Savage - Don't get me wrong. I wasn't trying to really rain on your thread here. I was day dreaming and studying about this survival stuff back when nuclear holocost was almost a daily dread, i.e. 40 years ago. My rifle then was the great all-around 30/06. I even developed a load for it that I could hunt quail with......1 1/2 grs of bullseye under a 150 gr cast bullet. Shot like a .22 LR.
But anyway as I really studied all this my thinking seriously evolved. Ultimately I came to realize the only rifle that would work in a serious long term situation was the .22 for the reasons I've listed.
As for repelling or protecting the family from other people, the lowly .22 is quite effective at that. The Russians used it very effectively as a sniping rifle against Germans in WW-2 and heaven only knows how many people a 22 has killed. But of course you don't have to kill with it. All we really want is to convince someone to leave us the hell alone and the .22 can get that message across quite well.
Defending against cougars and black bears? How often do these attack people? Very rarely...and if I were in a survival situation around them, I think I would likely shoot everyone of them I encountered regardless what they were doing........just to convince them to stay the hell away from me and people in general. The big reason for the rare cougar attack is they've lost their fear of man...but this is something that can be very quickly RE-TAUGHT...and again, I think the lowly 22 can teach the lesson.
The more one thinks about real survival, the more you realize it's the mundane little things that never cross our minds that would kill us. We can go out into the woods armed to the teeth but what if you forgot the can opener, or matches, or a needle to dig that big thorn out of your foot? Water purification tablets? Toilet paper? Aspirin or your allergy medicine?
I used to do a lot of backpacking and was always very careful to pack my .357 Magnum and enough ammo to start a small war. Invariably I would come home with the thing unfired. The gun and the ammo was just like 5 lbs of scrap metal in my pack. On the other hand, life could sure become hell if I forgot some of the "trivial stuff" that I was going to need every day. I learned about the needle for splinters the hard way.
Anyway, I love to daydream about guns as much as the next guy. But when you say "survival," I think of a whole different scenario. I'll go with the guy who is well equipped...not the guy who is well armed. And I figure in about a week of real survival life, the well armed guy will be willing to trade me a rifle for some salt.
