For someone who has “been buying, shooting, and studying them your entire life”, the sheer amount of nonsense you have been spouting is truly amazing.
Ah, but where do you live? I don’t know anyone who can do all those things, but all of those things can be done by various people I know. I even know a guy who makes his living with leathercraft, he makes a lot of deerskin shirts and pants from animals he or friends of his hunted. He has friends who do taxidermy and tan leather. He is also active in historical reenactments, and has many friends who have all kinds of roughing it skills.
Any mechanical device will wear out. Modern firearms ARE pretty durable, but they also don’t get used much. I’ve made certain assumptions, such as that they would get used a lot, but maybe those assumptions wouldn’t bear up. That’s the point of the thread. My original point on guns in particular (now all but lost) was supposed to be that a confluence of many factors would make guns less useful than most people imagine. If they wear out, if they break, if they run out of ammo, the result is the same: useless. There’s all kinds of factors to consider, and most people don’t. The funny thing is, the more obsolete the firearm, the more likely it is to last. Flintlocks, for example, have all of 4-5 moving parts, and don’t need shell casings. As long as powder, bullets, and flints are available, they will still be working.
I live in Oregon and we’re pretty up to date on our organic gardening, home repair, wilderness survival, fishing and playing with guns. Most people I know are reasonably proficient at quite a few useful skills, and for the knowledge gaps you have the truly stellar Portland library system.
Recent studies have indicated that small scale intensive organic farming is hands down the most sustainable method for producing food there is and I have the advantage of living in the Willamette valley, which is possibly some of the best growing land there is. We already produce a gigantic range of plants and animals here and there is more square footage under greenhouse already built than any other state in the union. With some solar augmentation we could possibly even grow tropical plants–my nephew the coffee wizard is pretty sure he can find a strain of coffee that would thrive under greenhouse in southern Oregon.
And one wrinkle of apocalypse preparedness nobody ever thinks about is propane. At any given time there are hundreds of thousands of gallons in strong tanks and big tanker trucks to move it around. I also know the only authorized dealer and installer of propane conversion kits for vehicles in the PNW, and with his records I’d have forklifts, tractors, medium sized trucks (and the Frito-Lay trucks are all electric, that would be a good thing to look at too) and passenger vehicles and vans all available to be scavenged. You can run a generator on propane too, and propane freezers and fridges are dead common–look in any Winnebago. While the rest of the idiots are fussing and feuding over rapidly deteriorating gas and trying to figure out how to make biodiesel I’ll have enough fuel to take me to the end of my natural life and pass down to my surviving community. Talk about having a bargaining chip, right?
At any rate, using tractors would just be necessary long enough to locate, scavenge, breed and train up draft horses. Hell, so many llamas in this state you could probably teach them to pull a plow and definitely to pull a cart.
And yet, the number of people who know how to make black powder, knap flint and cast bullets from scratch is very likely less than the number of people who can bowl a 100 game. On Wii. In God Mode.
I’ll place my money on Joe-Bob’s AR still going strong 10 years post-Apocalypse. Lubed with his daughter’s nose grease and loaded with rounds he had stashed since the last time Wal-Mart had a sale.
Regardless of the hypothetical future condition of Joe-Bob’s rifle, the fact is that there are frigging armories all over this country stuffed full of perfectly maintained and stored weapons of every size and description. If society has completely broken down and most of the population is dead you could use and discard a different rifle every week and barely scratch the surface of the hardware available just in sporting goods stores alone. Then there’s the cop shops, National Guard armories, military bases scattered all over the place. Honestly, the hardest part will be finding an analog phone book to get the addresses of all the best stashes.
I know just a little about a couple of those and next to nothing about the rest. But you know who does have the answers? The library. Barring some Day of the Triffids or Twilight Zone Time Enough at Last sort of scenario, simple literacy puts pretty much all that stuff within reach.
How so? What sort of fuel are they using?
what fuel do you plan on using for it?
Gas will run out rather quickly. No electric to pump. No refineries to refine. Propane works right? If the generator can be converted
City dwellers do better? How does that happen? Where does the food come from? Water? Sewers? Lots of people in cities, high rises, just “zillions” of populations
The Amish arent going into cities to help city dwellers. They’ll be out in the country still, protecting home and associate with their own. Probably laughing at the rest of us…
The city would be the last place I would want to try to survive. Way too many people fighting for their lives…
Farms 50 miles from town? In Montana, S Dakota, N Dakota etc…yes but there are farms in Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, etc, that are plenty close to town. But then what can you do in town other than visit with people. Grocery stores will be empty. Hardware stores? Forget about it. Scrounge for parts, lots of scrounging, sharing…Have you ever farmed? Lots of seed sources out there. Seems like the government has all those seeds in storage, right?
Hey I liked the show Revolution until they canceled it.
90% dead? 90% in big cities maybe.
All true. Cows gotta be milked, surely that can still be done without electricity. The “Amish” type people do it still. There’s always something you can rig up…
Lots of books out there, and lots being an understatement, you can easily learn most everything. Some people know how to share knowledge, if they arent willing to share food. Yes I imagine people will change in emergency type/disaster times.
Creative looting, if even feasible, wont last long.
I wondered what us diabetics would do
The Amish will be wiped out by looters and bandits - they are very much anti-violence, even for self-defense. I expect a few will break the rules, but historically they seem willing to stand by their beliefs to the death.
Give the proximity of my nearby Amish community to Chicago and some additional smaller cities I doubt very much they’d survive for long. There will be too many desperate and armed people. Sure it’s a long walk from Chicago proper, but doable, especially during the period there will still be fuel and some working cars. Food to eat, shelter, tools to pillage, women to rape… yeah, it will be very ugly for the Amish.
If I am firing my Glock enough time to wear out its plastic parts I have much bigger issues than polymer wear and tear.
OP #5: I’m curious, if it’s a true nuclear winter-type apocalypse, will solar panels still work?
I don’t see why not. Lessened efficiency due to all the particulate matter in the atmosphere, but these days the only time you don’t get at least a trickle of current out of a solar panel is…night. They would certainly work quite well in the Southern Hemisphere, assuming the nukes mostly landed above the equator. There is some intermingling between the two, but not so much as to take down Australia as fast as Japan, as I understand it.
^ Thnx.
It depends upon where you live. If you live in a rural area with farming, ranching, logging and other hands on manufacturing then chances are a lot of people know these things.
I would be weak in blacksmithing and wilderness survival (done some camping) and have never tried to make gunpowder but carpentry, gardening and mechanics I am very strong in.
Have had a large, mostly organic, garden for over 40 years and have grown most common things at one time or another. I can preserve food by canning. Most things can be canned in a water bath without a pressure cooker. I can turn a walking livestock or hunted animal into reliably butchered meat with just a knife. Drying, smoking, can do. Have helped to build a house and do most of my own home repairs. I have a well appointed garage/shop where I keep my 18 year old muscle car in top form, it has never seen a professional dealer/shop since I bought it all those years ago. I have a year-round freshwater stream running through my land.
Next door lives a diesel mechanic, across the road from me is a cattle ranch, and I can’t swing a cat in the local bar without hitting a dozen loggers. Very resourceful people. Oh, and I live near the mouth of a large river that dumps into the Pacific about 10 miles away. We could live on just the bounty of the ocean for most of the year. And one of my bolt action, scoped, hunting rifles is chambered for 7.62 X 39mm, the rounds that an AK-47 shoots (it was a gift, ok?) there will be plenty of ammo available, for a long time.
Location, location, location. When the shit hits the fan, do not be anywhere near the fan. 
Oh, I remember the gunpowder formula from much young days. 3/4 potassium nitrate, also know as saltpeter, split the other 1/4 between charcoal and sulfur, a little less sulfur and a little more charcoal. And that is it.
Assuming I was able to grab some of my books or my library survived, I have a bunch of gardening books, books on north american plants and animals, Firefox books, The Art of Blacksmithing, etc, etc.
I’m betting I’m not the only one. Hell, could probably find most of those in a rural library.
There are an estimated 5k to 10k trained Blacksmiths in the USA. 99% cull still leaves 50-100, plus all tools left by the dead ones.
A bamboo tube and some diamonds, and you could take out a Gorn. 
Especially if you can construct some sort of rudimentary lathe!
As an asides on the book series in question:
Very, Very Advanced Aliens determine that the Earth is at the cusp of a tipping point, where global climate perturbations will trigger several self-reinforcing processes. These will basically result in earth becoming a slightly colder and thinner-aired Venus. The VVAAs decide to intervene, but it is not an unanimous decision. Factions among them would rather see humanity extinct. The resulting action is therefore a committee compromise:
A “field” is placed around the earth, that has four main effects:
- The behavior of gases is inhibited, so that molecules which formerly bounced off each other now slide around viciously.
- The electrical resistance of materials is affected, electrical resistance now builds rapidly with the length of a circuit.
- Something involving nuclear decay.
- Something I don’t remember which was quite detailed. it involved the energy release of combustion I think.
This does not affect organic or large scale phenomena. So weather effects etc are unaffected. The aliens basically have unlimited processing power and could individually track and affect each individual atom on earth if required, so that the only effects are the inhibition of human technologies. They are also outside time and space and present on many parallel worlds. In at least one that was at the same tipping point they did not intervene, and humanity (and most higher life) is extinct.
The time of the intervention was March 17, 1998, 6.15 p.m. Pacific Standard Time.
They are probably more likely to break through misadventure than to wear out, that’s true. But the more a gun is actually USED the more chances there are for it to be dropped/stepped on/lost/run over by a vehicle, etc. Any number of these occurrences alone or in combination can eventually render a weapon inoperable. People just don’t consider how different the wear is on any mechanical device used routinely versus one used occasionally, as most civilian weapons are. This is a well-known issue in all militaries, which is why the best armies put plenty of time into weapons-handling and maintenance training. It’s also why the AK-47 was designed to be so robust: so the Soviets wouldn’t HAVE to do so much of that training.
Why will gas run out?
Why is there no electricity to pump gas?
Why don’t generators work?
Why don’t refineries work?
What I’m saying is that all these pocky-clips scenarios are highly scenario dependent. A full scale Judgement Day style nuclear war where the Soviet Union, Red China, France, the UK, and America all launch every single nuclear bomb they’ve got at every single target on every list is one thing. A Yellowstone supervolcano or Dinosaur killer asteroid or mega solar flare is another. A genetically engineer super virus is another.
In the first we cities and infrastructure nodes preferentially destroyed. In the other the effects are much more diffuse and the main problem isn’t degraded infrastructure, it’s that we’re facing a couple years of crop failures. For the solar flare we have electrical grid problems and all our electronics fried, but everything else is fine. For the pandemic people die, but the infrastructure is intact.
So your pocky-clips “everyone should know this or that or the other thing won’t work” depends on what you figure is going to happen.
And as I said, there really has never been such a thing as an apocalypse in history, aside from the collapse of the Americas post 1492. Even WW I+II didn’t come close, and neither did the fall of the Roman Empire, and neither did the Mongol conquests.