Sunday Q&A #1
Questions I recently received that don't need a whole post
Just for organizational reasons I’m going to use Sunday as a day when I answer questions. You can ask me here, or you can DM me on my Instagram which is where a lot of questions come from, or if you run into me online or irl you can ask and I will awkwardly not answer so I can answer it here if it’s a good enough question I think it’ll be useful to others to read the answer to.
How Much Ammunition Should I store? That depends on your space, budget and time you put into the range. It also depends on what you’re prepping for. Much of the prepping movement is full of people who are also fairly political and envision a second civil war. If you are prepping for that you’ll need more ammo - if you’re planning on fighting in it you’ll need even more. If you plan on bugging out indefinitely you need less because you can only carry so much. If you live in a high crime city and think a collapse is coming more handgun ammo is better. If you live on a farm in a rural area shotgun ammunition might be what makes up the bulk of your storage but you’ll also want some more rifle ammo.
Caliber also plays a role both because of cost and availability. I like my 20ga which was plentiful and cheap. I have a lot of it. I mean A LOT. There was a time when I was buying 25 round boxes of birdshot for $5 so I’ve stacked it deep. People with old 16ga shotguns don’t have that option.
I also like the venerable 45 Colt round, partly because it was originally a black powder round and can be reloaded easily. With black powder or substitutes the 45 Colt can achieve true magnum performance with less recoil. One of my favorite YouTube channels Guns of the Old West reloaded the round with the same Lee kit I have and got more than 1200 fps with a 255 gr bullet.
Granted that performance was not what he expected but I digress. The point here is that some of my ammunition budget for my favorite handgun cartridge goes to reloading materials because you can get more bang for your buck (ba-dum-tiss) loading your own. If you’re shooting 9mm or something you may not. 5.56 and .223 are still mostly cheaper to buy than to reload for I’m told.
For any of my handgun rounds I aim at having at least 1000 rounds. Sounds like a lot but it’s in fact just 20 full boxes as most handgun rounds are sold in boxes of 50. Some higher end self defense rounds will come in boxes of 20. You may not be able to get this all at once but what I do is just buy two when I can, put one away. I replace any box open for the range even if it’s not empty. Right now because .45 is so expensive I think I’m down to about 850. I can reload another 300 or so. I have about 1000 rounds at least of all my other calibers.
The more civil war oriented preppers will recommend 10,000 at least of every caliber.
.22 LR is the only exception. I have about 8,000 or so rounds of it and I fire it all the time. It used to be $2 a box for 50 so most people laid in in deep. Now it’s averaging $6 a box. Even at that price it’s cheaper than most other rounds so most shooters have much more of it than of other rounds they shoot.
But this is all aspirational - get what you can but if we plunge into a new dark age of Mad Max style violence no one is going to have enough ammo. Don’t get hung up on numbers.
You have a “coach gun” - why? This is a word for word direct quote.
I like coach guns. A coach gun is a variation of a shotgun that was designed to be easily wielded by stagecoach crews. They are double barreled guns with shorter barrels than most. The sport of Cowboy Actions Shooting created more interest in that kind of gun so there are a lot floating around. The coach gun is also supposedly where the term “riding shotgun” originated. The guy with the shotgun on a stage coach didn’t drive the horses, just sat upfront with the driver ready to start blasting.
They do have some benefits over other shotguns. Coach guns are actually more compact then other shotguns with similar sized barrels.
For most people that’s not important. To me it is. It’s also legal almost everywhere. Lots of young gun owners today like to pretend laws never change and don’t matter but I remember the 90s and how the ATF treats people who have guns that are suddenly “illegal’ so…
If you live in a blue state single and double barreled shotguns are usually the last guns to be regulated out of reach, if you like bushcraft coach guns make nice brush guns because of the length and can accept sub caliber inserts which are devices that make it so your shotgun can safely fire common handgun and pistol cartridges. This might be a good set up for long term survival.
But honestly, I just like them. The more you like a gun you have, the more you “play” with it and handle it, which means the more proficient you are with it is my theory. If you have a reliable gun you really like don’t let guys in skinny jeans with Glocks shoved down the front tell you it’s worthless. It’s also fun to try to get better with one. I’m trying to get as good as this guy:
Why don’t you just make a list of things for me to buy? This is a good one.
There is a market for that sort of posting, but I don’t do it for several reasons.
Lists, or what we called “listicles” and “list posts” are a hold over from blogging when affiliate links were a much more important revenue stream. For example in the prepper community we would write list posts of stuff “YOU NEED TO BUY NOW!!!” and much of it would be things on Amazon. The link to the water filter or whatever would have your affiliate code in it, so you got a cut of that sale. Even better, if the reader didn’t click another affiliate link your link was good for their purchases for that entire day - so if I sent you to Amazon and you then click around and bought something else I still got a cut. That’s one reason lists posts became popular - it’s a scam.
A more important reason I don’t make lists of specific things (though I will make a lazy list of general things you might want to think about) is your budget, your space and your environment will dictate specifics. I might advice you get beans and sugar etc, but I don’t know how much you can even afford. I don’t know if you have room for flats of beans. I don’t know if you have high blood pressure so you should watch the sodium so there are certain brands of beans that you can’t eat. I want to help you figure this out but I can’t figure it out for you.
I do, out of habit, make lists. I try keep them vague and don’t recommend specifics because I’m just trying to get you to make your own list. I can’t tell you how much salt you should store or what brand you want. I can just tell you I think it’s a great idea and I happen to store a lot of it. So take that with … a grain of salt.
Also if I make a list today of specific brands or things I like I might find out tomorrow something actually wasn’t all that great or worse (and this happened to me before) the company might rip you off. If you’re giving out advice you should remember a certain number of people will take it word for word, so you have a responsibility to be circumspect about recommendations. The few retail sites I’ve recommended I’ve done business with many times and I’m sure they’re not going to disappear overnight. There are other sites or stores I frequent that I can’t make that claim about so I don’t mention them.
Any other questions? Find me on Instagram