Dumb question from a non-gun owner; does ammo decay at all over time? Or can one just store 20,000 rounds indefinitely and know it will still work without issue even years later?
Not a dumb question,
Brief answer: it doesn’t have expiration dates. It can last decades. But water and heat can damage it.
Interestingly, I just watched an Adam-12 episode where they replaced their rounds at six months.
JAQ got it right. Properly stored ammo lasts a looooong time. I routinely shoot ammo that easily 80+ years old. (Bought a 2000 round ammo box of loose .30-06 for my Garand. Such a deal!) OTOH surplus ammo from overseas can be iffy due to poor storage. All my communist ammo experiences failures at about 15%.
Somehow ammo in vending machines brings me back to that scene in Dr Strangelove: Or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb in which Mandrake needed to make a phone call.
You’ll have to answer to the Winchester company!
… and their house…
I’ve shot very old bulk purchased 7.62x54 that came in Russian packaging. The primers were corrosive as shit though so you better clean immediately after firing. Seriously. Wait a couple days and you’ll be sad.
That goes without saying. My old SKS got scrubbed well after every range session.
I have also shot a lot of 7.62x39 through my Russian SKS as well, but all of that was non-corrosive. Dirty, but not turn your barrel to rust in a day like the x54 through the Mosin.
We might be getting fresh fodder for this thread soon…
Road rage ends in double fatal shootout.
I honestly worry that America is going to see a huge amount more of this. We have become a Road Rage Nation… and guns are getting easier to get… and ammo comes out of vending machines and big box stores.
Small stuff like “I accidently cut him off and He Threw His Coffee On My Car!” the cops can take a report & say “Well, I didn’t see it.” If one or the other becomes a frequent flyer, then maybe more happens. Wasting a judge’s time over the price of a carwash is really going to P/O the judge. ( someone will correct me, I’m sure )
Gun shots between cars automatically kick this to a higher tier. Did you get a plate#? Is there film of this? Do surrounding buildings have cameras? Do any other drivers back you up? Is there a bullet that can be examined? Does it match any used in any other crimes in the database?
(There is/was: supposedly a huge database of ballistics from recovered crime scene bullets within one of the agencies. Is it the FBI? Then again, maybe Rump scrapped that program: Too expensive & not enough Squid Pro Quo.
“I like people who win in car shoot-outs” /s ).
Does the person you are accusing own guns? Do you own guns? Have any been fired? Do the calibers match up? Is there GSR on that person or on/in that car? Is there GSR on you and/or your car?
Well, at least that’s how I thought it used to be. I know that the GOP doesn’t care. Just another ‘bad guy with a gun’ until it’s one of them when it becomes ‘just another bad day with a gun’ and ‘boys will be boys’.
Still, if the number of these car fast-draw artists keep escalating, there won’t be enough taxes in the world to cover the number of cops and labs and courts and judges and prisons needed to cover the backlog of inter-car shootings. If that happens, either the priority of the crimes will drop or the entire justice system will collapse in on itself.
If the priority of the crime drops, where do the goal posts get moved to?
The Higher Tier is when there is Personal Injury from gunfire?
Or dead bodies only?
Yeah yeah, the sky is falling, the sky is falling. Whatever.
There is a short story (pretty sure in one of the Dangerous Vision collections) where the highways are a free fire zone with cars outfitted with cannons, machine guns, etc. IIRC the reason was SCOTUS decided on a driver’s right to self-defense (which seemed outlandish when I read it back in the day, but doesn’t seem out of reach for today’s court).
The most currently unrealistic part is the mass transit system that hauls around the apparent majority of folks who don’t want to go mano-a-mano in a personal vehicle.
Along the Scenic Route by Harlan Ellison, published in the anthologies The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World and Death on Wheels.
One of the inspirations for Steve Jackson Games’ Car Wars.
“Why Johnny Can’t Speed” by Alan Dean Foster
That’s it - presumably not in Dangerous Visions (I think that was all original work), so not sure where I ran into it. I see it was in Galaxy magazine in 1971 - that might be where I read it, but I was only in 6th grade then. I subscribed to it eventually (I’d read all the sci-fi available in my small town library), but don’t know if I was that young.
At any rate, that is a link to archive.org and it appears that they have a lot of issues available as PDFs - I’ll probably have to dive into that at some point.
And to think he once worked to stop gun violence.
I’m really hoping that’s sarcastic.
I’d say it’s on the border between sarcastic and bare truth.