Excalibur crossbows

[CharlesHarris]

(20 December 2018, 18:47)Mortblanc Wrote: ....Over here we had a world event depression during the 1930s the Great Depression...farm animals were your wealth and you did not eat them, you milked them or sold them for beef to raise the little cash they would bring (you still had to have cash to pay your taxes, power, clothes, ect.). That made foraging for wild game very important to the protein supply.

Out of that situation my two grand fathers walked in possession of two firearms each. They lived 1000 miles separated and did not know each other.

Each of them owned a 12 bore repeating shotgun.

Both of them owned a .38 caliber pistol.

Those two firearms were the necessities of survival of SHTF...

...They had fed and protected their families with those two firearms for 15 years of SHTF, and continued to do so until their deaths many years latter. When they died they still owned the same firearms....

The situation was much the same for my grandparents and great-grandparents in rural West Virginia from 1929-1945.

Black powder muzzleloading rifles, shotguns and cap & ball revolvers were very much in common use among the rural poor who couldn't afford modern arms or cartridges. The first revolver I learned to use as a boy was an original 1851 Navy Colt which had been carried by an ancestor during the Civil Way. The family also still used an 1853 Tower .577 rifle-musket which had Confederate heritage and had been run through the Union blockade.

After WW1 surplus Krags and Trapdoor Springfields became common, and some had .45 pistols or revolvers, or war prophy captures which came home in the seabag.
Ownership of Colt and S&W revolvers or a Winchester rifle or shotgun firmly identified you as successful and middle class.