commander magazine 1 of 2

COMMANDER MAGAZINE

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Not too long ago I was reading Commander Zero and he was commenting on magazine stockpiling.  You all know I love CZ.  He is my favorite Gun Fag ( have you read “Gun Fag Manifesto”?  It is in reprinted book form, a collection of his 90’s ‘zine issues.  Sure, it’s $20, and that is for pure entertainment rather than education.  But it sure was damn entertaining ), mostly because he just does his own thing and rarely cares what other people say ( as opposed to my propensity to rail and rant against all others Not Me ).  I was shocked to discover the other day that not only did I agree with his premise, I thought he should double down on it.

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I don’t agree with the premise behind the premise, namely that you should own, view, think about or advocate semi-automatic weapons, but I do agree that if you do have them they need far more magazines than is financially responsible to own.  With any other type of firearm, loading rounds manually and singularly isn’t all that much of a stretch of the imagination or all that unfeasible.  If I had a magazine failure on my Lee-Enfield, and even if I ran out of stripper clips ( not out of the realm of the possible, since while I SHOULD have enough as they came free with surplus ammo for a time, now they cost $5 EACH and I can’t stockpile them as I’d wish ), I could load them one at a time and not feel too handicapped.

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But the whole purpose of a semi-automatic is to shoot a crap ton of bullets downrange rapidly ( which is the whole reason to NOT use them post-apocalypse, but I shan’t belabor that point here ).  Without magazines for that weapon, the semi-automatic function is null and void.  Simply, as everyone knows and agrees with, magazines are the most important part of your weapons system.  So Commander Zero was saying that he stocked a 40:1 ratio of magazines per gun.  And he has a LOT of semi-auto guns.  I would imagine that if sold, all those magazines would either pay off his home or purchase a brand new one.

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I’m not debating the desirability of semi-auto’s here.  I think they suck a golf ball through a garden hose, for post-apocalypse.  I am saying that if you need mags only forty mags per gun might be too optimistic.  You probably need even more.  Well, maybe YOU don’t, as you don’t have enough ammunition.  But if you do have enough ammo, you need a LOT of magazines.  And, PLEASE, I beg you, don’t bring up the “you won’t live long enough to need them, since you’ll die soon in combat”.  I actually agree with that, but that cannot be your basis of planning.  When you plan, you plan worse case scenario.  And in this, NOT dying is worse case.  You need to stock food and ammo as if you’d live far longer than is realistically the case.

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Why?  Because what if you actually do?  Then what?  If you die with too many supplies, you’ll golden. If you die because you don’t have those supplies, you’re an idiot.  Now, I agree that “picking a number” for ammunition or for magazines is kind of a fools game.  All we are doing is guessing.  Why is ten thousand rounds better than five thousand?  Why is five years of food better than three?  Why are a hundred mags better than fifty?  Besides “Worst Case Scenario“, you really can’t make a case for any numbers, can you?   I mean, I think a thousand rounds is ridiculously low, but I’ve never tried to live through an apocalypse, either.  In the end, the number that is correct is what gets you to sleep soundly.

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Having said that, I still think we should discuss Commander Zero’s numbers.  I think he should have more, but then, with the number of guns he has this has already got to be an exceptionally impressive figure.  I merely point out that had he far less guns, perhaps he could have upped his mag count per weapon.  Because magazines are not like underwear.  With skivvies, you can crap yourself, apply a bit of soap and water, and keep from needing to go commando.  Since you are wearing the things, they are salvageable.  Not so mags.  They are inherently fragile.  They slip outside of your control easily.  And while a lesser quality pair of underwear saves on your budget and still performs its basic job as a reuseable male Kotex to sop up body fluids ( and to protect your delicates ), a worse quality magazine completely fails at its mission.

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Even the better quality brands can still fail you, as abysmal quality is a global phenomenon, and even the most careful scavenger with a mag dump bag is going to lose magazines.  Just like you’ll never save all your brass to reload, so you have far more than you think you need, so too you’ll never have magazines last as long as you’d like so you stock far more than you think necessary.  And that is really as simple as that whole subject is.  But please allow me to share a story that really provided perspective to me on the whole magazine issue. 

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I was watching a YouTube video on the M1 Carbine on the “Forgotten Weapons” channel.  When I first tried to watch it, I stopped early because the sound quality sucked.  But it came up weeks later again as a recommendation and I managed to watch it through.  And I was glad I did.  It was far more interesting than I first thought.  Mainly, it seemed to me, it is almost as if the M1 Carbine was the father of the M16.  The Carbine had a TERRIBLE round.  It was very anemic.  No wonder, as this was the 1911A1 .45 replacement weapon.  It was meant for rear echelon troops.

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Remember when I told you that it took two or three years to make 6 million Carbines, but it took fifty years to make 9 million M-16’s?  I was using it to underline how our military industrial capacity is total crap compared to what it used to be ( I also had figures to compare naval ships but I’ve since forgotten them ).  What I didn’t think about at the time was how they weren’t just produced, but used on a widespread basis and actually loved. 

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I have much more to say than originally planned.  I’ll continue tomorrow.

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