Archive for August, 2009

How many cartridges do you think it’s reasonable for a person to have? How many guns? At what point does it cross the line and become a “cache” or a “stockpile”?

People who are uncomfortable with guns may view owning even one as remarkable, but lots of people view guns as just another object, and we all know how people can accumulate objects. Some people plaster their walls with action-figures or collector’s plates. Other people collect guns. When a news story reports that a person had “a stockpile of fifty guns,” it’s intended to sensationalize. Absent of any evidence of malicious intent, I find it no more remarkable than if the person had a collection of Star Trek plates. Heck, at least guns are useful.

Buying a gun is kind of like getting at tattoo. Once you’ve got one, you often want to get another. I have no particular desire to “hoard” guns, and I’m not really a collector of anything, but every time I go into the range to shoot, I wander around the inventory, and I find myself thinking, “You know, I don’t have a lever action rifle yet!” That process will continue until I end up buying a lever-action, and then I’ll find myself thinking, “You know I don’t have a bolt-action distance-rifle yet!” Etc…

My point is that this behavior is completely normal and benign, and eventually it will result in me having a big, bad “stockpile” of guns. Keep that in mind when if you ever see me on the news being hauled out of my house in cuffs.

What about ammunition? I heard a great quote comparing a “cache” of thousands of rounds of ammo to the “cache” of thousands of grains of rice the person had in their pantry. It’s completely apt and I’m going to use it. When people hear that a person has 3,000, 5,000, 10,000 rounds of ammo, they tend to imagine one dead body for each round, and wonder what mass murder was going to be perpetrated. It’s just ignorance. Even conservatively, I shoot 100-200 rounds of pistol ammo every time I go to the range to practice. At that rate, I go through 1,000 rounds every 5-10 trips. Let’s just round up or down and call that a year’s worth of ammo. And I don’t shoot much at all compared to some competitive shooters, who might go through 500 to 1,000 rounds per practice session.

Okay, so say that 1,000 rounds is about a year’s worth of ammo. For one gun. Let’s say that I have a 9mm pistol (my carry gun), another pistol in .357 (because cowboy guns are beautiful historical artifacts), a rifle in 7.62x39mm (for medium game and home defense), a rifle in .22 (for cheap practice and small game), and a 12-gauge shotgun (for skeet-shooting, naturally, and home defense). Now, I could go out and buy ammo by the box for each of these guns, but it’s so much cheaper when you buy it by the case, and you see where I’m going. Five guns, five calibers, a thousand rounds here, a thousand rounds there, and voila. I’ve got a cache. A completely benign, harmless cache. Much like my cache of thousands of rice grains or beans.

Oh, and by the way, when the cops report that a person had thousands of rounds of ammo, they should be required to leave out .22. It’s not that .22 is harmless (although it’s certainly the least scary caliber a person could have), it’s just that .22 is so cheap (about 5 cents per round) that it’s common for people to have five or ten thousand rounds sitting around.