What gun is this, and what would YOU use?

I'd have two for me, two for the wife and two for the kid - and plenty of ammo.

Does it really matter which ones?

After a movie like this, I start carrying stuff in my truck. My wife thinks I'm crazy...she is almost right...maybe. Truth is, none of us would survive very long. I mean in a situation where you don't have a good size group to spread the "watch" with. Got to sleep some time. Hard to hunt for food and water with out a posse to watch six for you.

Still, I would enjoy the movie...wifey would HATE it.

Mark

bigfatdave has hit the nail on the head. Read book before movie. Like usual it looks like movies takes some liberties. In the book I would have tried to make a bang stick or pipe gun out of the found ammo.

I haven't read the book, but I plan on getting it today. I don't get a couple of things though.

a) where did all the guns go? Even the bad guys seem to lack any firepower.

b) why is this guy so woefully unprepared for anything?

c) seems like you could scrounge up some form of self-defense in the aftermath - even without pre-planning.

After a devastating event, the first thing most people who aren't prepared will do is start raiding anything nearby for food, fuel, and weapons. The local grocery stores and gun shops would exist for maybe a couple hours at most and then be completely stripped by the time most people thought to even start looking around for supplies.

If you think you'll find what you need after an apocolypse, you'll probably encounter types like this who've already armed up. They will chew you up and spit you out before you can find a morsel of food or a rusty saturday night special in the farmer's house. Prepare now, or suffer that kind of fate.

Just a few additional cans of spaghetti o's and soups, a case of Ramen noodles, and one extra roll of TP a month in the grocery cart will give you a nice buffer so if tshtf so you don't have to instantly hit the trail like most people will. Unless you're stocked up and live in or really close to a major city - then I'd have everything able to be loaded up quick and I would bug out asap. The sheeple will be lost without Starbucks and Taco Bell and they WILL kill you for that can of spaghetti o's on d+1 if the future looks bleak enough.

Craig

Very well said mp43sniper.
Just because you have 5000 pounds of food if your cellar, a working garden, a five head of cattle doesn't mean you are safe.
If and when a SHTF situation happens, other people are not going to be as well prepared.

Even meteor strikes don't flash too bright.

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They do if they're big enough to make a significant crater.

The 1908 Tunguska bolide, a 30-meter stony asteroid that airburst over Siberia, would have probably been nearly as bright as a nuclear detonation at the moment of peak heating. That's not only bright enough to blind anyone within direct line of sight who's looking in its direction, but bright enough to cause flash burns and start fires. Had it hit a few hours later, it would have burned and leveled most of Moscow. And that was a small one by historic standards.

Here's a handy calculator:

http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/impacteffects/

Let's say we are looking at a 1-km porous stony asteroid impacting 50 miles away, at the relatively modest atmospheric entry velocity of 55,700 feet per second (17 km/sec). The fireball at that distance would be 60 times brighter than the sun, would linger for over two minutes, would set your house ablaze, and would kill and char anyone in the open or not under cover. Four minutes after impact, the atmospheric blast wave would reach you (12.2 psi max overpressure, comparable to that near ground zero under the Hiroshima bomb, accompanied by a 344-mph wind) and wipe your house away down to the foundation.

BTW, here's an image of a house subjected to a far smaller thermal pulse and a 5-psi blast wave, from an atomic bomb test:



Asteroid impacts are reasonably rare, but the big ones will definitely get your attention. And the really big ones could do the above on a continental scale.

Got the book yesterday and read it. Pretty good read - it was compelling and written in an unusual format.

Makes a little more sense about his situation, but still some nagging issues with how he handled events.

I won't relate them all here and spoil the book or the movie for everyone though. Get the book and read it - this guy is a great author. I loved 'No country for old men' and 'All the pretty horses' - two great books that were made into very good movies.

The book was great on the idea and the story. Frankly, he could easily have gotten a ghost writer out of any fifth-grade honor role. As an avid reader and a writer (I quit after HS, thank god. ) the style just grates until I got used to it.

But the story is excellent, after the writing settles in--clear goal, dealt with by a determined but average man, and the vague catastrophe doesn't feel out of place because everyone involved also has a '***? Well, crap.' sort of look on it.

To judge by the rough timeline, it could be anything from a harsh Tunguska-style event (a previous poster is right, bad meteor strikes do flash, I was thinking in terms of a shower instead of a single large one) to a a miles-wide volcanic rupture (there are cases of small ones openin in flat fields, who's to say it couldn't be the field?) to a nuclear accident to the Russians making a first strike mid- to late cold war, or the start of WW3--we would be a big target for pre-emtive strikes, and the Russians already demonstrated Big Ivan, which could blast Rhode Island into elemental carbon and had--what, five percent?--the radioactive fallout, proportionally, than Fat Man did.

The author doesn't even specify that it's worldwide. It could just be the western hemisphere, or even just the USA. A large meteor strike directly between the western coast and the Great Lakes could easily cut off Canada (or blast it off the map) and the ocean wash would fill that crater, probably cut off the other side, and could quite possibly cause a wave or such that would wash over some of Central America and cut us off from South America.

Or a nuclear accident/attack, that Europe wouldn't have the capability or will to aid with. How likely would the UK be to aid the couple thousand left in a blasted wasteland if Russia threatened to do the same to anyone that lends aid, and already demonstrated with horrific efficiency?

Anyway, enough speculation. That revolver's about the same as I'd use, too. Easy to wield, easy to find ammunition for, as much as anything else then. If there was any actual life left, a .22 would be more useful, but since the only things were what humans protected, you only have to worry about what they bring.

The book was great on the idea and the story. Frankly, he could easily have gotten a ghost writer out of any fifth-grade honor role. As an avid reader and a writer (I quit after HS, thank god. ) the style just grates until I got used to it.

Click to expand...

I have to agree and that's part of what I really liked about the odd style he used. Anybody could have written it. It's kinda diary-like or journal-like. It took some getting used to and it's a plot device. Nothing like his other books.

One thing this book made me re-evaluate. How many .22 pistols/revolvers/rifles do I have and how many rounds do I have? I've always liked guns that took multiple calibers like .38/.357 or like my Blackhawks with multiple cylinders.

After reading this book, I'm going to do a serious evaluation of my bug-out gear and where I plan to hunker down and wait out an event.

SPOILERS ahead, skip this post until AFTER reading the book!

The exact nature of the event doesn't matter.
If you haven't read the book, skip the remainder of this post, as there are some SPOILERS ahead:

Cormac McCarthy didn't write The Road and leave the disaster a mystery to be solved by the reader, the book was written from an ignorant point of view on purpose.
The daily struggle was the point, not some political or social message ... leaving the cause as a blank and writing in the journal/snapshot style allowed McCarthy to write about what he wanted to write about - the struggle through a hostile environment, and the effects on the father/son relationship.
Pondering the mystery is pointless, I imagine McCarthy himself doesn't know the answer, and the trailer for the upcoming movie reflects poorly on the adaptation, at least in my opinion. That being said, I'll likely see it in the opening week in the theater.
As to how the ammunition supply is dried up, the scene shown in the trailer is years after the disaster/event - I imagine any ammunition is scarce, and home-made black powder may be the state-of-the-art in the remaining patches of civilization.
If you finish the book and are inspired to stock up on ammunition and shopping carts, have fun ... I am inspired to own a non semi-auto (for reasons other than aesthetics) for the first time, and had a good think about my chances gimping my way across the map (I'm screwed!).