Why more Americans are learning to pick locks, bust out of handcuffs, and avoid surveillance.

When Reeve first started out, his largest client was the U.S. military, which sent soldiers as a supplement to requisite SERE training, standing for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape. Now, his main clients are civilians. "I expected a bunch of military guys and me here," a 34-year-old computer programmer from Boston named Chris, told me on the first day of class. "I walked through the door and looked around and was like, Oh, shit, it's just a bunch of mes," he says. Chris had read about the onPoint in Emergency.

My class was largely comprised of middle-class professionals. There was one couple (the only other one besides Bruce and me) that owned a natural-food store in New Hampshire. There was a salesperson for LexisNexis from Florida, a guy from North Carolina who owns a steel servicing business, a former bond-trader for Lehman Bros., a corporate banker from Washington, D.C. And then there was Nick, my cuff-mate, who works for a video game publisher; Bruce, who works in public relations; and me, a journalist.

The exception was Kyle, who hopped from city to city and had spent much of his life living on the streets. He had dreads down to his lower back and dirty fingernails. He said he was taking the class because he was often hassled by cops. (It should be noted that neither Reeve nor Alwood endorsed escaping from police cuffs. In fact, Alwood said with a wry smile, if you get arrested, police officers don't appreciate it when you unlock the handcuffs and give them back.)

Reeve has spent much of his professional career as a teacher. For five years he worked at Apple Computer (AAPL) as a leadership instructor, and he spent seven years working with the famously splenetic Tom Brown Jr. at Brown's eponymous wilderness survival school, also headquartered in New Jersey. When Reeve spotted a vacancy in the market for urban survival training, he left to begin his own business. Alwood came along two years later after reading about onPoint in a tactical journal. He had spent five years as an instructor at the U.S. Air Force CPEC sniper school and before that as a private military contractor and a bounty hunter, work that he still does on the side.

Though it isn't formally tracked, the growth in the survival industry is not limited to onPoint. Firearms sales in the most recent quarter at Sturm, Ruger & Co. (RGR) and Smith & Wesson (SWHC) have grown between 22 percent and 55 percent from a year earlier. The number of background checks for firearm purchases, required before the sale of a gun at a federally licensed dealer, has risen to 6 million through May of this year, a 25.5 percent jump from the same period in 2008.

The media attribute the spike in background checks and firearms sales to fear that President Barack Obama will reverse key provisions of the Second Amendment. They have also claimed it is due to increased interest in ammo and weapons as an investment vehicle. But isn't it also possible that it has to do with the same fear that is propelling sales at some camping supply and military surplus stores, which are up 50 percent?