You can rarely get through a conversation with a fellow prepper without the subject of weapons and ammo coming up. We are consumed by the fear of not having enough, not being able to maintain what we have, or someone trying to take them away. There are as many plans and ideas as there are of us, I believe.
At this very moment, if things went really bad, I know of three different walk-in gun safes within three or four hours drive in any direction from my house. We are talking enough hardware and rounds to knock off a South American dictatorship. I had some constructive conversations with the folks that own these safes, and the consensus is that they are stockpiling as a form of currency. I can see it, I’m just not as keen on spending that much money on something I can’t eat or drive.
As for me, I tend to stay at a basic loadout for each weapon I own. My thought process is that most gunfights last seconds to minutes. If you burn through 250 rounds of 5.56 and are still engaged, it’s maybe time to run because you are not hitting anything.
Ammo is sensitive and takes care in storage. Imagine stockpiling thousands of rounds only to degrade and have a large portion not useable when needed. The obvious answer is reloading.
Over the years, I have tinkered with reloading, more for education than anything. I have loaded a pistol, shotgun, and rifle rounds and have never had a failure to fire that I can remember. Getting into loading your rounds to me is the pinnacle of firearms utilitarianism. Having the ability to load your ammo safely is going to be one of the most valuable skills to your community and yourself when SHTF—you just better practice now rather than wait and play catchup afterward.
Reloading can be very dangerous. For rifle or pistol rounds, not going to the full battery or, for shotshells, having too much space near the crimp can be devastating to your barrel, arm, or even face. Folks have died, so please get the proper training before heading out to the range with a box of your newly minted rounds.
As for the cost, reloading the most popular types of rounds is not advantageous over buying your ammo outright. What we are doing here is learning a trade that will benefit us at a later time, when ammunition is possibly hard to come by.
There are a few drawbacks to Lee loaders, first of all being that they are not as efficient and it will take longer to prepare each round. Second, you should only reload brass fired from your weapon. And third, you may need to re-size the entire case if you are running rounds through a semi-auto, pump, or lever-action rifle. Failure to do so may cause malfunctions.
If you can get your hands on a shotshell hand reloader, they work pretty much the same way, you will just find that it is much harder to get safe crimp-on plastic shell casings. I found a tabletop shotshell loader that I believe is old enough that it came over on the Mayflower, but it works and works well. The best part: I spent nearly nothing on it and have never had a malfunction of shells I’ve reloaded.
While I have not been reloading massive amounts of ammo, I have had a ton of fun learning how to load and tinkering with these hand-loaders. If you plan on keeping your costs at a minimum, you can start this for easily under a hundred bucks.
My recommendation is to find a couple of hand loaders for a pistol and rifle caliber you own. Get some good training from someone who has experience and start reloading a few shells occasionally. You will be surprised how comfortable and quick you become and moreso, how popular you will get when the store shelves are void of ammunition.
This article was originally published in Survival Dispatch Insider Volume 3 Issue 8.