined to indict Streeter for the shooting – though they did hit him with an assault charge for shoving the other Vivos employee earlier the same day. Andersen sued, lost, and his appeal led to this ruling that, in practice, merely affirmed the lower court finding that Streeter’s actions colored well within the lines of South Dakota’s self-defense laws but in spirit endorsed the inhuman nihilistic savagery borne of a permanent and irrevocable collapse the doomsday prepper community – by its very value proposition – eagerly anticipates.

Envisioning a world in which the charred bones of the justices of the South Dakota state Supreme Court dangle from the copper wire strung above Sick Michael’s macabre den – and the original copies of the state constitution was among the thousands of pounds of paper used to kindle the massive pyre on which the former National Guard sergeant-turned-warlord had the jurists, their staffs, and every member of the state legislature immolated alive while his gang throttled their ATVs and dirtbikes in circles around the inferno – is actually pretty innovative when you think about it.

It’s as if the jurists said “Hey you know someday shortly after the Tau Cetians raid the planet en masse to harvest upward of 90 percent of all humans and livestock, the scattered, desperate survivors will – during the few moments of peace they experience while shivering under an old carpet they dragged into the derailed tanker car that seems far away enough from the path of the large crowd of strangers making bizarre, rhythmic hooting noises as they pursue an unknown quarry in the blackness – realize that all along the law was always a fiction, a bedtime story we told ourselves and each other again and again and again as if just one more time would make it so. That this stupid wooden hammer and this silly black robe might as well be a toilet brush and SpongeBob Squarepants pajamas as far of that world separated only by predators and prey is concerned. In a way it’s preserving our legacy to affirm the rule of lawlessness in anticipation of centuries, millennia even, of unceasing violence and suffering, all thanks to the fucking maniac prepper who should probably figure out how to fix his own septic system or just give up the act if he can’t.”