I don’t want to start a dooms day thread, but these shortages are becoming more frequent and more diverse. We’ve seen what happens when the cost of fuel doubles or more.

The one thing that bothers me about stocking up on ammo & stuff is that no matter if you have $10,000 or $20,000 of ammo, both are set on the assumption that you will defend wherever your ammo is because being realistic you can’t take it all with you, or at least you can’t take it far. Which brings up other questions, like will we have electricity & water? Would our phones work(land or cell towers)

I’ve thought about helping to arm a couple of my neighbors to defend themselves and the area but most of them I don’t know if I could trust them and I don’t know how realistic that would be. On our cul-de-sac which is a block long, we have 2 guys that are hunters, myself and another guy that belong to the same range and 2 others that are veteran's in their 40-50’s.

The other option would be to bug-out, but to go where and how much fuel would it take to get there. Being retired I do keep my truck ready to go to the range on a moment’s notice. Usually 500 rounds of 223, 9mm & 1K 22LR, a mixture of subsonic & standard velocity, along with firearms to shoot said ammo. I’ve got 4 weeks of MRE’s for 4 people. And we also have a few cases of water.

The more technically advanced we get, the easier it would be to set our society back to the stone ages.

quote:

The one thing that bothers me about stocking up on ammo & stuff is that no matter if you have $10,000 or $20,000 of ammo, both are set on the assumption that you will defend wherever your ammo is because being realistic you can’t take it all with you, or at least you can’t take it far.

... or more $$$

So true about the myths of quantity aka an arsenal to some.
Just 1K (1 case) of most any round is heavy.
The ones who want to destroy the 2nd Amendment would like you to believe that having that much ammo would lead to the death of 1000 people in seconds.
But even still .... gotta be prepared and being out of ammo is not a good feeling.

That other thread started as a question about fears; this one started as a question about actually doing, so I’ll post my thoughts about doing here.

There are things that inevitably show up in any discussion like this, but the huge elephant in the room that is largely ignored is how much of the advice is what large numbers of people simply cannot follow, regardless of how valid it might be for a few of those who post it.

Until 30 years ago, I lived all of my adult life in rented apartments, mostly due to my Army career. Even if I would have never needed to worry what I would do with two months of stored food for two people if forced to move, not to mention thousands of rounds of any type of ammunition, I simply did not have physical room for such a stockpile. On the other hand, when I last lived in an apartment, I and my wife were in good physical condition, were experienced campers and hikers, and—most important—had relatives with whom we could have holed up to (hopefully) wait out certain catastrophes. Now, however, I have the room for stockpiles and am far enough from urban hives that we’re unlikely to be assaulted by mobs, so could I have stockpiles? Sure. And then what?

Every now and then we see posts that give some insight into how many of us on the forum are disabled or have limited physical abilities to some degree. They very seldom, however, enter these discussions, probably because they have less virtue to signal by telling us all how well-prepared they are for the apocalypse. In my case, just to cite one minor example, my wife is disabled, requires certain types of daily care, and couldn’t make it to the street in front of our house without help. Due to our climate, if something really bad happened in the winter we’d probably be forced to go to a lower altitude at some point, and probably where the other social dangers would be greater, not to mention with a probably nearly-empty gas tank. In that event, my ammo stockpile would be left behind, as would most of my guns and other possessions.

A tiny fraction of people would be in much better shape to weather a social storm: they can live self-sufficiently for a long time, long enough in fact for them to be found by some warlord’s gang of the sort that will inevitably form after a true collapse.

Yes, all that’s gloom and doom and self-serving rationalizations, and yes, we should nevertheless still be prepared for certain troubles. That is, BTW, why all the milk and TP disappears from store shelves in advance of a bad weather forecast: people are preparing for what that may mean for their personal lives. (And a “panic” buyer is the guy who got the last carton of milk or roll of TP or box of ammo before I could buy it.)

If you’re prepared for any catastrophe that may befall us, congratulations. You and the other tiny fraction who survive because you were totally prepared will be exactly who are needed to rebuild a future society of more self-reliant, smart members. Most of the rest of us will simply muddle through as best as we can and in the end will contribute most by simply stop being “useless mouths.”

This message has been edited. Last edited by: sigfreund,

It all boils down to knowing how to be self-sufficient and having the knowledge and ability to provide for your own security and livelihood. We garden, we process and store food, we have a generator, and the tools and ability to hunt and fish. We live near a sustainable water source, and have enough ammo to defend against your average thug or small group of thugs. The area where we live is far from urban areas and their problems, and not prone to any major natural disasters except for the occasional tornado, which when they do happen tend to cause isolated rather than widespread damage.

Economically speaking, we have no debt and our investments are as diversified as I can make it. We are reasonably physically fit and have the ability and knowledge to repair our own vehicles and residence. IMO having supplies on-hand is a good start and would make things easier at the beginning, but resiliency and self-sufficiency is what really matters long-term. The biggest problem I have now is that I'm type 1 diabetic and insulin dependent, so if the supply of that ever dries up I'll be measuring my lifespan in months.


You can only prepare for so much. If we got hit by a nuke or involved in some major military conflict, lone groups of people are not going to be able to defend themselves against an army intent on wiping them out. It would require an organized military response of our own to counter something like that. I hope and pray that that never happens, because the reality of a war in and around our own homes and families is too horrible to contemplate.

So, I don't stockpile ammunition for "the coming apocalypse." I just like to shoot, and when I can find the time I shoot once a week. And a typical outing is fifty to one hundred and fifty rounds of .22LR, one hundred and fifty rounds of 9mm, and maybe fifty or one hundred rounds of .45, .38, .357 Magnum, or whatever else I decided to shoot for fun that day. (I do accuracy work with a .22, drills with my carry pistol, and work in something different every trip as well to remind myself that this hobby is supposed to be fun, not a chore).

If you add all that up over a year (assuming I take two weekends off to make the numbers round), that's 7500 rounds of .22LR, 7500 rounds of 9x19mm, and 2500-5000 rounds mixed of whatever "fun" caliber I brought to shoot that weekend. Call it 10,000 rounds of 9mm if I brought fun nine mils to shoot like my Berettas, TDA SIGs, or Smith & Wessons.

Past ammunition panics have followed a rough model of 6-12 months of expensive scarcity - you buy whatever you can find at $1.00/round for cheap 9x19mm ball - followed by 6-18 months of slowly waiting for $0.20-$0.30/round 9x19mm practice ball to come back down from $1.00/round.

So I want about two years of consumption for what I shoot regularly on hand just in case.

The reality of life is if I make it to the range twice a month I'm doing well (life with a newborn). Another reality is that if I really feel the need (as I frequently did during the COVID ammo panic) I can do what I need to do with a couple hundred rounds total per range trip. That, and as some others have posted, it's a real bear to move the ammo stockpile I have, much less the ammo stockpile I want, every time the Army cuts me PCS orders to a new base out of state.

Retirement is no longer a pie in the sky and will be possible within the next ten years. Once I own a home I expect to be in for five years or longer - or even better, when my wife and I can afford invest in land for a vacation property that will eventually become our forever home - my stockpile targets will change significantly.

But it's all wrapped around the fact that I'd rather invest up front in a rotating stock of ammunition large enough to weather scarcity and price hikes. A decade and a half in uniform has made me very, very skeptical of long-term post-apocalyptic survival of any group that can't pull together trained, equipped, committed defenders in at least platoon if not company strength.

For us, "Do" means sheltering in place unless our home is destroyed. Earthquake is a real statistical possibility, but our current home will withstand a pretty major shake.

My goal is to have at least 4 weeks of water and 2 months of food, plus other supplies like TP and dish detergent, in case of a blizzard or other similar event that makes shopping at the grocery store impossible or dangerous.

Aside from that, I am constantly trying to improve our medical preparedness.

Bugging out is probably a bad choice, as we are in a mountain town with few full-time neighbors. We're safer here than on the roads or in an urban area. I've not thought through the challenges we would have with stranded tourists.

I do keep the car and motorcycle gas tanks above 50% in case we do have to make a run for it. But I really do expect to bug-in rather than bug-out.

Economically, now that is a whole different set of problems. We're trying to downsize the home and upsize the portfolio. We have quite a bit of silver and gold (physical but held by a distant vault). I would like to acquire a good bunch of physical silver and gold to keep stored at home.

Financial catastrophe does seem like the most likely disaster with long term implications.