Black powder is dead simple to make. Sure, methods for making it aren’t common knowledge anymore, but common enough that a couple dozen people in every small town knowhow. Oil is oil. Butter, lard, tallow, bear grease, vegetable oul, whatever. And little Springs can be hand manufactured.
People today turn out AK-47 clones in backyard blacksmith shops all over the third world. Guns will eventually wear out, but not for years or decades. The level of disaster where people forget how to make and maintain firearms and revert to bow and arrow would require something like 99.99% of humanity dying off.
As for the Emberverse novels, over the years some characters do try to experiment to figure out what is happening. And when they experiment with old steam engines, they find that somehow the energy just leaks out into hyperspace or something. And so they determine the change has to be on purpose, not some random change. Like, how can you change chemistry so that gunpowder doesn’t explode, chanel electricity so that generators don’t work, and yet human bodies still work?
I hope you don’t ever have to find this out, but you may be in for a surprise.
During WW II, a group of Westerners in Southeast Asia (IIRC, missionaries in China) were stranded there, and several of them were diabetic. Someone among them had enough knowledge of chemistry to figure out how to extract insulin from pancreases, and asked a local butcher to save them for this purpose, which he did. Whatever they made was sufficient to keep them alive until the area was liberated, and when they saw commercially available insulin, which unlike the concoction they used was standardized and purified, they grabbed each other and cried tears of joy.
BTW, the word “apocalypse” literally means “unveiling”, which in this context can definitely mean “disaster”.
Depending on who you ask, there are somewhere around 300 million guns in America. Assuming one box of 50 rounds per gun, that’s 15 billion rounds. I’m gonna call that low. I’ve read estimates that there are 12 billion rounds sold each year.
What am I gonna do if a plastic part breaks?
Considering that most plastic parts were made to replace wooden parts, I’m gonna go out on a limb here and suggest that I could make a wooden part to replace a plastic one.
re: Animal fat lubricant.
Smelly and messy, but cooking just about any meat is going to result in more than enough waste fat to lube any firearm considering the minuscule amounts required. Hell, the grease on your fingers after you finish eating would be enough.
There will be an awful lot of cars sitting around that you could scavenge various lubricants from. If you don’t mind skipping over recipes (she likes to share wild food recipes) this story gives a lot of tips on how to do work-arounds: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11759047/1/Journal-of-the-Zombie-Years .
There are a billion decent to “somebody get these people an editor” ZA, Pandemic and EMP stories on Kindle/Unlimited. I like them for the survivalist tips that I could use for camping. I had heard of using a bucket with a garbage bag as an easily cleaned portable toilet but one book mentioned using a pool noodle to give the rim a little comfort as you straddle it. Good to know if our camper potty ever breaks down.
Except that is fiction and physically impossible, so when the premise of the thread involves genuine apocalypses, your premise is outside the discussion.
With existing stocks, bullet molds, etc, if 10% of the USA survived, they could salvage enough ammunition (including military stocks) to last until society was rebuilt and functioning ammunition factories up and running again.
Unfortunately, during the Groundhog Day Blizzard of 2011 the septic line in our place froze, meaning no drains or toilets in this place worked. Yes, we used a 5 gallon bucket lined with a contractor-grade plastic bag as an emergency toilet. It worked, but that damned narrow plastic rim was NOT comfortable. Yes, use a pool noodle, old toilet seat, a board, any damn thing to cushion that rim.
We also sprinkled some kitty litter on what was in the bucket in between uses which allowed about 24 hours of use by two people before the smell got to be unbearable. Close the bag tightly between uses.
You may now return to the thread previously in progress.
I asked Mr.Wrekker how much ammo is around in the U.S., he thinks 15 billion rounds is probably on the low side. If you think 12 billion a year are sold & add that to what you have left over, it could very well be upwards of 25 billion laying around. And who knows how much is being made daily that isn’t sold yet. Lots of bullets. I don’t see the all out wars amongst survivers like on The Walking Dead. I think most people will just die before they are prepared to kill someone for a can of spam. Of course who really knows what you’d do. I hope I don’t find out.
Hm, my brother had 10 000 rounds of 22 lr, he bought it about 10 years ago when his friend retired and sold off his gun shop. Danny liked to plink rats, an old fashioned rural passtime. mrAru and I have roughly 500 rounds for my M1, and around 1000 rounds for the Moisin Nagant 91/30. I think about 100 rounds for his 44 cal target hand gun, and 250 rounds of 9 mm kurtz for my 38h. Not sure what Danny was using for ratting, but it probably didn’t have much plastic in it. I know the 91/30 and my m1 are wood and metal, and I could clean and lube our weapons for about a year. Being medication dependent and undergoing treatment for stage 3 colon cancer I might have one good year in me if my assorted medical-fu stopped.
Synthetics are generally more durable than wood, especially in adverse conditions, since they don’t rot. In any case, if a plastic part breaks you can just make a wood replacement part, it may make the weapon weigh a little more butit doesn’t render it non-functional. And I don’t know where you get the idea that aluminium is replacing steel in the functional parts of firearms, it’s just not true at all. I don’t know where you got the idea that modern firearms will go nonfunctional within two years, it just doesn’t happen like that.
Another problem is your definition of ‘modern firearms’ - a lot of modern popular modern firearm designs date back to the 1950s. The AR-15/M-16 pattern rifle, for example, is extremely popular today (and the core components are normally made of steel, not aluminium). The AK-47 pattern rifle is a bit older, still manufactured today, and is found all over the world, and is even manufactured by people using hand tools. 1911 pistols are highly popular and the design dates back to… 1911. The Mossberg 500 and Remington 870 shotguns dominate the shotgun market, but the Mossberg was introduced in 1960 and the Remington a decade before that. Even if it was true that modern designs use weak plastic and aluminium, the guns one would expect to encounter in the field just don’t.
There are estimated to be more than 300 million legal firearms in the US. Your idea that they would all stop working in a year or two just doesn’t make any sense at all.
Do you have any idea just how much oil is needed to keep a gun operational? Just a few drops each time you clean it. And you don’t have to clean it every time you shoot. I have spilt more gun oil than I have ever used.
And oil is everywhere, in everything. All seeded plants are usually heavy in oil, the oil in the seeds provides the energy that the young sprout needs to get started. Canola, hemp, corn, grape, you can get oil from most all seeds. That is what seeds are, little packets of energy, heavy in fat. None of those crops are available anymore? There are plenty of other seeded plants that are not commercially used that you can extract oil from. Hell, I could probably distill some light oil from a chunk of pavement. Distillation is easy. Just heat up a substance without burning it, capture the vapors, and cool them and you get various distillate fractions.
And animal oil/fat is not inferior to artificially made oil. The oil used in the finest watches before the advent of synthetics was whale oil. Just moving to the coasts would provide you will many food and material resources.
Humans are very resourceful. Although the knowledge isn’t universal, it is common. A millwright becomes a blacksmith. A carpenter’s trade never goes out of style, etc. Plumbing, shelter, clean water, and pretty soon you are on the way back up to civilization. As part of my son’s millwright training they gave him a 1 foot square piece of steel, about 1/2 inch thick, and told him to make an accurate caliper that could be used to make the next piece of equipment. And he made it. In the past that would have been the job of a blacksmith, or a sword maker.
Apocalyptic scenarios make a good story. But I do not believe in them. People will die, and people will recover, both fairly swiftly.
But people in the cities, yeah, they are fucked. 10 days after the trucks and trains stop rolling and you better have got out of the city to safer, more productive land. And if transportation is down you best be fit enough to walk to where the pavement ends. That is where most of the people die. Not at the hands of their fellow man.
I think a lot of people drastically overestimate how difficult it is to grow enough food to keep a person going. If the apocalypse occurred in deep winter it would probably suck hard for a few months in areas that get a lot of snow, but just doing some creative looting would likely get you through to spring.
I have friends who have a small suburban yard (fifth of an acre total, with a 1300SF house on the lot) who have been intensively gardening it for years now. They have regularly gotten to within spitting distance and have sometimes met and exceeded their yearly goal of producing one ton of food from their garden. They are very good at preserving and drying their stuff, and being vegetarians makes things a lot easier for them but growing enough food for their family of four has been perfectly attainable–and they don’t even garden in the front yard aside from herbs disguised as landscaping and a bunch of sunflowers. They don’t spend much for food–they’re Seventh Day Adventists who don’t drink coffee or tea so likely the most they spend at the grocery store is for flour, salt, spices and cooking fats. Pretty much like most subsistence farmers did less than a hundred years ago.
Turning one’s entire yard (and maybe the yards of a couple dead neighbors) into small scale intensive gardening operations maximized for calorie production is absolutely feasible in a fairly short period of time. Do a lot of scavenging for nonperishable items that you can’t grow yourself, keep chickens and rabbits to eat your scraps and supplement the table and if you find a pair of goats or sheep–congratulations, you’re rich!
It also cracks me up when everyone assumes you simply MUST have firearms to keep meat on the table. Nope, get some good rat traps from the local Home Depot and you’re set. You might not like it, but that’s food right there, and you can probably bag squirrels with those too. Once your garden gets going, you set snares up to deter the local bunnies and supplement your diet.
Sure, people living in deserts will be screwed, but it was stupid to move that many people to Phoenix and Las Vegas in the first place. If they can’t figure out they need to move into California and up into the Midwest ASAP, well, can’t fix teh dumb.
Been buying, shooting, and studying them my entire life. I also reload. Guess what? I definitely know an asshole when I see one.
For the people whose knowledge of guns seem to come from television:
The assumption is that guns in this scenario will actually be used. Of those 300 million guns in the U.S., the vast majority sit in a closet only to be taken out and fired a few times a year. Guns that are used constantly require maintenance, lubing, and cleaning … constantly. Civilian firearms are not designed to hold up to that type of use (high-end trap shotguns excepted) and will simply wear out or break, especially because civilians will not generally know how to maintain them for maximum life. Military firearms, especially modern ones, are specifically designed to be modular so parts are simply replaced as they break. Except there won’t be any parts to use after a while.
One does not simply “make a wooden part to replace a plastic part.” If you really believe that, by all means whittle an entire Glock frame from wood actually thin enough to hold in one hand and see how many shots it lasts. Stocks and forends are just about the only places they could be interchangeable. Plastic and wood have different material properties.(And note: Nowhere did I ever say plastic has straight-up replaced wood directly, part for part.) Just suggesting such a thing raises an entire array of issues that are not being considered: Do you have access to a wood hard enough for the job? Do you have enough of that wood, in the right shape? Do you have the tools to shape said wood properly, since you may not have electricity for power tools? Can the wood handle the heat of firing without igniting? Do you have the time to make this part, before you are killed/enslaved/starve to death? Etc. The answer to almost all of these questions almost all of the time will be “no.”
The AK-47 has never been “made with hand tools,” by anyone, anywhere. It’s a firearm, not a goat cart. Producing a pic of one some guy in Africa put together out of spare parts doesn’t prove anything. He sure didn’t make those parts himself. ALL modern firearms that aren’t dangerous to fire have pressure-bearing parts that are made of cut, formed, and heat-treated steels. That is not a material one makes in a garage. It IS possible to manufacture crude firearms on a cottage basis, but what you have is not an “AK-47,” just some piece of crap. My main point though is that these will still require ammunition, and will be so crude as to be no more effective/useful in the long run than a bow.
I guess one could, if one was desperate, put organic grease on a gun. How’s that going to smell, after a few days and shots fired? Like a rotting pile of meat. SO much for sneaking up on anyone or anything. Better be a great long-range shot.
It really makes no difference how many rounds of any kind of ammunition there are in the country, because there are plenty of other factors that will matter sooner. Among these are: Do you own a gun in that caliber? Does it function? Do you know where that ammo IS? Will it be available to you, at any price? Will others be trying to take it? Just because something exists somewhere doesn’t mean YOU will have access to it. It’s like saying there will still be grocery stores full of food, so everyone will be well-fed. Well, not if they all go there at once.
It depends on the scope and nature of the 'pocylpse. Post WW2 Europe and Asia had the benefit of a benevolent victor who instituted the Marshall Plan to help them recover. North and South America and Australia were largely untouched by the war.
The Road is so bleak because it portrays a world where there is no hope for the future. There is nothing living besides a few people, most of whom are cannibals. If there is no way for humans to survive other than scrounging the last remaining cans of food or eating each other, then any survivors are just prolonging the inevitable.
This probably WOULD work … for the people who are left after everyone else has starved. However, do your friends use modern fertilizers? Store-bought seeds? Any form of pesticide? Any type of machinery to plant/harvest? Eventually, none of those things will be available.
Agreed, but again, only if the population density is very low. There just aren’t that many calories in rats and squirrels.
I’m extraordinarily surprised at the amount of expertise that many posters to this thread are crediting to their fellow (I presume) Americans. If what I read is to believed, the following forms of knowledge are common enough not to evince much concern:
gunpowder manufacture
blacksmithing
subsistence farming
carpentry
mechanical repair
wilderness survival.
Perhaps I’m the one who is deluded, but only about 1 in 10 of all the people I know can even change the oil in their own car. I do not share ya’lls faith.
Sorry, but I’m skeptical that any modern firearm would “wear out” from normal post-apocalyptic use. With no maintenance and assuming you don’t dip in in mud or anything, how many times can you fire a Glock or an AK-47 until failure? A couple thousand? Whose going to be firing entire clips of bullets when they ain’t makin’ them anymore?