Weapons: Defending your Home, Food & Family with Light Carbine or Rifle

As promised in my last blog post on defending your home, food and family, here's #2 of my suggestions for your must-have weapons.

A light carbine or rifle

SKS

There are hundreds of firearms in this category and many of them are excellent. So I will simply tell you what I like and you can make up your own mind.

The SKS. If money is hard to come by and for a lot of us it is then you can't beat the SKS. It's not the best rifle in the world but you can get one for around $100 bucks. That's an incredible price for a good solid rifle. And it has the added benefit of the availability of cheap ammo. You can get crates of the stuff for a few hundred bucks.

VZ58

The VZ58. I am a big fan of the VZ58. It's a great rifle and you can get one at a great price. There are a few different models and I won't go into that here but you should be able to pick up one for $500 to $800. It's a much better rifle than the SKS but as it fires the same ammo so you can afford lots of it. 

One other thing to point out about the VZ and the SKS is how tough they are. They are old school weapons made from steel and wood. They can take a lot of abuse and keep on going.

Beretta CX4 Storm

Beretta CX4 Storm. 

Now this little gun is totally different from the SKS and VZ. It's a modern design made with a lot of plastic parts and it fires pistol ammo. But I really like mine. It's light and handy with no recoil to speak of and it would be a fantastic weapon for defending your apartment or suburban house. The pistol caliber ammo is also suitable for hunting small game like rabbits and you could drop a dear or other large animal if you had to. Not that I would recommend it for large animals. 

One drawback is that it is an expensive little gun. At around $1000 to $1200 it's not something everyone can afford. But it's a great little gun.  Another nice feature worth mentioning is that if you are a fan of Beretta pistols you can get one that takes the same mags as the Storm. That can be really handy.

AR 15

The AR 15 family of firearms. A person could write an entire book on the AR 15.  All I will say is that it is an excellent firearm. It has lower recoil and is more accurate than the SKS and VZ58. On the down side it's a little more prone to breaking and it's requires a bit more maintenance. The ammunition is more expensive but it's available just about everywhere. It is also more expensive at around $1000 to $1200.

As I said before there are lots of great carbines and rifles. The AK 47 family. The FN FAL family. The Ruger Mini 14. The M14 family of rifles. The list goes on forever. I am actually a big fan of my M1 carbine and would have listed it but for the fact that the .30 carbine ammo is getting a little harder to find.

Next up will be #3 - the handgun