I have a couple of cubic yards of ammo, but I’d feel more comfortable with four.
Jim Harris
November 8, 2020
Comment to How’s everybody doing for ammunition? And what’s the full loadout for Pak36? Asking for a friend…
[Unless your stockpiling for your neighborhood, I think the money and time would be better spent on training and practice.
But, still, I rather like what he said.—Joe]
I never thought about my ammo in terms of volume instead of quantity. I have but one cubic yard, but if the SHTF I will be long dead in a pile of empty brass surrounded by the bodies of my enemies before I burn through 1/8 of that. I am too old and out of shape for a running gun battle lasting too long or covering too much geographical area. But I will take a lot of MoFo’s with me from my stand.
Having enough guns and ammo is a worthy objective, but I think it’s a bit of a stretch to fantasize about ongoing human wave attacks of pampered socialist kids storming our strongholds, suburban homes, or apartment complexes.
They won’t send snowflakes in human wave attacks. They’ll bomb the neighborhood like in Philadelphia in 1985. Do it once, and the neighbors will turn each other in, and, one at a time, SWAT teams will go out and it will be like the book patrol in the movie Fahrenheit 451. We won’t need guns then, we’ll just need a match.
And besides there are a lot of other, often more effective, ways to cause your enemy to cry uncle that have been used down through the ages.
Some battles can be won by being on the defense. Wars are mostly won by going on the offense. This one has reached the point that just defense will no longer cut it.
Ill health leaves me in a position that I can’t handle any recoil, and I don’t expect that to change for the better, but only get worse. Timing sucks. Not a happy camper…
Your point is well taken. The main activity of the men of Easy Company at Toccoa in “Band of Brothers” was directed at being in shape and learning to jump out of airplanes. Learning tactics and using the weapons was secondary.
If the balloon goes up, to use Colonel Cooper’s phrase, we need to be able to walk more than five miles without having to rest up for three days with ice and liniment.
If you didn’t have it before about June, you probably won’t have been able to add to it.
I haven’t been able to find any .30-30 since June or July, and haven’t been able to find .38 or .357 since well before that.
Last time I was able to find slugs, they were $15 for a box of 5 (*before* the Pritzker/Lightfoot tax) and buckshot was completely sold out.
I saw a giant pile of .25 auto at Cabela’s…I couldn’t use any so kept looking. Next time I stopped in, it was all gone.
Here’s the conundrum: you need ammo to practice with. And expect in the foreseeable future that Emma will be nonexistent or stupid expensive. You say you reload I have one word: primers. What happens when you run out of those? Or do you have literally 100,000 or more stocked up ready to go?
What would it take to go into business manufacturing primers?
I sense a market opportunity.
Not being able to buy primers seems fishy. It’s been 6 months and still no 9mm primers. Why?
And except for match heads and caps DIY does not seem possible. Anybody know how?
Three things –
Ammo has a larger net markup than just primers, and the ammo makers are all running flat out 24×7. So they are consuming most of the primer supply. What hits the market for the reloaders is only what gets made above the ammo-makers demand.
With all the new shooters and riots, ammo demand is up.
Bots – I put in a “product arrival notification” on MidwayUSA for primers. Not because I need them right now, just to test the sell-out rate. When I get an email, by the time I can click on it, it is already sold out. Call it 60 seconds or less.
Yeah; having it is one thing. Having both the physical and psychological ability to use it, or even to get to it, in a time of unrest is quite another. Using it to proper effect is another issue altogether.
War, should it come to it, is a purely psychological contest, with physical implications. It goes something like this;
We all know we’re going to die, but we want to delay that death as long as it is practical (to us, as individuals). Not only do we want to live, and this is critically important; we want to live in relative comfort and peace, with relative dignity. We also want to eat (food being a subset of survival requirements), and to drink water, etc. Warring factions use these wants against one another, by seeking to deprive them, until one side gives in.
The giving in, or refusing to give in even ’till death (or until whatever is deemed worse than death) is that purely psychological component. Therefore the most psychologically committed, and in many cases the most brutally evil, side wins. In the case of winning by being the more brutally evil, you’ve still lost, absolutely, and therefore evil has the, as it were, “tactical” advantage in this world, right there.
The Biblical narrative is quite different however. An altogether separate paradigm, which few human beings, being thoroughly distracted by the temptations of the first paradigm, will be able to grasp. But in even broaching the subject of the existence of evil we’re alluding to it, because if there’s an empirical standard for evil then there’s also one of good, and both would be beyond human influence (existing, like the stars, quite apart from the human mind which can merely ponder them). This Biblical paradigm says that evil will surely triumph in this world (iniquity will be fulfilled), and yet it will lose in the universe, and lose so utterly and so completely that there will be nothing whatsoever left of it when the dust settles, that the only being in the universe who will bear any scars from this war afterward is Christ himself.
This paradigm, based on the existence of a creator God to whom we are accountable, is so foreign to what we’ll call mainstream scientific thought that mainstream scientific thought itself could be seen as having been set up specifically as its antithesis.
And so when you’re doing your war gaming you may want to consider both paradigms in the process. Either one can be criticized, of course, but then anything, even the provably true, can be criticized, mocked, etc., as we’re all seeing in the world today.
One thing I believe we can all agree on right now, also strongly asserted in the Bible, is that deception will have played a major role in world events. Jesus’ disciples, even those who’d walked with him for three years, who of all people you’d think would be least susceptible to deceptions, asked Him what would be the signs of His return. The first thing He said in reply; “Take heed that no man deceive you.” Mathew 24:4 The takeaway there? If you think you’re incapable of being significantly deceived then it’s probably because you’re being significantly deceived : )
Not sure I’d want a PaK 36. While it would defeat almost any light armor we would see in town, it doesn’t have a canister round like the U.S. 37mm.
Now a PaK 40…..
I remember reading about the Russian-Afgan war, that 308 was saleing as high as $2 a round. (Afgan’s are capitalists).(I know they used brit 303. and 7.62×39 more).
But the point is ammo is money in the bank.
And if the world goes all rainbow-fluffy, life is good again. One has a good hobby already paid for.
And as the guy said in Eastwood’s, Unforgiven. “I just don’t want to die for lack of shooting back!”
“I think the proper measure is not necessarily how much ammunition one may possess, but rather how effectively one can use the ammunition one has. ”
Reminds me of this:
Back in the Nam war, someone decided that there was a problem with a soldier that kept coming back from patrol with most of his ammo loadout, while the others usually ran low or dry. The decision was made to send an observer on their next outing, instead of just charging him with cowardice, as that is a serious charge, and requires documentation. They got hit hard. Turns out he was generating most of their body count, while the rest of them were “spraying and praying”. Several awards for that and earlier engagements were forwarded for consideration.
Hitting your target is what really matters.
You can never have too much ammo…….unless you are on fire or drowning.