"to save ammunition... no warning shots will be fired"

Just a quick thought on this subject of warning shots or any other kind of bullet wasting... in a SHTF scenario of any kind you can gaurantee that trade will be done in hard goods and silver. You can also gaurantee that within weeks to months, a bullet will be almost worth its weight in silver so if you are willing to toss away a single bullet that could in theory buy you a days worth of food or more... be my guest of course. Think about this though. Now, while bullets have no value is the time to rattle them off at a target. Come time though... preservation of every round is going to save your life in more ways than just shooting them out the barrel. 🙂

I know ammo will be worth a lot, but some of the preppers i've seen on youtube have soooo much stashed,and it could be traded for food, but about the time that i'm running out of food and interested in trade-they'll be out of food too. Think I'd rather have more food and some ammo. I really don't know how much to get in-ammo that is-any suggestions?

One thing to remember is that what you practice is what you will do under stress. Some people fire 2 shots and then change magazines so that they can become really quick at mag changes. Under stress there have been people who fire 2 shots and then drop their mag for a change without firing off the other 8 shots in their mags (pistol calibers of course) and then get caught a little off balance. Just like food storage, store what you eat and eat what you store...

AS for ammo storage, maybe a better solution is to store your loading components and save your brass always. Unless you are using 9 mm which is quite cheap to buy, you can save a lot of money on reloading. When you get into rifle ammo it is really expensive to buy pre-built ammo.

There is probably no magic number as no one really knows what the 'event' might be; we can only guess at more likely events such as economic collapse that drags down our governments or pandemic flu, etc. The only scenarios in which you will need to worry about large, long-term storage of ammo is in these types of events that end society. Most other disasters we are talking about being self-reliant for a few days or a few months (Slave Lake fire).

That being said, I've been out hunting 2 weekends so far this year and have yet to fire a round. The person with me the first weekend fired once and then we had to track it for an hour in heavy bush. At the end of that, someone with us actually fired 4 rounds at 30' and missed because of adrenalin and trying to do a head shot (so as to do less damage to the meat). (The doe was eventually harvested thankfully.)

The second weekend, there was only one shot fired as the doe stood broadside and waited patiently to commit suicide. Clean instant kill.

So, 2 deer and 6 bullets... how often do you practice and how well do you handle stress? How many times a year will you be dependant on your skills to provide meat? Depends on what animals are near your BOL.

This isn't scientific but it gives you an idea that you need to assess what you'll be doing with the ammo and that you need to assess your skills. Just some thoughts...