For about forty years I've always gotten by with 2 per pistol but I guess I'm not serious.
me too..
but everybody is serious, it's pretty
silly to say anybody who shoots 'em instead of just owning 'em ain't serious
(yeah, you really do have to kill an awful lot of BGs to wear out a decent quality mag, if that is what you do.. but rare few civilians here, if any, are drug dealing gangbangers, and very few of those kind will last long enough to wear out even one mag)
one mag or 30 mags per gun, filling 'em one at a time, or all 30 at once, is pretty serious enough $$$ these days, even if you reload; if you bust the caps on 'em all often enough to not wonder if spring tension really do or don't matter, no reason not to do that, I would
some folks here shoot
competition, and if I did, I would own at least a dozen for each gun, too, (whatever you put to good use
is what you need), and the real competitors in this thread keep a real close eye on how many rounds they trust thru any one mag
but I don't, so I don't.. one in gun and one backup in the closet gets me by ok
not ok for all
but if you are stockpiling them in the underground backyard bomb shelter, or so lost in the fog that you really believe that everybody should be you, you might ought to dig a little deeper, sell off some mags, and buy more canned soup instead, preferably bacon flavored.. (unopened canned soup does have pert-near the same half life of unused ammo)
but that's really not how I read
this thread
most everybody on this one actually uses what they own
but this do be the "handgun autoloaders sub-forum", not other
PS
then again, some here may not yet know that (absent "wildcatting", which autoloader only folks cannot "really" do in a really serious way), it takes a pretty amazing round count to wear out the
cylinder of a quality
revolver 
but whatever you use your hard earned dollars for, use it whilst you can
no matter what the half-life might be, it ain't near long enough
