↑ arvau

Wikipedia / Ragnar Benson

Ragnar Benson (born ) is the pen name of the prolific survivalist author Larry Grupp, of Moscow Idaho, who specialized in preparedness topics, particularly survival retreats, hunting, trapping, austere medicine, false identification, explosives, firearms, and improvised weapons. He was executive director of the Moscow Chamber of Commerce from 1972 to 1977 and ran an agriculture consulting business from his home on Paradise Ridge.

According to the fictional biography in the nearly two dozen “non-fiction” books he has written under the pen name Ragnar Benson, he is a globetrotting gunrunner who has been in just about every hot spot in the world. But Grupp discounts the authenticity of his books. “They're kind of apocryphal," said Grupp, whose wife, Carol Grupp, is the University of Idaho's risk-management officer and director of human resources.

Writing career

Many of his 46 books were published by Loompanics Unlimited (which went out of business in 2004) and by Paladin Press (which also went out of business in 2018). Both Benson and Paladin Press are controversial, because actually formulating or constructing many of the explosives and weapons that he describes would be illegal in most jurisdictions. Some of his books have been banned ("challenged") from importation into Canada, by the Customs Canada censors at the Connaught Building.

In the aftermath of the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing, Timothy McVeigh was found to have been in possession of Benson's Homemade C-4: A Recipe For Survival and Ragnar's Big Book of Homemade Weapons: Building and Keeping Your Arsenal Secure. Senator Dianne Feinstein proposed an amendment to the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act that criminalizes broad categories of criminally instructional speech, and it was passed by Congress in 1999. His book Ragnar's Guide to Home and Recreational Use of High Explosives and others were reportedly pulled from distribution the same year.

Benson's work on improvised medicine has been recognized and promoted by the U.S. Special Operations Command in their official publication Journal of Special Operations Medicine: A Peer Reviewed Journal for SOF Medical Professionals.

Fictional biography

Larry Grupp, writing as Ragnar Benson, had constructed a fantasy biography of himself as his pen-name persona. His fictitious. His alter-ego was born in Indiana and was raised on a farm where dynamite was used for utilitarian purposes. As of 1999, he lived "...on nine acres in southern Idaho with his pet skunks and his wife and 100-plus guns of varying caliber." He was the son of a German immigrants, and his family spoke German in their home until the outbreak of World War II. In his book Urban Survival he recounts some of his father's experiences growing up in Germany after World War I. Later in his childhood his parents returned to Europe and he stayed in America with his grandparents who immigrated from Russia. None of the above is actually true.

Selected bibliography

Books

Book contributions

  • Tough Times Survival Guide, Vol. 1. Boulder, CO: Paladin Press, 2009. .

  • "Foreword." In: Ballou, James. Prepper Press, 2018. .

Video

  • Homemade C-4: A Closer Look. Boulder, CO: Paladin Press, 1991. [VHS]. .

Further reading

See also

References