Shewts gewd, raht?

In SHTF, you won't be able to replace barrels on your rifles very easily, because folks will be struggling just to find their next meal.

Many of the "old" cartridges that have fallen out of favor in the modern shooting world have done so because marketing is more powerful than physics.

For folks who aren't "gun people", bullets fly in an arc when you shoot them. The easier it is for a bullet to hit your target without needing to account for how wind will move the bullet left or right, or accounting for drop due to distance, the "better" a cartridge is determined to be, for largely the same reasons that people think buying a Ferrari means they're a better driver.

Now, this isn't done with just marketing magic, but through tuning the velocity of the bullet and by choosing bullets with different dimensions. This is something you can already do if you hand load ammunition, but what currently drives the gun market is not capability, but ease.

You can build a car that has a better 0-60 or skidpad rating that a Ferrari for a fraction of the cost, but if someone can just buy something off-the-shelf and "shoot better" than someone else, it won't matter if they could have done the same thing less expensively. Status, not function.

So, the first part of the "not-magic" is that when shooting a lighter bullet, the felt recoil will also be smaller, because the physics of accelerating the bullet to a certain speed require less force. F=MA, so at the same acceleration, you'll need less force if you have less mass. This is a big part of how modern rounds of a smaller caliber "reduce recoil", and do so off-the-shelf, because they're shooting a lighter bullet.

The thing is, though, that shooting a lighter bullet to the same velocity requires more powder charge, due to how inertia works. A lighter bullet is going to start moving down the barrel faster than a heavier one because of inertia. Heavier bullets will resist accelerating longer than a lighter bullet, so in order to keep generating pressure behind the lighter bullet, more powder has to be burned so that the drop in pressure as the bullet travels down the barrel doesn't occur fast enough to prevent the bullet from reaching the desired speed.

Think of it like how, the better you can keep your lips pressed together, the more pressure you can hold in your mouth.

Now, given F=MA above, it's not only easier to accelerate the bullet when it's lighter, but if you've got the same barrel length and force being applied, the final velocity of the bullet will be higher as well. Higher velocities make a "flatter" bullet arc, because the faster a bullet is the less time gravity has to work on the bullet before it finds its target.

You can also do things like use a smaller diameter bullet, because the smaller the diameter, the less that wind resistance will come into play.

The modern "hot rounds" all thus tend to be smaller in diameter than "old" rounds, lighter weight bullets than "old" rounds, and are universally praised in marketing as being "better".

Except that, you remember how you need more powder for these lighter rounds?

Each time you fire a gun, you do a very small, but still real, amount of damage to the barrel and chamber. Most firearms are capable of making many thousands of shots before that damage becomes a problem.

These new rounds shorten that lifespan considerably before a replacement barrel is required.

If you live in the 1st world, and shoot for fun, then this isn't really an issue. Just go online, order a replacement barrel, and then install it. Most new firearms are also designed to be easily serviced by the user, so you often don't even need a gunsmith or gunsmithing skills.

If SHTF though, you no longer live in the 1st world.

Instead of a controlled shooting environment like a range, you're most likely going to be dealing with suburban distances which are frequently much shorter. It won't matter if you could reliably hit a stationary gong at a thousand meters if the hostile you need to kill is moving quickly and at only 50 meters away.

Further, to be very accurate you must also deal with issues in poor reliability, because accuracy requires consistency down to very small minutia, every component needs to be doing the same exact thing the same exact way every time you shoot. Variation means things don't work exactly the way they're expected, and you won't know by how much until after you've already pulled the trigger.

Like putting the wrong gas in your Ferrari. Might still run, or it might not at all.

In evaluating your firearm choice in preparing for SHTF, you thus cannot rely on what is currently popular. The AR-15 platform is fine for its intended purpose, but as I've written before, people have deceived themselves as to what that intended purpose is, and a lot of folks think their tacticool AR-15 will give them any sort of edge in the post-apocalyptic wasteland.

The reality is that they've got a weapon which wasn't designed based on raw lethality, on efficiency of materials across the entire lifespan of the weapon, but on how well the weapon would sell in a particular market.

1st world military and SHTF are not the same market.

Prepare based on what you will encounter, not on what you currently experience.

There's a reason certain cartridges and firearm layouts were popular in the past, when technology and materials science weren't what they are today. We'll be entering such a "dark era" again, when we can't rely on modernity to be our savior, and if we can thus learn from the past, why things did or didn't work and why, then we'll actually be ready to deal with what is to come.

Freedom of _____

If you don't own a gun, then you don't support the 2nd amendment.

Complain all you like, but freedoms that you do not participate in already, that you do not make sacrifices to partake in, will not magically become important enough to defend on someone else's behalf, let alone your own, until it is "too late".

The reason that guns are taken away from some people is because we let people run around in society that we should not, and we want to pat ourselves on the back for the stupidity of tempting fate and appearing to get away with it.

Felons, mentally handicapped, severe PTSD?

Guns aren't the problem, they're just the medium by which the disease manifests symptoms. We take away the guns because morons think that removing opportunity is the same as eliminating the actual problem. We pretend that treating symptoms is identical to curing the ailment, and we keep doing that till the patient dies, and then the rationalization hamster starts spinning while we try to find any reason other than the obvious to explain what happened.

Take away a gun from someone who desires to commit violent criminal acts, and you've still got someone who desires to commit violent criminal acts.

Take away a gun from someone who cannot comprehend the consequences of their choices, and you've still got someone who cannot comprehend the consequences of their choices.

Take away a gun from a solider who never came home from the war, and you've still got a soldier who never came home from the war.

The actual problem hasn't actually been resolved, dealt with, and what's tragic is that there were decent answers to this in the past. We had solutions in place, and it's rather dishonest for people to claim that any tragedies have ever really been avoided when in reality they've simply been saved up.

Every "tragedy" we think we avoided because of the choices we had made has just added to the pile of consequences which will come all at once later.

Just because overdosing can kill you faster than gluttony, does not make the eventual death from overeating, and all the medical costs associated with keeping gluttons alive despite their poor life choices, any less tragic or unavoidable.

Somehow we think that, if we slow the onset of consequences down, that if we can delay the inevitable just a bit longer, then maybe it isn't really so inevitable. The reality is that we're just saving up all the consequences to come at once, so instead of being able to grow, to cope, to learn how to address each individual tragedy individually over time, we instead are utterly crushed as all the tragedies that we were going to experience hit all at once.

This kind of thinking is what fuels hatred of older generations in the younger, because the younger will be required to clean up the mess created by those who are dead or dying and can't do anything to change the state of things.

It's the same thing with divorce and abortion. People want to treat symptoms instead of the real sickness, without realizing that the side effects are turning out to be worse than the disease. Folks believe they have been able to offload the consequences of their sins to someone else, they "got away with it".

The sins of the father do not occur in a vacuum.

All that said, the "issue" with guns exists two levels: the physical or the philosophical.

Legislation, cultural values, and the Overton window are how things are dealt with on the philosophical level. In the realm of ideas.

Law enforcement and civil war are how things are dealt with on the physical level. In the realm of actions.

Failing to address problems in the philosophical realm mandates that they be addressed in the physical. If we do not change the laws to align with reality, with the truth about human nature, then the physical circumstances will come about where the folly of not making such correction will be made undeniably clear.

Isolationism, the "you just believe what you want and I'll believe what I want and we'll leave each other alone" is how this dynamic got so screwed up, because the people who understood the problem wanted everyone to agree to disagree, while everyone else gossiped and talked behind their back and simply refused to play along. This made the isolationists put up even bigger defenses, thinking they were "fine on their own", except that their enemies were busy building alliances and gathering power. Folks thought they could just ignore problems and they'd go away, that it was a waste of time and effort to try and do any sort of quality control on society and who could participate in it, to argue for truth and reality in the face of emotionally satisfying delusions.

If you don't own a gun and you make excuses because of where you live, or the poor choices of other people, or who lives in your household, if you are good at making excuses for yourself, then you are already primed to surrender for whatever reasonable sounding excuse a government or foreign power offers. There won't be a "line" to cross because you've never practiced acting when a line is crossed, you've practiced coping with people crossing lines and you doing nothing about it, and what we practice determines how we'll perform under pressure, when we don't have time to think things out.

Stop making excuses, stop practicing surrender, and learn how to fight in both the physical and philosophical realm, and then start by making moves in the philosophical. We can always afford to be aggressive with ideas, with votes, with the Overton Window, and the more aggressive we are there, the more success we see in that "front", the less likely that anything will ever spill over into the physical.

We can avert a bigger conflict later by being smarter, more clever and cunning, more decisive and clear as to what we're doing any why. We can avoid a civil war if folks would fight and win in the intellectual one.