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Another reason is if for some reason we have an oil crisis. Most of what you eat is delivered on trucks. No oil means no food in about two weeks. Hunting used t
by Clubber 9y ago
Another reason is if for some reason we have an oil crisis. Most of what you eat is delivered on trucks. No oil means no food in about two weeks. Hunting used to be par for the course just a few decades ago.
- Frondo 9y agoFrom personal experience, from a social circle that spans a wide variety of types of people, the venn diagram of "people who are Into Guns" and "people who can effectively hunt their own food" has no overlap. My friends who are Into Guns are into feeling tough and powerful, like they've always got an upper hand in any situation. When they go into the great outdoors, it's to drink beer and shoot their guns into the woods. (Yeah, it's stupid and dangerous and shitty. I stopped camping with them some time ago.) My family members who hunt never talk about their guns, they just hunt with them a couple times a year and fill their chest freezers with deer.
- lainga 9y agoWhat does enthusiasm for guns have to do with this discussion?
- panglott 9y agoThe linked article is about rationales for possessing rifles such as the AR-15.
- lainga 9y agoYou can own an AR-15 without being compelled to enthuse about it to everyone (as the grandparent mentioned their poor-hunter friends do).
- Spooky23 9y agoThe AR-15 is the key word. Subsistence hunters aren’t buying expensive guns. You can get guns for that purpose for 80% less money. AR-15s are like toy light sabers for adults.
- lainga 9y agoYes, but if you're not a subsistence hunter, and only planning to become one in unusual circumstances, the AR-15 is so popular that its parts and ammunition are widely available everywhere. In fact, I'd say an entry-level AR-15 at about $400 is a better choice for someone who isn't enthusiastic about guns, and doesn't want to expend too much brainpower maintaining them, as opposed to a $100 Cosmoline-encrusted Mosin or Norinco rifle. Even if it is overkill for hunting.
- flyingfences 9y ago5.56 is actually under-kill for hunting a lot of game, especially as compared to something like the Mosin that you gave as an example.
- cc439 9y agoYou're right in that .223/5.56 is only useful for game up to your typical southeastern Doe or small Buck but milsurp rifles are a thing of the past. Not only is a decent Mosin ~$350 these days, they are awful, awful hutning rifles for a dozen+ reasons. A Savage Axis is the better comparison but it costs about the same as a budget AR-15 and either option is so cheap it's hard to argue against buying both.
- Density 9y agoThat's why intermediate 6mm cartridges exist. 6.5mm CM, grendel and better yet .300 blackout. All easy conversions to the AR platform. All you need to go from a base .223 ar to a .300blk is a barrel swap.
- flyingfences 9y ago
- busterarm 9y agoWith the dramatic increase in CWD in the US deer population, I don't know if I would be messing with deer meat anymore. I started turning down venison at meals for good two years ago. I'm probably being overly cautious.
- cc439 9y agoThe only difference between "military-style firearm enthusiasts" and "hunters" that I've noticed is that the hunting focused crowd rarely shows interest in platforms like the AR-15 but they loooooove to talk about/argue about handguns. All the hunters in my family rareoy discuss their field guns (there's really not much to discuss about the differences between one .308 bolt action/12ga pump or inertia shotgun and another) but god forbid they get started on a 9mm/.45 debate or their umpteenth Wonder 9/1911 argument. Basically, the difference boils down to one of defensice ideology, tacticool people believe in the benefits of the modern carbines/rifle concept while hunters believe in the benefits of a CCW and/or bedside handgun instead.
- vkou 9y agoIf there are no more trucks in the United States, the only thing you'll have left to hunt after a few weeks would be people. [1] [1] http://www.actionbioscience.org/biodiversity/rooney.html http://www.actionbioscience.org/biodiversity/rooney.html
- gowld 9y agoHow are deer related to trucks?
- saalweachter 9y agoThe US has 30 million deer and 330 million people. If divided evenly and your exclusive food source, that would last the country about 3.5 days.
- Clubber 9y agoWell there won't be 330 million people for long either. There are also a lot of other animals to eat other than deer. The people who have rifles will have a better chance than the people who don't. The people without them will have to rely on the kindness of others to live. I think people stuck in or near cities will have a low chance of survival regardless of if they have a rifle.
- xkcd-sucks 9y agogator, bear, duck, squirrel, possum, goose, raccoon (boil in baking soda twice, according to Joy of Cooking)
- LyndsySimon 9y agoRead stories from people who lived through the Great Depression - there was basically no wild game left. It took decades for it to return.
- crsv 9y agoAn oil crisis from where? Our reliance on foreign oil has diminished considerably, we would need an oil crisis domestically for this to even be on the table, and that seems an even further reach than an international one. https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/us_oil.php https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/us_oil.php
- sverige 9y agoNo trucks means no food in three days or less for 95% or more of the population.
- cc439 9y agoHunting won't be a viable method for replacing the majority of calories in one's diet in any scenario in which the public has to resort to finding such a replacement. Small game is only capable of supplanting other calorie sources, and although that role as a supplement is incredibly important in terms of nutrition, it can't serve as Plan A no matter how many squirrels and ducks you see in the park during "peacetime". Large game, which means white tailed deer for 95% of Americans, is viable in terms of calories per successful hunt but the success rate of hunting will plummet the longer any food-insecurity scenario continues. The population of white tailed deer is enormous (15,000,000) but the population of people capable of hunting them is large enough to absolutely annihilate that population in mere months. Just doing some napkin math but several sources state the average carcass of a northern state buck yields 72lbs of meat. Does outnumber bucks and are far smaller (plus southern deer are far smaller) but let's be conservative and say the average is 60lbs of meat per carcass. Multiply that by the FDA approved # of calories per pound of ground venision which is 712, and you get 42,720 calories. Let's say you have to feed a family of 4 and you're fine with a starvation diet of 1,400 calories per day. That deer only provides you with 15 days of food assuming it only needs to provide for half that already limited calorie intake. Make that ~11 days if you want to maintain a 2,000 calorie diet with venison being half. Now picture the ramifications of that math as it plays out over a population of millions of families with an experienced hunter in the household and their need to take 2+ deer every month. Not only do you still need additional sources for the other half of your calorie intake, you'll need to replace the portion satisfied by venison fairly quickly as the deer population is hunted into near extinction. Basically, hunting serves as an excellent way of supplementing your diet in such a scenario but it is by no means a complete solution over any timeframe and it becomes completely non-viable withing a surprisingly short window of time.
- code_duck 9y agoEasier math is that 30 million cattle are slaughtered in the US annually.
- maxerickson 9y agoUnfortunately there's not really a meaningful amount of game. Even a relatively small portion of the current population hunting for sustenance would demolish that resource. Cannibals would of course have a ready supply of food.
- saalweachter 9y agoThe calorie density of a corn field is higher than Manhattan. There's also more calories of beef in the US than people.
- maxerickson 9y agoThe comment above suggests a scenario where the fuel has stopped. There's a lot more people on Manhattan than there are cattle and corn fields.
- Clubber 9y agoMost people who are stuck in large cities would simply starve to death.
- saalweachter 9y agoI mean, maybe? There are people starving to death (or to an infirmity that leads to death, rather than literally starving to death) inside and outside of cities today, so it can certainly happen. There's 120 sq miles of cornfields in New Jersey and 160 of soybeans, which are enough to feed Manhattan for a year, even if they're not currently allocated to feeding people in Manhattan and not enough to feed the entire metropolitan area. There's a considerable amount of food within one day's walk of even giant cities like New York. Moreover, non-mechanized transport and storage of grain is kind of something humans are good at. Pre-modern cities relied heavily on it for hundreds of years. Rome, London and Beijing weren't relying on food grown by farmers living in the city. In any non-magically-fast collapse (eg, the oil supply is cut by 20% per year until only a negligible amount remains on the market versus ALL OIL LITERALLY DISAPPEARS OVERNIGHT) I think there's going to be a decent glide path to an alternate structuring of civilization (electric-solar heavy farm equipment; reduced quantities of grain-fed meat; electric-solar rail and increased river/canal transport) that we'll be heavily incentivized to take. (The end-of-the-world that scares me most is a _rapid_ shift in climate leading to significantly reduced growing seasons which allow for significantly less food production world-wide; I can't see any way that doesn't turn bad, and I am not sure what an individual would do to safe guard themselves against it besides hide in an unmarked cave with a massive food store until things are magically better.)