I’ve heard people say that when police confiscate guns and ammo, the amount of ammo sounds ridiculously high, but it’s actually reasonable, because it’s easy to go through a lot. But 4 tonnes is a pretty large amount, still, right? Or is it about right for 300+ guns?
Question comes from this news story:
A quick online search suggests that’s around 200,000 rounds. Which is a lot but not an insane amount. Active shooters could go through that in a couple of years.
And 200,000 rounds at say $.25/round would be $50,000. I really doubt if many shooters are spending $25,000/year.
600 rounds per gun isn’t much.
In Australia, 200,000 rounds is an insane amount of ammunition.
A quick calc shows I have about 2100 pounds of ammo in the basement.
How much of that is in 155mm? 
I think 378 guns is the insane part.
But it was for 3 guys.
Maybe they could multi-task.
12,000 rounds for your machine gun in the face of thousands of enemies in one day is enough. Heinrich Severloh fired that much from his MG-42 from 5AM to 3PM at Omaha Beach on D-day. He killed at least 1,000 American soldiers wading to the shore.
I know at least half a dozen guys with a collection around there or larger.
I have more than 4 guns myself.
Collecting all of the variants of a given rifle or pistol can easily hit 20 or more for just one gun.
Stamp and coin collectors have many times this number. Insects, shells, Pez dispensers, too. Are they insane?
I find Deadheads or similar fans collecting hundreds of bootleg copies of live performances beyond my understanding… It’s not for me, but I wouldn’t label them “insane”.
I have over 20 old British sports cars, which may actually define insanity.
To each his own, no?*
Yeah, I know they’re illegal down under. Bad, bad Aussies.
Looking at Wikipedia, it seems like those numbers came from Heinrich himself. I’m not sure that they were ever independently verified.
That was also one of the biggest military operations of WWII. Other than to demonstrate exactly how much ammo an automatic weapon (especially one designed to lay down a high rate of suppressive fire) can go through if it’s fired pretty much continuously throughout most of the day, I don’t really see the relevance to the current discussion. Heinrick didn’t stockpile his own ammunition or buy his own guns. Both were supplied by the German army specifically to be used to defend the coast, which is exactly what he did with them. I doubt that many private gun owners have set up lines of well-stocked defensive bunkers to defend against the possibility of an invading army during a war.
My first thought almost exactly, but I flashed on if the question was regarding nuclear weapon yield.
Some estimate 2,000 hit/killed, others (based on his position and landing assignments) say he couldn’t have hit more than 300 and killed maybe 50. Trouble was that at Omaha, there were very few other factors to consider as to why 2,500 American soldiers died or went missing. His ammo supply was 12,000 and he said he had 2 spare barrels for his mg-42.
Regardless, he represents the war-time record and his experience sufficiently demonstrates a shooter’s maximum ammo requirement (and barrel change) for one day. That was my point.
What’s interesting is that the photos in the linked story are all of guns which are not restricted beyond the strict requirements for obtaining a firearms licence in the first place etc - all those rifles and shotguns are bolt, lever or break-actions, which anyone with a longarms licence can own. A couple of the handguns appear to be .45s, which are restricted (even for handgun shooters) but it’s not impossible to get permission to own them.
Having said that, licenced gun owners in Australia still have to have a permit for each gun. As the story notes, however, the police say they found some full-auto stuff including AK-47s and an MP5, and those things are impossible to get a licence or permit for in a live-fire condition.
But yeah, four metric tonnes of ammunition is a LOT, even by Australian Bush standards.
And to address the other discussion about ammunition useage: I’m pretty sure the record for longest period of sustained fire is held a British Vickers Medium Machine Gun, which one unit of 10 guns in 1916 fired non-stop (except to change barrels) for a solid 12 hours, going through a million rounds without failure. That’s an average of 100,000 rounds per gun.
Vickers also apparently fired a Vickers Gun for a solid week in the interwar period as a reliability test, again without failure.
Whenever I see a figure like 4.2 tonnes I always assume that this is probably someone rounding up from someone else’s estimate. I bet no one actually weighed it - just some reporter said, “That looks like a lot of ammo.” And someone guessed 10,000lbs. Then, because like us, Oz is sup[posed to be metric, that got converted to 4.2 tonnes.
Given Australia is metric, why would the initial figuring be done (by an Australian) in Imperial before being converted?
The reporter wouldn’t have been anywhere near the place until the police search was nearing its conclusion, so the 4.2 tonnes figure will have come from the police themselves.
I read the thread title as “Is 4 tonnes a lot of emo”, and was going to answer that it’s about average for a Weezer album.
But never mind.
Yo!