How much ammo do you need?

I know someone that has 2 9MM pistols a semi auto shot gun and some variation of an AR15.
He has about 4000 rounds for these weapons.
I think this is a bit excessive and he's not a go to the range very often guy.

If you ask that question, you need what you have.
 
And you have to think about shelf life. I would not trust my life with a round that is much over 10 years old (depending on how it's been stored).
Why? I have WWII .30 M1 Carbine ammo that has been reliable with no issues for as long as I have had them.

Hanging on to that many rounds increases the chance of a squib load. It was drilled into me by a range officer that old ammo (over 10 years old) is one of the leading causes of firearm explosions. It was explained explicitly that most squib loads are a direct result of moisture during long ammo storage. A less common cause is insufficient powder in the load.
I would posit the quantity stored is irrelevant, the method and environment in which it is stored is the relevant attribute. With that said, I can unequivocally state it takes more moisture than you think to ruin ammunition.

I have reloaded >500K rounds in my life and have had various components that didn't work out the way I wanted them to or that I just decided to stop using. One of the things that typically happens with is primers. I have soaked primers in a glass jar of water for a week, took them out, shook the water off of them, let them sit for about an hour and they would fire. The only way to effectively kill a primer is to soak it in oil.
 
Why? I have WWII .30 M1 Carbine ammo that has been reliable with no issues for as long as I have had them.

I would posit the quantity stored is irrelevant, the method and environment in which it is stored is the relevant attribute. With that said, I can unequivocally state it takes more moisture than you think to ruin ammunition.

I have reloaded >500K rounds in my life and have had various components that didn't work out the way I wanted them to or that I just decided to stop using. One of the things that typically happens with is primers. I have soaked primers in a glass jar of water for a week, took them out, shook the water off of them, let them sit for about an hour and they would fire. The only way to effectively kill a primer is to soak it in oil.


I have had rounds that failed to fire just a few short days of slogging in the rain. Could be it was defective even before. I have no way of knowing. I don't want to tempt fate. We all have our own comfort zone. I error on the side of caution when it has anything to do with explosives or combustibles.

Soaking primers in a jar of water to test would serve no purpose for me. I personally cannot imagine doing that for any reason whatsoever. I have never in my life heard of storing primers like that. Having random loose primers around is a recipe for an explosion. Any kind of humidity is not good at all.
 
Two best reasons

spasm3 "Because I can, I don't have to have a need."
Astro indicated 200 rounds every that's 5k a year. of 4 years. Not excessive.

Eat or be eaten. Were I as smart as Astro, I would not have gone out in the last 5months and buy 2K rounds of lower "quality" at triple the price. In this country some people eat and others are eaten..toilet paper, alcohol,...when this is over, I will start using my brain again.

oh yea Zeeosix's post..

Learned my lesson
 
I have had rounds that failed to fire just a few short days of slogging in the rain. Could be it was defective even before. I have no way of knowing. I don't want to tempt fate. We all have our own comfort zone. I error on the side of caution when it has anything to do with explosives or combustibles.

Soaking primers in a jar of water to test would serve no purpose for me. I personally cannot imagine doing that for any reason whatsoever. I have never in my life heard of storing primers like that. Having random loose primers around is a recipe for an explosion. Any kind of humidity is not good at all.
You are not understanding the reason the primers were in the water--they were to be discarded as noted in this statement "I have had various components that didn't work out the way I wanted them to or that I just decided to stop using."

I soaked them to safely discard them and as a check, I took some out and let the dry for an hour and they fired as if they had never been in the water. The point that I am making here is that a little rain or moisture is not going to ruin a metallic cartridge so long term storage is not going to cause any of them to be squibs (in and of the storage).
 
Two best reasons

spasm3 "Because I can, I don't have to have a need."
Astro indicated 200 rounds every that's 5k a year. of 4 years. Not excessive.

Eat or be eaten. Were I as smart as Astro, I would not have gone out in the last 5months and buy 2K rounds of lower "quality" at triple the price. In this country some people eat and others are eaten..toilet paper, alcohol,...when this is over, I will start using my brain again.

oh yea Zeeosix's post..

Learned my lesson

I'm not that smart, it’s just that I got caught in 2012 when the prices spiked.

For over two years, I struggled to find ammo at reasonable prices. I had alerts set up from Midway USA (who never raised their prices, by the way, earning my enduring loyalty) but I couldn’t always act fast enough. My shooting hobby, not to mention my proficiency shooting, was really hampered by a lack of ammo, or ammo at crazy prices, tripling the cost of a range session

When prices returned to normal, I planned for another crisis. I bought lots of ammo from 2015-2019.

How much I’ve got now is not a number I’m willing to share, particularly with the self-righteous who would like to judge how much I “need”, but I have enough to see me through this current crisis.

As an example, I bought a new gun last week. It has some issues (I’ll post up a range report on that when I’ve got time) and I went through 400+ rounds sorting it out. If I were to buy every available box, at every local store, I could not have put together that much ammo, and I would’ve paid a small fortune for it.

However, the ammo came from my stash, which was bought from www.sgammo.com when prices were reasonable. I’ve got plenty of that caliber left.

I will add that if you’ve got a box or two, and you think that’s enough to maintain proficiency with a firearm for a year, you and I have very, very different ideas on what is meant by proficiency.

Let me also add that having firearms in a variety of calibers is a way to mitigate this crisis. I have one carry/duty gun, but for my shooting hobby, I’ve got a variety. When I walked through two of my local gun stores recently, I found 10mm and .30-40 Krag in stock at reasonable prices. 9mm and 5.56mm were either nonexistent, or marked up to three times normal.
 
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Lads.
Protect your right to own as much ammunition as you “bloody” well please. I live in a Country where the Police make that decision and i go to Prison if i do not abide by it.

It's not much different here. The gun and ammo laws are tightening up in our country. This thread brings up that point. I personally rely on my wits and common sense in regards to my personal safety, rights as a firearm owner, or any entity. Panic buying for the "what if" or "it's going up in price" is not my style.

If tomorrow all firearms were deemed illegal or there was a cap on how much ammo I could have, it would just be a shrug of the shoulders and upset for the loss in value I had to give up. It's really not that big of a deal.

OTOH, for some it is a very big deal. I would predict that there are many law abiding citizens that would not give up their firearms or ammo even if the law deemed it so.

Case in point: The AR15 was deemed an assault weapon somewhere in the mid 90's. I remember clearly the panic buying that followed after it was announced. The ammo purchasing rush of the mid 2000's was the same thing just different product. In a lot of those cases both the assault weapons and ammo are just gathering dust in a safe. How about the Black Talon bullets? How many boxes of those are forgotten in some corner of the garage?
 
If tomorrow all firearms were deemed illegal or there was a cap on how much ammo I could have, it would just be a shrug of the shoulders and upset for the loss in value I had to give up. It's really not that big of a deal.

Aye, this is where the divide usually occurs. Senseless erosion of rights should be a worry for everyone and not simply accepted with a shrug of the shoulders. The UK is now banning knives because they never addressed the root of the problem, things in Oz and NZ are ridiculous.

Here in Canada the current administration used COVID to ram through legislation with a minority government to ban semi-auto rifles. The basis for this impotent piece of legislation was a mass shooting perpetrated by a man who:
1. Wasn't a licensed firearms owner
2. Purchased all his guns illegally from the USA
3. Impersonated a Police Officer, allowing him to benefit from the confusion and chaos that caused

Taking away semi-auto's from LAGO's would have had absolutely ZERO impact on how that played it. We have numerous organizations and companies suing the federal government over this idiocy presently.

In the wake of this legislation, murder by firearm in the GTA has continued to increase. Almost exclusively gang violence committed by felons with illegal hand guns smuggled in from the USA.

Politicians will ALWAYS choose the "fast and easy" way, even if it achieves absolutely nothing, over the difficult and resource intensive task of taking actual action against the root cause of a problem. The latter doesn't enable the same virtue signalling or provide that instant gratification to appease the screams of the emotion-driven imbeciles incapable of processing the complexity of the situation or separating fantasy from fact.

As it stands, millions of Canadians are poised to lose billions of dollars in guns through a program funded by their own tax dollars to appease an audience who is stupid enough to think that in doing so it will have an impact on a statistic dominated by felons and gang violence, a demographic wholly unaffected by this charade.

The government will then take the lack of effectiveness of this program as an opportunity to impose further legislation to restrict the rights and activities of those not perpetrating the crimes, destroying peoples hobbies, livelihoods and tradition under the guise of public safety with absolutely no benefit to that actual cause.
 
Aye, this is where the divide usually occurs. Senseless erosion of rights should be a worry for everyone and not simply accepted with a shrug of the shoulders. The UK is now banning knives because they never addressed the root of the problem, things in Oz and NZ are ridiculous.

Here in Canada the current administration used COVID to ram through legislation with a minority government to ban semi-auto rifles. The basis for this impotent piece of legislation was a mass shooting perpetrated by a man who:
1. Wasn't a licensed firearms owner
2. Purchased all his guns illegally from the USA
3. Impersonated a Police Officer, allowing him to benefit from the confusion and chaos that caused

Taking away semi-auto's from LAGO's would have had absolutely ZERO impact on how that played it. We have numerous organizations and companies suing the federal government over this idiocy presently.

In the wake of this legislation, murder by firearm in the GTA has continued to increase. Almost exclusively gang violence committed by felons with illegal hand guns smuggled in from the USA.

Politicians will ALWAYS choose the "fast and easy" way, even if it achieves absolutely nothing, over the difficult and resource intensive task of taking actual action against the root cause of a problem. The latter doesn't enable the same virtue signalling or provide that instant gratification to appease the screams of the emotion-driven imbeciles incapable of processing the complexity of the situation or separating fantasy from fact.

As it stands, millions of Canadians are poised to lose billions of dollars in guns through a program funded by their own tax dollars to appease an audience who is stupid enough to think that in doing so it will have an impact on a statistic dominated by felons and gang violence, a demographic wholly unaffected by this charade.

The government will then take the lack of effectiveness of this program as an opportunity to impose further legislation to restrict the rights and activities of those not perpetrating the crimes, destroying peoples hobbies, livelihoods and tradition under the guise of public safety with absolutely no benefit to that actual cause.


I understand completely. I have sadly succumbed by voting to be heard and when that does not work I figure the government is going to do what they want anyway. Losing simple rights is a bummer for sure.
 
If tomorrow all firearms were deemed illegal or there was a cap on how much ammo I could have, it would just be a shrug of the shoulders and upset for the loss in value I had to give up. It's really not that big of a deal.

The Russians, Jews, Chinese, Cubans and many others thought the same thing too when their "Dear Leaders" did the same thing.

They realized the mistake when those same governments came "for everything else"- it was too late then
 
I understand completely. I have sadly succumbed by voting to be heard and when that does not work I figure the government is going to do what they want anyway. Losing simple rights is a bummer for sure.

Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
 
Hmmm...don’t have a 6.5...might have to fix that. Latest AR is a pistol in .300 BLK. Can’t find that caliber for a reasonable price at the moment.

Bought the pistol in November, but didn’t buy much ammo for it before the current spike in demand hit .300 along with every other popular caliber.
 
Aye, this is where the divide usually occurs. Senseless erosion of rights should be a worry for everyone and not simply accepted with a shrug of the shoulders. The UK is now banning knives because they never addressed the root of the problem, things in Oz and NZ are ridiculous.

Here in Canada the current administration used COVID to ram through legislation with a minority government to ban semi-auto rifles. The basis for this impotent piece of legislation was a mass shooting perpetrated by a man who:
1. Wasn't a licensed firearms owner
2. Purchased all his guns illegally from the USA
3. Impersonated a Police Officer, allowing him to benefit from the confusion and chaos that caused

Taking away semi-auto's from LAGO's would have had absolutely ZERO impact on how that played it. We have numerous organizations and companies suing the federal government over this idiocy presently.

In the wake of this legislation, murder by firearm in the GTA has continued to increase. Almost exclusively gang violence committed by felons with illegal hand guns smuggled in from the USA.

Politicians will ALWAYS choose the "fast and easy" way, even if it achieves absolutely nothing, over the difficult and resource intensive task of taking actual action against the root cause of a problem. The latter doesn't enable the same virtue signalling or provide that instant gratification to appease the screams of the emotion-driven imbeciles incapable of processing the complexity of the situation or separating fantasy from fact.

As it stands, millions of Canadians are poised to lose billions of dollars in guns through a program funded by their own tax dollars to appease an audience who is stupid enough to think that in doing so it will have an impact on a statistic dominated by felons and gang violence, a demographic wholly unaffected by this charade.

The government will then take the lack of effectiveness of this program as an opportunity to impose further legislation to restrict the rights and activities of those not perpetrating the crimes, destroying peoples hobbies, livelihoods and tradition under the guise of public safety with absolutely no benefit to that actual cause.

I am with you 100%.

Mac 10 is quite popular over here, as is the little Scorpion machine pistol that is smuggled in from eastern europe. Only criminal gangs have them of course. Law abiding lost semi auto back in 88.
 
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