Been a good boy and not bought any guns in a couple weeks. But….gun accessories, on the other hand…
I was doing well until an email landed in my box asking if I was interested in some factory mags for the Ruger 9mm P-series….you know…P95DC mags.
Me: How many do you have?
Them: 
*sigh*
Interesting thing is, this works out to about three mags per gun.
Well, if you’re gonna have an Uzi (or two), you’re gonna need mags….right?
Fifty oughtta be a good start. And I’ve a few other accessories for the new acquisition that have started trickling in.
This was a 50-mag package from Atlantic Firearms. These are 25-rd mags and, thoguh used, they appear to be in pretty good shape. I need to thoroughly examine each one closely, but so far they all look good.
I’m not really an AK guy. Yet, somehow I have managed to acquire three of them.. a milled Arsenal, a milled Norinco, and a WASR-10 of some flavor. I still have gobs of 7.62×39 laying around, so I decided to keep the AK’s since having a military-style semi-auto with plenty of ammo is never really a bad thing. And, of course, logistics rears its ugly head. If you’re gonna have a buncha AK’s, youre gonna need a buncha AK mags.
Ok…will 200 be enough?
I went for an even split of 40- and 30-rd mags. These are the AC Unity mags that you’re seeing all over the place. Made in ex-Yugoslavia they’re pretty good mags. The nice feature is metal locking tabs front-and-back. Ordered in bulk from Robert RTG (bookmark that place, guys) they came out to, with shipping, $4.87 per mag. (10% on 100+ mags.) For that kinda money, I don’t mind having a bunch of extras to someday sell to the unenlightened masses when the next mag ban comes rolling in.
This is, by the by, on top of the AK mags I already have. I went deep on AK mags a few years back when those metal Korean AK mags were coming into the country. And prior to that I had a buncha ChiCom mags. For a guy with only three AK’s, I’d say I’ve got the magazine end of things covered.
One is none, and two hundred is….one hundred?
I have a Mini-14 GB that I like for nostalgic purposes. Trouble is, finding good, reliable magazines for the Mini-14 has always been a fool’s errand. I’m sure someone will jump into the comments about how their TripleK/USA Brand/RandoCo magazine has been utterly reliable for them. Hey, may be. But I’m willing to believe those are outliers. The fact is that there have been only two aftermarket Mini-14’s that are reliable – the long-discontinued Eagle 35-rd mag, and the recently discontinued Tapco Gen 2. What’s that leave? The Ruger OEM product.
So, I have a 30-rd Ruger-marked mag here and for some reason its been giving me some headaches. I suspect the magazine spring was losing it’s enthusiasm. A new Ruger 30-rd mag is a little under $40…ridiculous. So, I ordered up some Wolff replacement ‘extra strength’ mag springs. They arrived today.
Normally, magazine springs aren’t something I worry about. In a world of $10 Magpul magazines it makes more sense to just buy a new Glock or AR mag. But when you’re looking at a magazine costing almost $40, thats a different story.
So, I wound up with a handful (a ten-pack,actually) of Wolff Mini-14 mag springs that I now have to carve out some storage space for.
Unless you’ve been under a rock the last week, you know some guy in Maine (of all places) went sideways and killed about twenty people before taking his own life. As usually happens after these events, the usual crowd wiped the blood onto their faces and began wailing about ‘commonsense’ and ‘reasonable’ restrictions on…well..whatever they think was at fault.
To be fair, the administration really has it’s hands full right now and is probably not interested in getting into a domestic policy quagmire while it’s in the midst of a couple foreign policy quagmires. But…I’ve been wrong before.
But if they do get some traction on their usual ban-dwagon, you don’t want to be caught unprepared. It’s been 19 years since the sunset of the much-despised ‘Assault Weapons Ban’. If you bought on pistol magazine and one rifle magazine each month (a very easy goal) since then, you’d have about 228 pistol mags and 228 rifle mags…an amount that almost everyone would agree is a comfortable amount to have.
And if you bought one ‘evil’ rifle every year, again not an outrageous or difficult goal, you’d have 19 AR’s in the safe.
But some people just will not learn. It seems like every time some whackjob shoots up a 7-11 and the media starts their campaign about ‘high capacity magazines’ there are people who sudenly think they need to buy. Dude…you should have had your magazine issues settled shortly after the ban expired. I encounter way to many people who think that “Oh, I have a dozen mags for my AR. Thats plenty.” That is wildly shortsighted thinking that fails to account for what perils the future holds. I’m not going to elaborate about that because I’ve covered it elsewhere on this blog more times than I can recall.
TL;DR for todays post: one of these days, these gun/mag bans will come back and you don’t want to be caught with your pants down. Stack it deep. And if you really want a positive habit to develop, buy one pistol mag per month, and one rifle mag per month. They are money in the bank. (Not that keeping your money in the bank is a good idea, but you get my meaning.)
Palmetto had a sale on MKE-made MP5 mags for $30 a mag. Still a lot of money to pay for a simple magazine, in my opinion, but a bargain compared to what these things usually sell for. Picked up ten and they arrived yesterday. They seem to fit just fine in my MP5 clones but my MP5k clone doesnt seem to like them. I suspect something is off with the magazine catch on that one and I may need to send it to be looked at.
Other than that, these seem like good mags and I’ll be taking them out this weekend to function test them. So, if you’ve got an MP5 clone and you need some mags for it…well...I hope you got in on that deal.
As someone in comments pointed out, PSA is having a sale on MP5 mags. It appears these are imported from MKE by Century so theyre going to be at least better than as if the drunken gunplumbers at Century made them themselves.
(Click on image below)
I ordered ten. We’ll see what happens.
It’s interesting…I was thinking about how mags for the Barrett are normally around $150 ea. To buy, say, six spare magazines, which is a reasonable amount, would be almost $900. Thats the sort of thing that would make most people, reasonably so, declare “what the heck, I’m not spending almost a grand on magazines for one gun!”
And then the math kicked in. That would be about 10% of the cost of the Barrett. Hmmm. A quality AR is, say, $900. Ten percent of that is $90 and that would get you about….six or seven spare magazines.
A Glock? Retail is about $550. Ten percent of that is about $55. That $55 would get you about five Magpul magazines.
An AK? A Zastava goes for about a grand in the stores. Ten percent of that is a hundred bucks. Again, you’re back to around a half dozen magazines.
So, the more I think about it, I’m starting to think the answer to “how many mags should I have for a gun?” is to plan on having at least as many mags as 10-15% of the gun’s cost will get you. That would seem to put you on some pretty solid ground…a starting point.
Of course, that math gets skewed if you buy a used gun which is usually much cheaper than new. But the notion of spending about 10-15% of the MSRP of a gun on magazines sounds like it might be a good baseline.
I didn’t even know police surplus M82A1 mags were a thing, but….
I daresay that might be enough mags for a gun that costs almost $9 a round to shoot.
I lucked out and found these for $60 ea. on GunBroker. Serendipitous, that. Apparently the universe wants me to have a squared away Barrett. Maybe the universe is planning on bringing back the t-rex or something.
Still to purchase – optics. And I am dreading the outlay.
NOTE: New version of WordPress sucks..I somehow neglected to turn commenting on. Got something to say? Let’s hear it.
Okay…so there’s a Barrett M82A1 on its way to me. The gun ships with one lonely magazine. As you may expect, extra mags are expensive. But, sometimes fortuna gives me a wink and a nod…..
Me: I see you have some used M82A1 mags for sale
Them: Yup. $60 each.
Me: All of them…
Them: Uhm…How many do…
Me: All. Of. Them.
(And bring me all the bacon and eggs you have while youre at it)
So, I got eight more mags. If my life hits the stage where I’m laying prone somewhere needing 90 rounds of .50 BMG on hand….well….life just took a turn for the savage.
