News stories about a recent shooting almost always mention that the shooter had bought 6000 rounds of ammunition. What would you guess 6000 rounds of ammunition weighs? How many rounds can a well conditioned military persons tote around, usually, your guess again?
If a round weighs several grams, say 5 grams (no idea at all how heavy they are, but that sounds good, also depends on how big they are), then 6000 rounds will weigh about 30 kilograms/66 pounds, which is probably more than most people will be able to easily carry around, especially for extended periods, plus it will hamper your movement, but 6000 rounds is way overkill in any situation, especially if you have to manually load them (i.e. not an automatic).
Depends entirely on what caliber of ammunition. A .22 round is very much lighter than a .50 BMG round.
A bit of cursory research indicates that 9mm pistol rounds come in aroun 8g, 5.56mm NATO at 12g, and 7.62 NATO at 25g.
So 6000 rounds for an AR-15 is about 70kg, plus the weight of their packaging which if they’re loaded in magazines is very significant.
6000 is ridiculous, I usually carried 4 magazines total of 120 rounds for an M-16.
If I needed to shoot more than 120 of the enemy, I just ran away.
Lanzy, no one is seriously carrying 6k in rounds around or even contemplating it, but I gotta believe your outfit easily had that much on hand for you when you needed more.
For longer term civilian use, it’s not an absurd number if you are an avid shooter or a member of a club.
Last time I went shooting I went through about 250 rounds. That’s probably around average, but that’s only using two pistols (1 revolver, 1 semi) and a lever action rifle. If I were out there blowing off rounds rapid fire with the semi, or with an assault rifle, it wouldn’t be hard to go through 500 rounds in an hour or two. If you do that twice a week, you’re looking at that 6k rounds being a 6 week supply, more or less. Even at my light rate, 6k rounds would be 24 outings. Go once a week and that’s just shy of 6 months. Twice a month and that’s a year supply.
And just like anything else, it’s cheaper in bulk.
I myself currently have around 500 rounds of ammunition for my pistols on hand, and I consider that to be at the low end of what I feel comfortable with, since it’s only two light outings worth of ammo. Less when I consider that some of it is expensive top end ammo I bought for my old job and I don’t want to just pop that stuff off at a paper target. On the other hand, I have about 1500 rounds of .22 on hand, which cost me less than one box of the expensive pistol ammo.
I used to work with a guy who did near-industrial scale reloading of 12 and 20 guage shotgun shells for his trap shooting club. He said it was not unusual for him to have 10,000 rounds of trap loads on hand, and they would easily blow through that in the season.
Heck, you’d ruin your barrel long before you expended 6000 rounds!
Maybe if you were going cross-country behind enemy lines on a long-range recon. But, heck, even then: if you get into that heavy a firefight, you’ll never elude a full-alert search grid. So… Nuh uh.
Sounds like “Dungeons and Dragons” logistics.
6000 rounds just means there was a sale at Turner’s.
The usual basic combat load for a M4 is 210 rounds. 1 mag loaded and 6 more. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t try to bring more ammo with them into combat. A lot more. Unlike Lanzy, most soldiers need more than one bullet per enemy. And there are things like suppressive fire.
6000 rounds should weigh around 300 pounds, which is a guesstimate based on how much 1000 rounds of 7.62x39 seems to weigh (~50 pounds?)
I didn’t look it up at the time, because the OP said to guess the weight, presumably without looking it up; according to this page,a round weighs between 2 and 16 grams, depending on what kind it is and whether it is the bullet only or the whole cartridge, which would be 12 to 96 kilograms (26 to 210 pounds).