i would think that, after bread and water, guns and ammo would be next on the looting list so all these guns & ammo stores would have been emptied before rick and crew got there...
alasdair
That still doesn't make sense.
When Rick woke up in the first season, Atlanta was deserted except for a few holdouts. In an America with the 2nd Amendment, those holdouts would have known where the gun stores were and would have stockpiled them in their warehouse. As the survivors, they logically would have had tons of weapons, or esle they wouldn't have survived. But that didn't happen.
Guns should have been everywhere. Suppose in the days o the outbreak, every gun store was looted. As people ran out of ammo, they would have dropped the guns and fled, or they would have been overrun by zombies when they still had ammo and dropped the guns and ammo. Since zombies aren't interested in firearms, the weapons and ammo would have been left where they fell.
If you think Atlanta would have run out of ammo, there are untold trillions of rounds of civilian ammo floating around. For the 500 million civilian weapons in the USA, that is at least 2000 rounds per weapon. Except for automatic weapons, it would be extremely UNlikely for low capacity civilian weapons to fire off 2000 rounds each in a matter of days while leaving tens of millions of surviving zombies.
Still, not all would have been looted. Many areas were still pristine (not looted) including commercial districts after the outbreak. Even if that which was looted would still exist somewhere. Many would be stockpiled. The ammo would be there too, much of it unused. Others would be at sites of carnage where there was an obvious shoot out. In TWD, they show Rick and his crew searching house after house, and most of these houses are pristine and occupied by the original owner who is now a zombie. One out of three Americans owns a firearm, yet none of these pristine houses has guns or ammo.
Since, as you say, food is the first priority for looters, how come they keep finding food stockpiles but never guns and ammo stockpiles?
Then there is military weapons. The military owns untold billions of weapons and trillions of rounds of ammo. Why do we so rarely see any of it in the show? Military stockpiles and armories should be a constant source of new supplies, but this doesnt happen.
Now that I'm thinking about it, what's with the absense of cars and gas? Why do they walk every where? Why not drive heavy, fortified vehicles? Maybe it happened during an Oil Embargo? Which episode explained the gas shortage?
On the topic of gas shortages, gas does rot, but it takes a couple of years. Somebody who has no knowledge of chemistry would see this as the time limit for having cars. But they have Eugene. Eugene is a chemist. Rick could have led them to an oil tanker, then they could have siphoned off barrels of oil, and Eugene could have shown them how to build their own bush refinery. But they wouldn't even need Eugene. With access to a library, anybody with a freshmen's knowledge of chemistry could figure out the procedure. Illiterate Nigerian tribesmen run bush refineries that distil gas from stolen oil, so Rick's or Nagel's guys could have gotten one working easily.
There are so many problems. I can suspend disbelief and allow for a zombie plague from some weird bacteria or virus. Maybe a rogue genetics engineer brew the stuff in his basement lab and released it. But asking for too much suspension of disbelief without a good explanation weakens the story.