How much ammo is enough

[MichaelD]

Depending on where you go is not sensible to me as a reason. Do various areas have nicer gun fights? Does an upscale area have a lesser chance of a gun malfunction and the need to drop a mag and reload than a crappy area? My gun doesn't seem to know where it is. If one did get in a critical incident - they seem to happen in nice areas. The nice church, the nice mall, the nice theater.

I opine that with a semi - a gun and a mag is a reasonable setup. Two might be better but one seems a reasonable cut on the risk continuum of incidents. It's like the .05 level. .01 would be two mags. .001 is the gun, two mags and a Bug. I admit to walking around in .001 lately. Not hard. A J or G42 in some nice LLBean cargo pants is not a pain.

Think about someplace where it's legal to carry but could otherwise be considered a non-permissive environment with consequences if discovered. See where I'm going on this?

[olstyn]

We're on the same page Glenn. Probably a completely different thread but I wonder what trainers could do to get more people into their classes?

I know I should get involved in some training, but when I hear that a class is going to cost $400, burn 500 rounds of ammo, and is far enough away cause me to have to stay in a hotel, my enthusiasm dampens. I know instructors need to charge that kind of money in order to earn a living, and the travel costs are out of their control, but there's a threshold where "normal" people start saying things like "I can't justify the cost, because I have real-world expenses A, B, C, D, and E that need my money first."

[JodyH]

A lot of those normal people who will stutter at spending $1000 for training will drop $2000 on a tactical optic for their fighting rifle and burn 500 rounds in a day of dirtclod shooting with no hesitation...

I'll posit that fragile egos hold more people back from training and competition than finances do.

[olstyn]

I don't doubt that your theory is correct, Jody, but for me, it truly is a case of living within my means; my wife and I own one pistol each, and the only rifles we have are a pair of .22s that her father gave us. $1000 is more than I spend in a year of shooting, plus my car is due for a timing belt job in about 3000 miles, and that's $1000 right there. If it was in the budget for me, I'm sure I'd enjoy it and get a lot out of it, but the cost/benefit analysis doesn't play out in my favor given my current financial situation.

[eyemahm]

Depending on where you go is not sensible to me as a reason. Do various areas have nicer gun fights? Does an upscale area have a lesser chance of a gun malfunction and the need to drop a mag and reload than a crappy area?

For a given gunfight, I’d agree the answers to your questions are probably yes and yes. You are essentially saying that the severity of gunfights is unbiased based on locality, and that seems like a fair assumption. So let’s add to it.

How do you know you’re going to have that gunfight in the first place? What clues do you have? Perhaps you’ve read crime statistics or seen particularly shady characters in certain neighborhoods. Maybe you’ve seen crimes committed yourself. We know there’s a strong local bias to crime and we have data on it, so rather than assuming someone is going to have a gunfight, which is a pretty crazy assumption for the average CCW, let’s allow someone’s risk analysis to consider the odds that it will occur in the first place.

Just multiply the two and call it the expected gun fight (i.e., severity * likelihood).

Expanding on this concept, if you are 10x more likely to have an “incident" in town A than in town B, and the severity of incidents is identically distributed, you are also 10x more likely to have an "extremely (and identically) severe incident” in town A than B.

We think of guns and mags like insurance - they protect you against risk. So if you didn’t find it necessary to carry an extra mag in town B, because the .0001 odds of needing it did not exceed your tolerance for risk, I get it. Then you go to town A and the .001 odds exceed that tolerance, so you decide to carry it. Makes perfect sense to me.

[eyemahm]

I opine that with a semi - a gun and a mag is a reasonable setup. Two might be better but one seems a reasonable cut on the risk continuum of incidents. It's like the .05 level. .01 would be two mags. .001 is the gun, two mags and a Bug. I admit to walking around in .001 lately. Not hard. A J or G42 in some nice LLBean cargo pants is not a pain.

I like where you’re going with this. Realizing that these odds are not intended to be exact, their relative values in this case are far more important from a decision making point of view, given that they all assume events on the long tail of daily existence. So, can you explain your choice to prioritize an additional double stack mag over a BUG?

Granted this is almost entirely speculative (I can think of little relevant data other than that mass shootings are <1% of all homicides), but for me, I'd estimate the risk of having a gunfight that I manage to fuck up and then needing a BUG/fixed blade to be greater than the odds of being involved in a mall type incident (what I imagine would be the only type of situation where that 3rd mag might come into play). Then again, with all the media coverage that mass shootings get (at least 50x more than their fraction of the homicide rate), one cannot help but wonder if that factors into peoples' perception of relative risks. 😉Not saying that's the case here, but one definitely sees it a lot.

That said... a clinical psychologist could do a master's thesis on the different opinions/attitudes concerning this topic. Bottom line is, only you (the collective 'you', we here on this board) can decide where your comfort zone is. For sure, just about whatever fits your desires can be had, these days. But from where I sit, realistic threat assessment on the streets of the United States is not as clear-cut as it used to be. Ergo, IMO one should be prepared for the worst... just in case.

.

This brings us to the crux of the issue - how do you evaluate risk (and thus determine appropriate load out) in a consistent and unbiased way? Or is it just an issue of carrying whatever makes one comfortable (as a ccw), cause it's all at the far end of the tail anyways?

[Mr_White]

This brings us to the crux of the issue - how do you evaluate risk (and thus determine appropriate load out) in a consistent and unbiased way? Or is it just an issue of carrying whatever makes one comfortable (as a ccw), cause it's all at the far end of the tail anyways?

The bolded part is the approach I take.

[El Cid]

I completely get the part that everyone views risk and how to mitigate it differently based upon their perceptions, training, experiences, etc. And I get that there may be varying risk levels assigned to different geographical areas.

But I cannot comprehend anyone carrying a handgun without at least one reload. And I don't tie the spare mag to the on-board capacity of the gun - if I had a Die Hard/Lethal Weapon Beretta that holds 200 rounds, I'd still carry a spare magazine. The idea that I can't remediate a malfunctioning handgun with a fresh magazine if a tap/rack doesn't get it back in the fight is troubling. I also would like to be able to top off the gun as soon as hostilities appear to have ceased. A person can give me a thousand reasons why they choose that COA, but I'll never understand or agree with it. It's their choice and one I hope they never regret.

[Wondering Beard]

The bolded part is the approach I take.

Same here.

Mind you my minimum over the last few years has always been a G19, a reload and two knives.

[Rex G]

Any amount is enough, until it isn't. Personally, to walk the dog, in my relatively safe neighborhood, I usually carry the handgun, and one reload. (Perhaps two if the handgun is a revolver or single-column auto, but I am too lazy to switch much, and usually tote Glocks.) Depending upon the model of pistol, that is usually 15 to 17 rounds, with 17 in the spare magazine.

It is not unusual for me to add another 17-round magazine, and/or a second handgun, when going into nearby Houston. In parts of Houston, I will be toting the second Glock, period. This could even be in a "nice" part of town; the nearest cinema happens to be across the street from the Israeli consulate. That could be an interesting location for a "perfect storm" event.

I will add spare magazines as deemed, well, comforting. There is no set number.

FWIW, I swore an oath over thirty-one years ago that compels me to move toward trouble, rather than away from it. It remains to be seen whether retirement will prompt any changes in the load-out.

Since I wrote the above, well, "Paris happened." I have been trying to keep my mind ready for something like the Paris event for a quite long time. The Kenya mall incident did not surprise me. The Mumbai event did not surprise me. Beslan did not surprise me. I certainly did not envision the method used on September Eleventh, 2001, but the attack, itself, did not surprise me, and was almost predictable, considering the prior WTC attack's limited success.

The second Glock, and additional spare magazine, that I carried into town this evening, were nothing new; I was doing this before Paris, as indicated in my previous post. It was Paris that got hit, this time.

To be clear, I am not saying that any individual person should up-gun because of any one incident, or that anyone should move any direction other than away from trouble.