Hey guys,
I just wanted to share a few thoughts about ammo stockpiles. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people post that they've got 50K rounds of ammo, and need more. I've seen various numbers, estimates, and arguments for how much you need, but I wanted to do my own figuring and see what I came up with. So I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation on this, because, as much as I'd like to have 50K (or even 20K) rounds of ammo stored up, I don't, and won't any time soon. My basic assumptions are that I'm feeding, defending, and practicing for a family of 5 for a year, that the shooter is a better gunfighter than 90% of the folks out there, and that there is an incredible abundance of wild game to be harvested for the dinner table, which is pretty unrealistic if every gun owner in america starts hunting to feed their family. Just for giggles (or crying, more likely) I roughly figured the total cost of this theoretical stockpile as well. This is meant to be at the extreme high end for what a person in my make-believe scenario would need for a year. Finding this many game animals may be unrealistic. Surviving this many combat engagements may be unrealistic. Etc.
Hunting: Small game
Let's say that a single squirrel or varmint is the centerpiece of 1-2 meals for a single person. To feed a family of 5 each one squirrel a day we'll say we need (and can find, to shoot) 5 small-game kills a day. Even in today's world, on good hunting grounds, that can be a tall order, but we'll assume they're out there, and you can find them to shoot at. Call it 7 rounds of .22LR or airgun ammo a day, since they're crafty buggers and it's harder to shoot straight when you're looking out for zombies.
7 rounds a day * 7 days a week * 52 weeks in a year * 1 year of living it rough = 2,548 rounds.
The big assumption here is that there will actually be that much to shoot, which is dubious. We'll throw in an extra 1k rounds for practice, training, or whatever. We'll round to 3,500 rounds of .22LR. Really, you're never going to have that much stuff to shoot, so this is a very high-end estimate.
3,500 rounds of .22LR.
Note: At a price of $20 for a brick of 500 rounds, that will run you $140.
Hunting: Medium and Large game
Around here a good deer weighs between 120 and 200 lbs. Even on the small end, if you lose half of that to bones, guts, and other inedibles, that's around 50 lbs of meat, give or take, assuming you're eating all that is edible. Call it the foundation for 50 solid meals. So for our family of 5, eating deer once a day:
5 lbs of deer per day * 356 days in a year = 1,780 lbs of deer. With our 50 lbs in the freezer from the one deer, that figures needing about 35 deer. If you're bagging a larger deer, or elk or other game, then it's an even smaller number of animals.
Realistically, you're not likely going to be eating a pound of deer every day, because hopefully you'll be supplementing it with long-term food stores, and foraging, fishing, etc. And, realistically, you're not going to have time to do all that hunting, and the animals may not be there in the first place to hunt.
So we'll say 40 rounds for your game rifle to harvest game per year. I'll throw in another 40 for possible long-range defensive, and 40 for practice. That's assuming that you're not going to sit on your porch and snipe every poor 2-legged beast that makes the mistake of walking down your street. 120 rounds.
120 rounds of ammo for your game rifle.
Note: If you're paying $1.30 per round for premium hunting ammo, that will run you $156.
Defensive use: Rifle
Without pulling the pin on the AR vs. AK grenade, we'll assume that you have one of the two, or a similar type of rifle for defending your family and your assets.
A pretty standard combat loadout is 1 mag in the gun plus 6 on your person (i.e. 6+1 mags) of 30 rounds each. So each loadout is 210 rounds.
In a really gnarly engagement, I think that by the time you've expended 1/2 to 2/3 of your ammo, you will have bugged out, finished the job, or gotten killed. Two-thirds of your loadout is 140 rounds per knock-down-drag-out engagement.
Note: Most of the time you meet a stranger in a world without order, hopefully there won't be any violence. If you do have to fire your weapon to defend your life or your family, most of the time you will hopefully be able to get the job done or bug out in your first mag, or 30 rounds or less. But this is a survivalist board. We're prepping for the worst case scenario of the worst case scenario. Hence the notion that you could be expending well over a hundred rounds in a real serious confrontation.
We'll assume you're good. Damn good. In a fair fight, you're better than 90% of the rest of us.
So there is a 90% chance you'll survive your first engagement. There is a .9*.9 = 81% chance you'll survive your first engagement, and then go on to survive a second engagement. There is a .9*.9*.9 = 73% chance you'll survive your first, then go on to survive a 2nd, and then go on to survive a 3rd engagement.
By this figuring, there is a 50/50 chance that you'll get killed by your 6th or 7th engagement. By the time we get out to 21 engagements, the chances that you're still kicking are less than 10%. And that's assuming a fair fight, i.e. that you're not getting ambushed or surrounded or overpowered.
So we'll give you enough ammo for 21 fights.
21 * 140 rounds (remember, that's 2/3 of your combat loadout of 6+1 mags) =~3,000 rounds of rifle ammo.
Really, that's far more than enough. If you're James Bond and Rambo rolled up into one, then you're not going to need 140 bullets for each confrontation, and if you're not James Bond/Rambo, then you're not going to survive 20 knock-down drag-out firefights. That's also assuming that there are that many people out there who are going to try to kill you. By this figuring, you'd be getting in a hardcore firefight practically every other week, if we stretched those 21 fights out over the course of a year.
Again, we'll throw you an extra 1K rounds for practice, training, and in case the SHTF after the SHTF.
4,000 rounds of ammo for your combat rifle.
Note: I get my AR ammo online for about $0.35 per round (bulk FMJ), so that figures $1,400 for combat rifle ammo.
Defensive: Handgun
We'll do a similar calculation as before.
A Glock 19 has a magazine capacity of 15 rounds. We'll say you're carrying 2 spare mags, plus 1 in the gun. Your loadout is about 45 rounds. With the same theory that you'll be dead, or have finished the job, or have bugged out by the time you've expended at most 2/3 of your ammo, that means you need 30 rounds per engagement. Same logic as before: you're a better gunfighter than 90% of the folks out there. To get through 21 engagements, you need about 630 rounds of handgun ammo. For practice we'll round it out to an even 1,000. Keep in mind that if I get in 5 knock-down-drag-out firefights with my pistol, I'm gonna start carrying my rifle, and make that my main fighting weapon. So again, we're being conservative - you won't need anywhere near this much ammo. Furthermore, if you're out there with just a handgun and someone engages you from a distance with a rifle, then your chances aren't so rosy. So, regardless of your skill level, it is pretty optimistic to assume that you'll survive 20 hardcore engagements with a handgun.
1,000 rounds of defensive handgun ammo.
Note: I pay about $0.40 cents per round of .45 (ouch. I need to switch to 9mm), which puts this at about $400 for handgun ammo. If you're using a 9mm, like the Glock 19 I mention above, it's more like 20 cents a round, or $200 for handgun ammo. That's bulk FMJ ammo. If we're talking JHP, it'll be close to twice that amount.
Summary:
Assumptions:
- Feeding/defending/practicing for a family of 5
- You're a good enough gunfighter to survive over 20 major engagements
- You actually have enough time to spend seeking and harvesting all this wild game you're going to be feeding your family
- All of your guns are already more or less sighted in and you know how to use them
Results:
- 3,500 rounds of .22LR gives you 5 squirrels a day for a year plus 1K rounds of practice
- 120 rounds of big-game rifle ammo gives you 30-35 deer (1,800 lbs of meat) plus long-range defense, and practice ammo. I'm assuming that you're not going to snipe every 2-legged creature that you see.
- 4,000 rounds for your fighting gun gives you more than enough to survive over 20 knock-down drag-out engagements, assuming you deem necessary to stick around to fight, and survive long enough to even put that many rounds down range. And that includes a thousand rounds for practice or training or barter or whatever.
- 1,000 rounds for your defensive handgun gives you enough ammo to survive >20 knock-down drag-out firefights, as well as several hundred rounds for practice.
- The total cost here was figured to about $2,000, with the assumed price-per-round that I listed for each type.
That's a grand total of about 8,550 rounds of various calibers, to support a family of 5 for a year with ample game, lots of long, knock-down-drag-out defensive engagements, and plenty of practice. And 40% of that is .22LR, thank goodness.
This should be MORE than enough for just about any conceivable situation, unless you're prepping for numerous years of disoder, or equipping a small army and have to train them to boot.
Anyway, like many have said before, wild game may well become rare if everyone who has a gun is out trying to feed their family. And for defensive uses, you won't likely survive enough firefights to live long enough to need more than a few thousand rounds at the very most. So buy more food and water, and don't stress about ammo as much, if you've got the basics covered.
The Bottom Line
If you've already got food and water (and soap, booze, toilet paper, and tooth paste) for 5 years, then yeah, I envy you and maybe you can justify getting another 15k rounds of ammo, but for the rest of us, a couple thousand here and there should be more than enough for a year, or considerably more than a year if we're supplementing the wild game with stores, and avoiding firefights (both of those are a big DUH in my opinion). If you're not going out of your way to get in a fight, and if you're only using wild game to supplement your stores, then I really think you can get by for a year or more with about 1/3 of this amount.
For longer term preps, you may need more of some types of ammo, but you won't likely need much more defensive ammo IMHO, because you're still only going to statistically survive X engagements. More hunting ammo, sure. More ammo for training, or barter, or to equip friends/family, sure. But the amount of defensive ammo you're personally going to use is very finite. Put another way: if you have 20K rounds for your fighting rifle, what you're really saying is that you're planning on getting into 200 combat engagements where you're putting a hundred rounds down-range each time, presumably killing one or more armed bad guys, and then escaping unscathed each and every time, living to fight another day. That is a lot of fighting. You may be the best major league pitcher of all time, but you're still not going to throw a hundred perfect no-hitters back to back to back. Eventually your luck runs out or you meet your match on the battlefield. I don't know for sure, but I suspect most of our hardened combat veterans in the US armed forces haven't even been in anywhere near that many sustained firefights, and they go to war for a living.
The trick will be to avoid the fight, and not have to hunt as your primary source of food. No matter how good you are in a firefight, you still can't count on winning a hundred (or even a dozen) fights in a row. And no matter how good a hunter you are, the game may not be there to harvest, depending on the scenario.
I just wanted to share a few thoughts about ammo stockpiles. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people post that they've got 50K rounds of ammo, and need more. I've seen various numbers, estimates, and arguments for how much you need, but I wanted to do my own figuring and see what I came up with. So I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation on this, because, as much as I'd like to have 50K (or even 20K) rounds of ammo stored up, I don't, and won't any time soon. My basic assumptions are that I'm feeding, defending, and practicing for a family of 5 for a year, that the shooter is a better gunfighter than 90% of the folks out there, and that there is an incredible abundance of wild game to be harvested for the dinner table, which is pretty unrealistic if every gun owner in america starts hunting to feed their family. Just for giggles (or crying, more likely) I roughly figured the total cost of this theoretical stockpile as well. This is meant to be at the extreme high end for what a person in my make-believe scenario would need for a year. Finding this many game animals may be unrealistic. Surviving this many combat engagements may be unrealistic. Etc.
Hunting: Small game
Let's say that a single squirrel or varmint is the centerpiece of 1-2 meals for a single person. To feed a family of 5 each one squirrel a day we'll say we need (and can find, to shoot) 5 small-game kills a day. Even in today's world, on good hunting grounds, that can be a tall order, but we'll assume they're out there, and you can find them to shoot at. Call it 7 rounds of .22LR or airgun ammo a day, since they're crafty buggers and it's harder to shoot straight when you're looking out for zombies.
7 rounds a day * 7 days a week * 52 weeks in a year * 1 year of living it rough = 2,548 rounds.
The big assumption here is that there will actually be that much to shoot, which is dubious. We'll throw in an extra 1k rounds for practice, training, or whatever. We'll round to 3,500 rounds of .22LR. Really, you're never going to have that much stuff to shoot, so this is a very high-end estimate.
3,500 rounds of .22LR.
Note: At a price of $20 for a brick of 500 rounds, that will run you $140.
Hunting: Medium and Large game
Around here a good deer weighs between 120 and 200 lbs. Even on the small end, if you lose half of that to bones, guts, and other inedibles, that's around 50 lbs of meat, give or take, assuming you're eating all that is edible. Call it the foundation for 50 solid meals. So for our family of 5, eating deer once a day:
5 lbs of deer per day * 356 days in a year = 1,780 lbs of deer. With our 50 lbs in the freezer from the one deer, that figures needing about 35 deer. If you're bagging a larger deer, or elk or other game, then it's an even smaller number of animals.
Realistically, you're not likely going to be eating a pound of deer every day, because hopefully you'll be supplementing it with long-term food stores, and foraging, fishing, etc. And, realistically, you're not going to have time to do all that hunting, and the animals may not be there in the first place to hunt.
So we'll say 40 rounds for your game rifle to harvest game per year. I'll throw in another 40 for possible long-range defensive, and 40 for practice. That's assuming that you're not going to sit on your porch and snipe every poor 2-legged beast that makes the mistake of walking down your street. 120 rounds.
120 rounds of ammo for your game rifle.
Note: If you're paying $1.30 per round for premium hunting ammo, that will run you $156.
Defensive use: Rifle
Without pulling the pin on the AR vs. AK grenade, we'll assume that you have one of the two, or a similar type of rifle for defending your family and your assets.
A pretty standard combat loadout is 1 mag in the gun plus 6 on your person (i.e. 6+1 mags) of 30 rounds each. So each loadout is 210 rounds.
In a really gnarly engagement, I think that by the time you've expended 1/2 to 2/3 of your ammo, you will have bugged out, finished the job, or gotten killed. Two-thirds of your loadout is 140 rounds per knock-down-drag-out engagement.
Note: Most of the time you meet a stranger in a world without order, hopefully there won't be any violence. If you do have to fire your weapon to defend your life or your family, most of the time you will hopefully be able to get the job done or bug out in your first mag, or 30 rounds or less. But this is a survivalist board. We're prepping for the worst case scenario of the worst case scenario. Hence the notion that you could be expending well over a hundred rounds in a real serious confrontation.
We'll assume you're good. Damn good. In a fair fight, you're better than 90% of the rest of us.
So there is a 90% chance you'll survive your first engagement. There is a .9*.9 = 81% chance you'll survive your first engagement, and then go on to survive a second engagement. There is a .9*.9*.9 = 73% chance you'll survive your first, then go on to survive a 2nd, and then go on to survive a 3rd engagement.
By this figuring, there is a 50/50 chance that you'll get killed by your 6th or 7th engagement. By the time we get out to 21 engagements, the chances that you're still kicking are less than 10%. And that's assuming a fair fight, i.e. that you're not getting ambushed or surrounded or overpowered.
So we'll give you enough ammo for 21 fights.
21 * 140 rounds (remember, that's 2/3 of your combat loadout of 6+1 mags) =~3,000 rounds of rifle ammo.
Really, that's far more than enough. If you're James Bond and Rambo rolled up into one, then you're not going to need 140 bullets for each confrontation, and if you're not James Bond/Rambo, then you're not going to survive 20 knock-down drag-out firefights. That's also assuming that there are that many people out there who are going to try to kill you. By this figuring, you'd be getting in a hardcore firefight practically every other week, if we stretched those 21 fights out over the course of a year.
Again, we'll throw you an extra 1K rounds for practice, training, and in case the SHTF after the SHTF.
4,000 rounds of ammo for your combat rifle.
Note: I get my AR ammo online for about $0.35 per round (bulk FMJ), so that figures $1,400 for combat rifle ammo.
Defensive: Handgun
We'll do a similar calculation as before.
A Glock 19 has a magazine capacity of 15 rounds. We'll say you're carrying 2 spare mags, plus 1 in the gun. Your loadout is about 45 rounds. With the same theory that you'll be dead, or have finished the job, or have bugged out by the time you've expended at most 2/3 of your ammo, that means you need 30 rounds per engagement. Same logic as before: you're a better gunfighter than 90% of the folks out there. To get through 21 engagements, you need about 630 rounds of handgun ammo. For practice we'll round it out to an even 1,000. Keep in mind that if I get in 5 knock-down-drag-out firefights with my pistol, I'm gonna start carrying my rifle, and make that my main fighting weapon. So again, we're being conservative - you won't need anywhere near this much ammo. Furthermore, if you're out there with just a handgun and someone engages you from a distance with a rifle, then your chances aren't so rosy. So, regardless of your skill level, it is pretty optimistic to assume that you'll survive 20 hardcore engagements with a handgun.
1,000 rounds of defensive handgun ammo.
Note: I pay about $0.40 cents per round of .45 (ouch. I need to switch to 9mm), which puts this at about $400 for handgun ammo. If you're using a 9mm, like the Glock 19 I mention above, it's more like 20 cents a round, or $200 for handgun ammo. That's bulk FMJ ammo. If we're talking JHP, it'll be close to twice that amount.
Summary:
Assumptions:
- Feeding/defending/practicing for a family of 5
- Five squirrels/varmints per day, for a year
- 35 deer, for roughly 1,800 lbs of edible venison for the year
- Rifle ammo to survive over 20 major rifle engagements
- Handgun ammo to survive over 20 major handgun engagements
- Plenty of practice ammo for all calibers
- You're a good enough gunfighter to survive over 20 major engagements
- You actually have enough time to spend seeking and harvesting all this wild game you're going to be feeding your family
- All of your guns are already more or less sighted in and you know how to use them
Results:
- 3,500 rounds of .22LR gives you 5 squirrels a day for a year plus 1K rounds of practice
- 120 rounds of big-game rifle ammo gives you 30-35 deer (1,800 lbs of meat) plus long-range defense, and practice ammo. I'm assuming that you're not going to snipe every 2-legged creature that you see.
- 4,000 rounds for your fighting gun gives you more than enough to survive over 20 knock-down drag-out engagements, assuming you deem necessary to stick around to fight, and survive long enough to even put that many rounds down range. And that includes a thousand rounds for practice or training or barter or whatever.
- 1,000 rounds for your defensive handgun gives you enough ammo to survive >20 knock-down drag-out firefights, as well as several hundred rounds for practice.
- The total cost here was figured to about $2,000, with the assumed price-per-round that I listed for each type.
That's a grand total of about 8,550 rounds of various calibers, to support a family of 5 for a year with ample game, lots of long, knock-down-drag-out defensive engagements, and plenty of practice. And 40% of that is .22LR, thank goodness.
This should be MORE than enough for just about any conceivable situation, unless you're prepping for numerous years of disoder, or equipping a small army and have to train them to boot.
Anyway, like many have said before, wild game may well become rare if everyone who has a gun is out trying to feed their family. And for defensive uses, you won't likely survive enough firefights to live long enough to need more than a few thousand rounds at the very most. So buy more food and water, and don't stress about ammo as much, if you've got the basics covered.
The Bottom Line
If you've already got food and water (and soap, booze, toilet paper, and tooth paste) for 5 years, then yeah, I envy you and maybe you can justify getting another 15k rounds of ammo, but for the rest of us, a couple thousand here and there should be more than enough for a year, or considerably more than a year if we're supplementing the wild game with stores, and avoiding firefights (both of those are a big DUH in my opinion). If you're not going out of your way to get in a fight, and if you're only using wild game to supplement your stores, then I really think you can get by for a year or more with about 1/3 of this amount.
For longer term preps, you may need more of some types of ammo, but you won't likely need much more defensive ammo IMHO, because you're still only going to statistically survive X engagements. More hunting ammo, sure. More ammo for training, or barter, or to equip friends/family, sure. But the amount of defensive ammo you're personally going to use is very finite. Put another way: if you have 20K rounds for your fighting rifle, what you're really saying is that you're planning on getting into 200 combat engagements where you're putting a hundred rounds down-range each time, presumably killing one or more armed bad guys, and then escaping unscathed each and every time, living to fight another day. That is a lot of fighting. You may be the best major league pitcher of all time, but you're still not going to throw a hundred perfect no-hitters back to back to back. Eventually your luck runs out or you meet your match on the battlefield. I don't know for sure, but I suspect most of our hardened combat veterans in the US armed forces haven't even been in anywhere near that many sustained firefights, and they go to war for a living.
The trick will be to avoid the fight, and not have to hunt as your primary source of food. No matter how good you are in a firefight, you still can't count on winning a hundred (or even a dozen) fights in a row. And no matter how good a hunter you are, the game may not be there to harvest, depending on the scenario.
