How much ammo next door makes you nervous?

Amp, you are denying the reality of some situations, and insisting on the reality of others being the probable cause.

Have a few examples.

My mother in law is a hoarder. She has a rotting, broken wooden storage shed in her back yard, and I guess that it is 12 x10 or so. No, it doesn't have a lawn mower, chipper, tiller, or even engine parts in it. It is filled almost wall to wall with plastic totes full of fabric scraps. SCRAP. she has entire rooms filled wall to wall with garbage. My wife and family have gone over and had interventions several times, and she fights every step. My wife has been bringing home bags and boxes of records and mail, I have to sort through them and scrap the stuff. She keeps JUNK MAIL. catalogs. Spam. publisher's clearing house, change your bank or card, buy this insurance...

I was going through her tools during one of them. I found a few rusty little screws and she caught me getting ready to drop them into the trash. She got angry, took them from me, found a jar and put them away.

Her children are similar. two of them are almost as crazy as she is. One had a collection of over a dozen broken vacuum cleaners. He moved into a trailer when he was evicted, and had to leave several dumpsters worth behind him. His new home had a stack of maybe thirty dinner table chairs in his front yard after he was finished moving in. When he was evicted again, we put most of his stuff into a double car garage storage unit, packed the rest into a covered patio in his mothers home, and there was still a dumpster load left behind when he was banned from the property once again.

One of her daughters gathers yarn, for example. One of the bedrooms has yarn in plastic totes. the stuff is stacked floor too ceiling, two deep, in a ten foot long stack.

she doesn't knit.

this is crazy.

Now, if a man stores tens of thousands of rounds of ammo in a dank basement or garage, stacked on pallets and piled on floors, either inventoried carefully or just tossed in, yet never or rarely shoots, that person is maybe a nutter.

A man who collects money, yet collects it just to have it, is called a miser. A person who has a 150,000 dollar salary, yet owns a twenty seven year old car and eats beans, and has his fifth million, that's a nutter. If you pursue wealth with no reason than to have that wealth, you are pursuing a ghost. A block of cash in a mattress is no more valuable than a brick.

There is an old truism. When a person covets and cares for an object, and spends his life keeping it safe, which one of them is more important? the hoarder, or the object? I knew a woman who would not leave her home without getting a babysitter to watch her 'collection'. (of junk). Her antique beer can collection was safe and guarded, but she sometimes went without groceries, and it wasn't because she lived in montana. Her salt shakers were more important than she was.

If a person is a nut, and collects ammo because he is a nut, he is a nut because he has ten million rounds of rimfire rusting in his basement. Just because it isn't ten million in a basement, it doesn't change the fact that the guy may still be a nut, maybe the guy buys a case of everything every time he goes to a gun show 'just in case' of the zombies. Or "just in case" he ever has his cataract surgery and starts to hunt again.

People who needlessly or pointlessly hoard things, no matter what they are, frequently do so because they have psychological issues and sometimes, far too frequently, because they are just nuts. the historical schifferdecker home burned to a hollow brick shell because the biggest room was filled floor to ceiling, wall to wall, with stacked antique dressers, and every dresser was packed with stuff and the rest of the house was just as bad. It was like a landfill fire. They both died.

Who was more important? the people? or the possessions that they died protecting?

Don't dismiss crazy. It is everywhere. the guy next door may be an absolute loon. Did I mention the guy who kept propane tanks in his house in case he needed them? He didn't seem crazy until i talked with him for several months.

When he finally got around to showing what he really is, it was by telling me that the moon was coming up in different places every day. he would hoard ammo if it was his desire.
 
I no longer give a rodent's posterior about the opinions of other people concerning what and how much of what I should own. I think we'd all be a lot better off if more people felt that way.
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I'm good with that. So what if you fill your tank when it gets down to a quarter, or buy bread or milk or toilet paper days before you need it?

What is nuts is when people bury supermarket lines ten people deep with staples because an inch of snow was forecast. It really happens, that's not just an urban legend.

Ten years ago or so, a forecast for snow was out. I had gone to sams for a normal trip. I walked past a guy who had a flatbed cart filled shoulder high with bales of toilet paper. I nearly choked laughing and took a picture for my wife.

Maybe he managed the dorms at the university, and the regular shipments were disrupted because an inch of snow had been forecast?:confused:
 
My next door neighbor has more ammo than me, (and I have plenty) which is fine. That's means that during the next panic he won't be trying to mooch from me.
 
It’s funny how people try to define other people’s “normal”.

Even worse, people are defining what’s crazy and irrational for others. If collecting items (needed or unneeded) is a defining quality of a mentally ill person, well, we are all in trouble.

Funny thing about freedom... sometimes you have to put up with someone else’s freedom.
 
Having ammo is a good thing but it depends on condition/state. I heard of this event back in 2009 at the Ventura Gun Show during setup or teardown, I forget the exact setting. During a previous show I bought reloaded 45ACP ammo from Edward Wyman because it was during the ammo shortage, normally would not buy reloads from an individual. His reloads were not really cheap but the ammo looked fine and he documented the load such as bullet, powder and charge amount.

The last time I saw him was at the Tuson show about a year later, I think. Edward is rather unique as a seller by being in a motorized chair. While the article below doesn't state the exact reason for his conviction I believe it was the lead he collected from ranges contaminating the ground. As to the cause of the fire my guess is corroded surplus ammo that became unstable in the summer heat of the garage.

I haven't seen nor heard of Edward since about 2010.

https://www.dailynews.com/2011/11/16/veteran-gets-5-years-for-backyard-ammo-dump/
 
It’s funny how people try to define other people’s “normal”.

Even worse, people are defining what’s crazy and irrational for others. If collecting items (needed or unneeded) is a defining quality of a mentally ill person, well, we are all in trouble.

Funny thing about freedom... sometimes you have to put up with someone else’s freedom.
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Ricky, don't you ever make the mistake of pointing to someone and saying "wow, that's one crazy SOB."

Either we draw a line and say "that side of the line is normal and the other isn't" or ted bundy is normal, and you are infringing on his god given freedom to define himself as normal. normal and abnormal both exist, they are easy to tentatively define in a person with careful study. If collecting to the point of endangering life, property, even the environment surrounding the collector is an extreme danger, that is abnoraml and probably mentally ill.

People can be crazy, abnormal, mentally ill, and sometimes those people are the people who stack possessions up to the rafters in a rat infested garage because every magazine or newspaper has some horribly important significance.

I'm talking only about mentally ill people, and how they can be understood and defined, and compulsive hoarding can be a sign of mental illness.

someone who unnecessarily and excessively accumulates anything, including ammunition may have problems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsive_hoarding
 
WAY TOO MUCH information BrianDG.

I’d like to keep this thread a friendly discussion about ammo quantities, not relatives and psychiatric conditions.

Thanks.
 
Just trying to make the point that the reason for having it is far more important than what you have, and that maybe we should be concerned about the guy who piles ammunition into his garage, just like we should be concerned if he keeps several hundred gallons of gasoline.

now, how many cats does an old lady have to have before we should start worrying about our bird feeders?
 
Briandg the above post makes your point that there are plenty of folks in need of some mental health care. If you, or anyone else thinks my cats or ammo is a threat, then by all means contact authorities. Better yet come over to the house and we can discuss it over a beverage.

I would rather live next to the guy with a million properly stored rounds than a busybody neighbor or governmental lackey who thinks we all need to comply with his or her notion of "normal." People and government talk a lot about mental health care, but they don't do anything about it. We have well over 2 million people in jails and prisons, and pushing 5 million on probation and parole. We're not reluctant to incarcerate and punish folks, instead of treating the underlying issues. At $50,000-70,000 a year to warehouse these folks, many of whom are suffering mental health problems that could be prevented or treated, there is plenty of money available for mental health care if we had the resolve to do so.

If someone's idiosyncrasies are a threat to themselves or others then we should get them help. If they simply offend my sense of normal, it is absolutely none of my business.
 
At $50,000-70,000 a year to warehouse these folks, many of whom are suffering mental health problems that could be prevented or treated, there is plenty of money available for mental health care if we had the resolve to do so.
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IMO: The largest industry in the US is prisons. Politicians are in the pockets of companies that run private prisons. US prisons are full of mental cases.

In about 1982 i attended a class given by Donald Bordenkircher, warden of the WV prison. Bordenkircher had been warden of the Long Binh POW prison and San Quentin prison.

Bordenkircher had this to say: "They take a mental case, thorazine his %#$, call him a behavior case and chunk him into prison."
 
K_Mac said:
...At $50,000-70,000 a year to warehouse these folks, many of whom are suffering mental health problems that could be prevented or treated, there is plenty of money available for mental health care if we had the resolve to do so.
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$50,000 x 2,000,000 = $100B
$100B / 330M citizen = $300 per citizen
That's about $1K per employed taxpayer.

That could have been a lot of ammo (or healthcare, infrastructure improvements, etc. per employed taxpayer.
 
If someone's idiosyncrasies are a threat to themselves or others then we should get them help. If they simply offend my sense of normal, it is absolutely none of my business.
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I pretty much agree. However, who gets to make the call about what is, and isn't a threat? And another point is that we ALL have "mental heath problems", depending on who gets to decide what a "problem" is.

Anti-gun fanatics, whom we think have a mental problem, because they are anti-gun fanatics, think we have mental problems, because we aren't anti-gun fanatics.

Sure, there are extreme cases, but some of them are also dependent on the value judgements of the observers. The guy with 10,000 books, magazines and newspapers filling his house is a case where, if they're just piled around, he's disturbed, he's a hoarder...BUT if they are stacked neatly, on shelves, organized appearing, then he's ok, he has a library....

It appears that if you have a large collection of anything (useful or not) and its unkempt, you've got "problems" but if its neat and tidy, then you don't...

Value judgement. Who makes it, for you? For me? Making those decisions for oneself is called liberty and freedom. Making them for someone else isn't called that. And for a reason.
 
I’ve got way too many weird spoons in my kitchen drawer, I don’t have a use for them. I can’t get through my Jethro Bodine sized bowl of cereal as efficiently as I could with a normal spoon. There’s pillows on my couch that only serve a visual purpose and I throw them down when I sit on my couch and watch cartoons whilst eating that bowl of cereal. I have a couple of guns that I don’t really like and a bunch of ammunition on shelves.
I don’t know how much is there... it’s a lot by my own standards, but I’ve felt no desire to inventory it.

Which one of the previous statements should get me locked in an asylum, and who decides the threshold at which I am considered mentally unfit? Many think ownership of one bullet and one gun makes you mentally ill.

It’s loose standards of mental fitness that has caused legions of people to be abused, tortured, raped and murdered in mental institutions... it’s kinda why there’s not as many people behind asylum walls anymore.
 
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Until this discussion, I had never given a thought to how much ammo a neighbor might have. I've had friends with more ammo than me, and a neighbor who has a lot more than me. But as I said, never gave it a thought, and now that I have given it a thought, it still doesn't make me nervous. By the standards of about 50% or so of the population, I suspect most of us, who own even one functional firearm, and any ammunition at all, would be considered nutters, and make them nervous. And what would that 50% or so think of a guy like me, who has a dangerous concealable long barreled firearm that fires a high velocity projectile with each pull of the trigger, several rounds of ammo, a Gerber tool AND a bar of dried survivalist food? OK, I know, not just a nutter, but a dangerous survivalist nut nutter who should probably be turned in to the "authorities";)
 

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