Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

Mmmph…I’d been putting off doing an ammo inventory for a while. What can I say? Those ammo cans are heavy. But, as our lives continue towards who-knows-what, it seemed a good idea to just re-affirm what was and was not available. The good news was that there was plenty of .22, 9mm, .38 and 7.62×39. The fair news was that .45 ACP (a low-priority) could use a little boost in its numbers. The bad news was that .223 and 12 ga. were a little thin and need some timely attention. It also occurred to me that I need to stockpile a few thousand rounds of .357. While the .38 ammo can be shot out of the .357 pistols as well as the .38’s, and thus the reason it makes sense to be heavy on .38 ammo, it would still be good to have enough .357 ammo on hand to take advantage of the performance of the longer cartridge.

One thing I find irritating about discussing stockpiling ammo on forums is that one person will post about how they have stockpiled a zillion rounds of ammo and someone will then comment saying thats stupid because you can only carry xxx ammo with you or ‘if you need that much ammo in a gunfight, youre in bigger trouble than you thought’.

Let me ask you something, you have a couple hundred pounds of rice or wheat in your storage, right? Well, you can’t eat it all at once so whats the point of having it? You have 80 magazines for your AR’s? Whats the point since you can only carry a few at a time and if you need to use all 80 mags youve obviously bitten off more than you can chew? See, thats the same utterly short-sighted stupidity that rears it’s ignorant head in these discussions. I don’t have umpteen million magazines for my PTR-91 because I plan on using them all at once. I have the foresight to look a little further down the road….I have umpteen million magazines because at any given moment those may be all the mags I have for the rest of my life. Assuming I’ve got another 35 years or so in front of me, a lot can happen in those 35 years.

So, back to the subject at hand, ammo….yeah, gonna have to set up the big Dillon and crank out some more. The missus picked herself up a .40 Glock police trade-in (Detroit PD..they stamped their name on the slide, frame and even the mags!) and tweaked it out for use as a competition gun which means my logistics train just had another boxcar attached to it since we previously had nothing in .40 caliber. However, since that’s just one Glock out of..well..a bunch…..of 9mm Glocks I think we’ll be okay limiting it to just a thousand rounds or so.

I was, however, immensely pleased to see that our policy of always buying a brick or two of .22 ammo when we went to WallyWorld has paid off. We have plenty of .22 on hand and most of it bought when it was about 40% cheaper than what it is now. Same for 7.62×39…I still have cases of the stuff here from when it was $95 a case.

How much ammo? Man, it’s like food, money, silver and gold….you cant have ‘too much’, you can only have ‘not enough’.