How much ammo is too much ammo? And who gets to say?

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Levant

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I didn't want to get into a discussion on the "where's everything" thread and see it closed for thread drift. Let's leave that thread for talking about where the ammo is, instead of where it isn't. 26 pages and so far so good.

But what I wanted to discuss here is how much is too much and who gets to say.

I was talking to one guy that said he has 27000 rounds of 22lr. Why would anyone need that many rounds ?
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Yes you're free to do so. You're also free to bottle your own urine if you want to. Both are going to elicit more than a few people to scratch their heads and ask "er...why?" Doesn't mean they can't.
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Saying that buying ammunition is as crazy as canning urine doesn't make sense to me.

Driving to work this morning, I was dutifully (or fearfully) obeying the speed limit when someone passed me easily doing 20 miles over. My first reaction was to hope a cop was ahead and he got a ticket. But on second thought, I realized that the road was empty; it was four lane road, and I was the only other car in the vicinity. There was nothing unsafe about his speed in those circumstances. I had to chastise myself for thinking that everyone should behave how I behave or behave how the government wants them to behave. It is my strong belief in individual liberty that made me realize that it was the other driver's free choice how to drive as long as he's not endangering others.

Individual liberty means folks get to do what we might not choose to do. To defend our own individual liberty requires us to accept and defend another's right to live how they see fit. When we criticize the choices other free men make, we support those who wish to restrict the free men's right to make the choice. The only possible outcome of that is that eventually we will lose our freedom of choice as well.

I'm just saying this to highlight that it is important to remember to each their own. If they want 100000 rounds, then good for them. If the Walmart manager wants to buy all the ammo when it comes in, well, he got a job with that kind of access to ammo and guns. Get a job at Walmart. If the distributor is keeping all the ammo he's getting, well, that's the benefit of being in that business. To imply that any of them should take less so others can get more is pretty Marxist sounding in my book.
 
As one fo the quotes noted above, lets again preface the statement in relation to a person that had acquired twenty seven thousand rounds of .22LR. I compared it to Hughes because while legal, it was a bit head scratching...

1. Should it be legal? If otherwise legal of course. I have no issue with the legality of it.

2. Is it too much? That is the question.
*Does this person run a shooting club or such (example boy scout troop range or such)?

*If no, whats the intent here? Is he hoarding to resell at a higher price?

*Is he a competition shooter or just otherwise shoot a heck of a lot? If so I could see him running through 2-4K rounds a month so definitely understand it. I personally know competition shooters who have a minimum of 10,000 rounds at any given time of 9mm because they reload in big batches and will shoot that up in just a few months. They're my hero...:cool:

*If no to that, then again while legal and I wouldn't stop him, I'd scratch my noggin at the sheer amount of that. How many years of shooting is 27,000 rounds? After all I had a Ruger target pistol that I ran about 40,000 rounds through over a 20 year period that pretty much just fell apart and has officially been retired to the old guns home.
 
Is there a such thing as too much money? I would like to have enough ammo that my children and grandchildren are "taken care of" and since my kids are teenagers, I have no idea how many grandkids I might have. So there is no number you can give that would be too much for me, and if you try to tell me I have too much, well that just means you are jealous.
 
For me, enough means that when panics hit, I can keep shooting until supply returns to normal without having to worry about running out.

Too much is so much that I don't have any chance of using it all based on my reasonably projected usage and within the normal lifespan for someone of my demographic.

So far, we each get to decide ourselves (or have our incomes decide for us). I don't want to see that changed, but that doesn't mean I support all of the decisions on ammo purchasing I've seen and heard about during this last shortage.
 
2. Is it too much? That is the question.
*Does this person run a shooting club or such (example boy scout troop range or such)?

*If no, whats the intent here? Is he hoarding to resell at a higher price?
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Ok, no offense intended, I promise. But remember the joke from when you were a young boy? Maybe it was just a thing of my age. The joke was, would you perform a specific sexual act for a million dollars. If you said yes, then the response was, "Now that we've established what you are, let's negotiate price."

That is the problem with the idea that there must be a good reason. Once purpose comes into the argument and we accept that purpose is a legitimate consideration in how many guns or how much ammo a person should have, then we've accepted that there are limits. Now we're just negotiating what those limits are.

Too much is so much that I don't have any chance of using it all based on my reasonably projected usage and within the normal lifespan for someone of my demographic.
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Why is that too much? You can always leave it to your children. It's a better investment than greenbacks in any regular savings account.

My children aren't into guns. They don't mind them and each owns a gun or two but none of them are passionate about them. There's a real possibility that I'll leave my guns and ammo to the local NRA or even to a trust run by a gun forum owner with the requirement that they be given away by some contest or another.
 
the idea that hoarding ammo is dangerous is anti propaganda that makes as much sense as their mentality. No one is going to perform a rampage carrying 27000 rounds of any ammo on their person they wont get out the front door.
 
*If no to that, then again while legal and I wouldn't stop him, I'd scratch my noggin at the sheer amount of that. How many years of shooting is 27,000 rounds? After all I had a Ruger target pistol that I ran about 40,000 rounds through over a 20 year period that pretty much just fell apart and has officially been retired to the old guns home.
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Years?

Try months- or even weeks.

Ten/twelve years ago I shot my Ruger .22/45 two or three nights a week and on both Saturday and Sunday most of the time.
I'd go through between one and three bricks of ammo a week (1500 rounds)
My wife would go along with me and go through an average of a brick a week.

So, between the two of us, we ran through 2,000 rounds a week.
& that's a pretty conservative estimate.

We'd each buy 10 bricks when it went on sale @ both K-Mart and Dicks.
(They had a 10 brick limit.)
Our normal stock of what we'd keep on hand was usually around 50,000 rounds.
There wasn't any hoarding or anything sinister.
The normal price of a brick was around $10 or $11 and the sale price was a buck or two off the regular price.
All we were doing was taking advantage of a sale to pay a lower price.


P.S - the Ruger .22/45 I shot back then ran through over 100,000 rounds in a little over a year. Other than a tiny worn spot near the muzzle, you can't tell the gun is used.
It's far from "falling apart".
Not sure why your Ruger shot out at only 40,000???
 
I think too much is a very subjective concept that depends on all manner of factors. And given all the factors two people might still disagree on what too much or not enough actually mean.

However, I think that most people would recognise, based on common sense, and a reasonable attitude that a particular horde would seem over the top, whilst another would seem rational.

I have little choice in the matter, having only one 9mm Luger gun to my name, I am legally restricted to having 1000 rds of 9mm stored on my premises.

Is that enough? Well, for my shooting needs, provided I can buy more without too long a wait, then yes.

The question that follows always begins "But what if....?" and that is a slippery slope and where people can tie themselves in knots with the feeling that there may yet be another eventuality that they have not taken into account.

Personally, if I had enough ammo to shoot, unrestrained, for about 6 months, I would consider that plenty and given my present lifestyle that would probably be about 1-2000 rounds of 9mm and .22LR, about 500 .44s and .38spl and about 250 .308s.

If I had and were allowed to keep that, it would be enough for me to feel most eventuallities are taken into account.

Planning a monstrous suitable for armageddon is a bit pointless in this day and age, IMO...
 
So far, we each get to decide ourselves (or have our incomes decide for us). I don't want to see that changed, but that doesn't mean I support all of the decisions on ammo purchasing I've seen and heard about during this last shortage.
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Here here, agreed on all counts.

Not sure why your Ruger shot out at only 40,000???
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Well, it was in the family for 20 years (me then the Wife appropriated) so I was guesstimating. likely more.

But yea I hear you. pre Bullet Freakout II (aka last year) we were shooting 1,000 - 1,500 a month ourselves and would have shot more, time permitting.
 
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You have too much ammo when you can't fit all of it in one ordinary sized home closet - dedicated to just storing ammo.

Who gets to say? ME! That's who.:D
 
JohnKSa said:
For me, enough means that when panics hit, I can keep shooting until supply returns to normal without having to worry about running out.

Too much is so much that I don't have any chance of using it all based on my reasonably projected usage and within the normal lifespan for someone of my demographic.
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On the nose.

I can recall at one point doing the arithmetic and finding that I had around 30,000 rounds. At that point, I was shooting 1,000 rounds per week.

For the sort of multi-year drought we've experienced, I had accumulated too little.

One also strives to buy low, so when opportunity presents itself, it can make sense to relieve a retailer or distributor of an apparent surplus. That also makes sense in a wider supply/demand sense in that replenishing an individual reserve will supplement an otherwise low demand and help keep supply flowing and profitable.
 
On this and some other related threads there is the recurrent statements about the immorality or other negatives about hoarding, especially when the buyer intends to re-sell at a huge mark-up. Wake up everyone, this is capitalism! If someone wants to wait for the Walmart shipments to arrive and buy up all that the store will sell to them, then so be it. If they try to re-sell the ammo at a gun show or other venue, then it is up to the customer to decide if the price is worth the value of the merchandise. Much of our economy is based upon someone buying a product and then selling it at a higher price and thus making a profit.

As to how much is enough, there is no answer other than what someone decides for themselves. I have less than a dozen firearms, a pittance compared to many on this and other gun-related forums. Yet I have relatives or friends who think that more than one gun is ridiculous. I don't care what they think, for me, the number of guns I have is what I want/need for my purposes. If you want/need 1,000 guns and 1,000,000 rounds of ammo, that is your choice in a free market society.

And I don't know how many of you are aware of the reality that the price of diamonds is maintained by South Africa having vaults filled to the brim with raw diamonds. Are they guilty of hoarding, if indeed guilt has anything to do with it? Ammo is no different, except that it can be manufactured a lot easier than it is to find new diamonds.
 
2. Is it too much? That is the question.
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I would ask this in response?

Why would you ask?
If you ask yourself this question to see if it is too much for you, then no harm done. This is a normal thing to do.

But if you ask this question for any other motive or purpose I would say why do you care, how is it your business, why do people these days feel they need to know or be involved?

This is one of many problems we have today. People getting involved in things that are just not their business and some even creating justifications for why they should be involved. At the same time these same people will turn a blind eye to things they actually should get involved with.
 
I have a heuristic - a thousand rounds for each gun caliber as a reserve. Then I buy what I need for matches.

I will increase the store if there is a good sale but then I use it up.
 
I don't do what Glenn does but I should. That reserve he maintains allows him to make it through "dry seasons", (expensive and hard to find) and he has the luxury to replenish during the "wet seasons", (cheap and plentiful).

It's smart. I just don't shoot enough to motivate myself to do this, but I should. It's smart to do this with many things that have a long shelf life and suffer price fluctuations.

Imaging if you had started a Gasoline Coop that did this say, back in 1970? I don't know if it would have been useful but it would make one heck of an interesting study.
 
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