Best survivalist gun?

There are a lot of experienced people on this forum with a wide variety of opinions on this question. I guess it comes down to your environment and whether you expect to be engaging in combat or just doing a little quiet hunting.
For my purposes a suppressed bolt action .22lr is going to be adequate.

 

That sort of thing would no doubt be true in Wales Lonewolf but where I live the sound of gunfire is pretty common. People go out in their yards here and shoot. Even at night you hear gunfire because it is legal to spotlight rabbits at night. If anything the sound of a gunshot if things were messed up would act more as a warning and be avoided more than anything.

Guns are tools and like hammers there are a LOT of different kinds that are each good for different things. First you need to decide what you want your gun to do and then pick the best gun for purpose. If I could only have one it would probably either be a Ruger 10-22 tricked out with a scope and folding stock or a good pump shotgun with maybe a couple of barrels. If you live in bear country it would for sure be the 12 ga. A 22 isn't a great stopper but if you shoot them a lot they will go down. The good is that you can pack a LOT of Ammo and in the hands of a marksman it will kill anything in North America. A couple of 22lr in the head will drop anything.

If you are in the middle of a city and think that you will need to fight your way out you would probably be best served with a 30 caliber AK or AR.

If you are out in the wide open west you would probably get more use out of a good scoped but with iron sights also bolt action rifle.

In a heavy forest you would be better off with a shotgun. Slugs and buckshot for bigger game and defence and then smaller shot for small game. A 12 ga is the most common but a 20 ga especially with 3" shells will get the job done and is a little lighter both the gun and the ammunition. Some of the new sabot slug loads are strong and in the right gun can reach out a long way.

For some sorts of protection you might be better off with a fairly powerful handgun. 9mm or 38 Special are the minimum. I prefer a 357 mag or 44 mag in revolvers and a 40 S&W, 45 ACP or 357 SIG in an automatic. A handgun can always be right there with you. If you are carrying a long gun you can't carry a lot of other things and if itis slung on your back it is awful slow to bring into action.

I love my 22 handguns for walks in the woods, fishing and such but in my opinion they would be mostly useless in a survival situation.

 

Agreed TexDanm, it's like going to your toolbox to select the right tool for the job. There are very few large non domestic animals in the UK, most of the deer are small leaving only red deer and wild boar needing a larger caliber rifle.
Lamping rabbits at night is also legal here...in fact it's a very popular winter pass time in the country. If they're headshot and paunched immediately I get paid £1 each by the local butcher. If they're a bit messy I'll eat the legs and saddle and put all the rest of it through a big mincer for making dog food.

 

It's me that's on a Welsh hilltop TexDanm.

 

Just some food for thought...

But yes...trapping and or snaring are preferred if possible. Efficient too if you are good at it.

Organic apple juice from the local 7 eleven. I love apple juice....don't you ????





Thanks,
Watcherchris

Not an Ishmaelite

 

In addition to the .22 LR, I have a thing for the .22 magnum. Out of a rifle, it has 9mm energies in a 40gr bullet; i.e. it explodes. It'll trash a medium sized dog outright -- if not dead, the dog will be spinning and no longer attacking you. Don't use it on small game = destroys the critter and its meat value. While it may not be a man-stopper, the injuries a .22 mag causes on a human will test your ability to suppress your gag reflex.

Alligator hunters use the .22 mag. Deer poachers use the .22 mag for head and neck shots, because it will blow a hole into the thickest deer skull, snap a deer spine, or tear apart major arteries in a neck. The report of a .22 mag is FAR less than a center-fire rifle. Now know that you MUST NOT use the .22 mag for shoulder shots on a deer -- might kill a small deer, but is more likely to wound (will go off and dies somewhere else; cruel). A .22 mag copper jacketed hollow-point will NOT dig deep. In FMJ, it will dig further, but not do enough damage.

Fifty-round boxes of .22 mag ammo are small. Four hundred rounds of .22 mag ammo will fit into a cigar box. And this ammo is way cheap compared to center fire ammunition.

I've owned revolvers, semi-auto rifles, pumps, and bolt actions in .22 mag. It's no target round, however it's plenty enough accurate for hunting and varmint-control, so scope your bolt action. Let me tell you, I'd be terrified to the core of my being were my enemy armed with a scoped bolt rifle loaded with .22 mag hollow-points. Massad Ayoob once called this cartridge a "nasty" little round -- and that out of a handgun.

https://www.americanhunter.org/articles/2014/5/2/alligator-ammo/

 

There are a whole host of .22LR rounds from around 800f/s up to 1600+f/s. I also like the .22WMR and the 177HMR but it's impossible to silence them properly. The ammunition is barely any heavier to carry than .22LR but they feel more like grown up guns. As a rimfire rounds theyre also some of the few semi-auto calibers allowed in the UK.
For hunting bunnies and small game I use a 40 gr segmented hollow point round with an initial muzzle velocity of 1050f/s made by CCI, it gives great energy transfer for such a tiny bullet. The rifle is a CZ452 ZKM (good build quality and a simple design....reliable and cheap, costing less than a quality air rifle)

 

A 22 mag is indeed a poachers best friend. I don't care for it in a pistol but in a bolt action rifle it is great for medium sized game. My only issue with it is that the ammo is expensive when compared to 22 LR and with some of the hyper velocity loads now the advantage at short distances isn't all that great. With either if you are shooting deer you need to carefully place your shot. I always was told to aim for the eye shine. My Uncle killed a LOT of deer with a 22 mag. All were shot at night in the eyes. He killed 27 in a month one time. They didn't go to waste though. He skinned them and the game warden would take them to an orphanage. He was legal because he was trying to thin the population that was wiping out his crops on a farm.

I have researched and now am better informed about wales, Devon and Great Britain in general. I was looking at it all as being like the Scottish Moors and was amazed at how pretty and rugged both Devon and Wales are in places. When I thought of Great Britain I just didn't think of mountains and valleys.

I love that we are from all over. I have learned so much about other places from people here. LOL, I thought that Keith was in America when he said he lived in New England. As I get to know people better I like to go and look at the places that they mention. I understand on a purely intellectual sense that places have a lot of different terrains and landforms but like others I visualize a country based on what they shot mostly on TV. I have had a lot of people that were amazed that I was raised in Texas in a swamp. They think of Texas as tumbleweeds and arid plains. When most people think of oil fields they visualize a fairly barren landscape with oil well all over the place. The fact is that where I come from the oil wells are in the forest and you can't see but one at a time. My highschool had 4 well on campus and they drilled oil wells in the middle of subdivisions in the city of 120,00 where I grew up.

On the other side of the state it really is arid and desertish. Basically West Texas is the sea floor of an ancient inland sea and looks like it. The Guadalupe Mountains are beautiful. They however are not mountains. They are fossil coral reefs that were on the bottom of that sea. The middle is rolling fertil hills with lots of farms and ranches. The South is all ranches some the size of other states.

I see now that Britain is much the same with a lot to see that I had never known about. All that you see on TV is London and the Scottish moors and locks.