The_Dunedan

Whatever we like. Let me see if I can dig up some pictures of The Wedding Reception, which would probably have made some of Slims' indiginous co-workers and antagonists feel right at home, since we shot our way through about 8,000 rounds of rifle ammo and 30lbs of Tannerite, plus two water tanks, three washing-machines, two stoves, five dryers, three dishwashers and one University-level mathematics textbook. Everybody got five rounds of ammo per turn on the firing line, and in the few seconds that occupied the noise was stupendous, continuous rapid rifle fire interspersed with cracking, thudding, lung-pounding explosions. Nothing like high explosives to really get a party moving along.

Very little. It's a short list, really, but the things that're -on- that list? They're worth being scared of.
As a somewhat benign-sounding case-in-point, let me present the following: rabid animals. In my part of the country, rabies is epidemic among skunks, possums, and raccoons. It's also present, though somewhat rarer, in coyotes, foxes, bobcats, and of course household pets. In one ten-day period in December, we killed no less than three rabid skunks: One shrugged off four hits to the chest and abdomen from a .40-calibre pistol before succumbing to a headshot, the other took seven rounds. In a separate incident, the third animal took six hits from CCI high-velocity .22 Magnums and four rounds of .40-calibre pistol fire before dying. I was the shooter in this last incident, and that animal died charging at me. My last round was meant to be a headshot, but missed when the skunk turned sideways and the bullet took it through the neck. Rabid animals, even small ones, can absorb an horrendous amount of damage and keep coming, because their nervous systems are totally haywire and they don't respond to pain as they normally would. Think about that: a skunk, an animal the size of a housecat, took four, five, or six rounds of a round designed to stop grown men NOW (Winchester Ranger 155gr. JHP). What would it take to kill a rabid dog? A handgun? I wouldn't take my .40 to that gunfight, that's for sure, and I'd feel undergunned with my late, lamented Model 29 .44Mag. A .460 would be about right, but I'd still want more for a rabid Boxer or God forbid a Catahoula. Those are the moments when a high-capacity centerfire rifle is a blessing. That MSAR up there would do the job nicely, though an FAL or M1A would be even better. A Saiga 12ga with a 10-round magazine full of 3" 000 buckshot would be just about ideal. Note: this load delivers projectiles-per-minute counts rivaling those of multibarrel cannon. There is -no- such thing as overkill with a rabid animal. -LOTS- of kinetic energy, RIGHTNOW, is the only way to deal with a situation like that, and it's an entirely common situation in which to find oneself in my neck of the middle of nowhere.

Now let's talk about what happens if you aren't able to stop that rabid skunk or dog, either because you're disarmed or underarmed. If you don't get treatment within 18hrs, you are going to die. Period. Very slowly, and in agonizing, irretrievable pain. It's possible that the insanity of terminal human Rabies allows the conscious mind to detach itself from the physical agony of the body, but since only one person in all of recorded history has ever survived untreated terminal Rabies, and this with serious brain damage, we can't know.

2400ppm sounds about right to me.

Quite correct. Responsible gun ownership is about safety, doing one's research, covering one's bases, and obeying Col. Cooper's Four Rules. The art of accumulating dozens of weapons is properly called, depending upon context; collecting, caching, casual buying or horse-trading. Collectors are, well, collecting things. Some guys collect machine-guns, we had a fellow on these boards for awhile who was the proud owner of something close to $500,000.00 worth of legal, registered machine-guns. Some folks collect certain rifles, or pistols by a certain maker, or rifles from a particular era. Americans in particular are fond of collecting not only their own military service rifles, but the service rifles of their ancestral homelands. Hence, one very gemutlich old German customer of ours owns every German service rifle from the Napoleonic Wars onwards, and also an example of every US service rifle since roughly the same period. Cachers are folks who own large quantities of weapons for sheer utility's sake: a .22 for small-game hunting, a shotgun or two, perhaps two or three .223- or .30-calibre rifles, which are frequently dual-purpose: deer-hunting with an SKS, for example. Lots of folks who tend to survivalism or at least self-sufficiency fall into this category. Casual buyers just pick up anything that strikes their eye or feels good in the hand. Frequently they'll be back to resell the gun in 6 months, or trade it in on the newest cool thing. We've had lots of folks bring back 2.5"-chambered Taurus "Judge" pistols to trade in on the 3"-chambered model, for example. Horse-traders are folks who enjoy trading guns around, bartering for favors or a boat or some transmission work. They'll frequently come in to browse for wampum guns, check out the latest edition of Kelly's Blue Book of Gun Values to see if they got a good deal on the boat or not, or enquire about the ancestry of some ancient thing they got in trade for their old, leaky bass-boat and can't identify.