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

I had a chat with a cop the other day. We got to talking about guns and he’s not much of a gunny. He said he thought that five guns was ‘plenty’. I pointed out to him that according to the Montana Shooting Sports Association the average Montanan owned 26 firearms. He thought that was nuts. I said that you have a nightstand gun, a truck gun, a plinker .22, a hunting rifle, a couple guns you picked up because they were too cheap to pass up, etc, etc, and they can add up in a hurry. He thought about it and revised his estimate. He said that ten guns was plenty. I told him Id mention that to my Ballistic-American friends and we’d all have a good laugh over it.

There is no such thing as ‘too many’. Once in a while someone will opine on the discussion boards that anything over ‘x’ amount is stupid because you cant carry that many guns at once. The number of guns you can carry at once has no bearing on how many guns a person can have before they are ‘too many’. That’s like saying you can only wear one pair of shoes at a time so owning more than one is ‘too many’.

As someone who has had discussions like this with many, many people I can say that there are only two people who have a hard number about what constitutes ‘too many’ guns: people who don’t shoot and wives.

Personally, I know people who own well over 100 guns and I wouldn’t say that’s ‘too many’. If you specialize in a field of collecting you can easily get into the several hundred range. Even a broke college kid will probably have three or seven guns floating around at any given point.

Does anyone need more than ‘x’ amount of guns? Well, need doesn’t really enter into it. If I want a dozen AR’s in the safe and I can afford to then, by Crom, Im going to have just that. My buying habit is that I treat every gun as an irreplaceable object. What I mean by that is that I judge and value every gun in my collection as if I would be unable to buy another one tomorrow. My goal is to have enough firearms to take care of my projected needs in a worst case scenario for the rest of my life. If tomorrow every gun shop closed and all you had in the safe was all you could have for the rest of your life would you be content with what you had? If not, get out there and shop.

The problem with the notion of ‘too many’ is that it implies theres some arbitrary number where once you exceed that number you’ve gotten into wasteful and irresponsible behavior. Pshaw. Gun ownership is probably the most responsible behavior you can engage in. If I were to define what ‘too many’ is I would say it is the same as with any other thing that you do to excess – when your behavior negatively affects other aspects of your life. Or, put another way, when you let the car get repossessed because you wanted to buy another FAL you may have hit the stage where its time to stop buying guns and start spending a little more wisely. (On the other hand, if it’s a really nice FAL and the car needed a new tranny anyway….)

While I cant give you a hard and fast number about ‘too many’, I can easily give you a number for ‘not enough’. That number is 0. I think one gun is too few but even one gun is better than no gun. But two are better than one and three are better than two….
“Yeah, look man, Im not after a lifestyle I just want a number for adding to my checklist of zombie prevention gear.” Okay. Four. Anything between one and four is bad news. Less than four is skating on thin ice, driving on bald tires, being called to Al Gores hotel room for a massage, driving without a seatbelt…you’ll probably be okay for a while, but youre definitely flirting with disaster. Why? Four is a handgun and a rifle, with a spare of each. Four is a rifle, handgun, shotgun and .22. Four is a stash of handguns for barter or sale. Four is a minimum that provides enough versatile combinations to handle just about anything. There have been some times when I didn’t have whole lot of money to my name and when the gun collection shrank in the face of money problems there was still usually four guns that never got sold. So, I cant tell you what too many is but I can tell you what too few is.