He's tired of answering the same questions repeatedly. He's said as much in another thread.
I'll bite. Let's start with bullets. I think I'm paying you what I can afford for bullets, which I need. You think I'm stiffing you. Okay, I buy from someone else.
Perhaps we agree that you continue to manufacture on the hopes I'll buy, but not deliver until payment is finalized.
If we're in an actual state of conflict, it'd be in your best interest to give me the lowest possible price that still lets you run the shop tomorrow. Even if your neighbor refuses to pay, it's still in YOUR best interest to cover him too, just as in the case with fire protection, for the benefit it provides you. The moment this ceases to be true, you vacate, tell your customers you've moved, and he can cover fire protection, private security, and territorial defense all on his own.
You might RESENT him not paying his fair share, but until it costs you more to cover more of it yourself than it does to back off on your own preparations, you do so anyway.
If the community militia treasurer won't pay you enough to stay in business, you go talk to a competing militia about selling to them instead. They are convinced they can do the same job with less money overall, and still afford to buy better gear.
If I can't convince you that I CAN'T AFFORD to pay you more for your ammo, I ask a competing manufacturer to sell me some for less, or perhaps I learn new ways to do with less. Less spray-n-pray, more dry-firing, perhaps MORE practice so every shot in the field counts.
Of course, if you cut off your supply at the bargain basement price, the new bullet factory I just helped my brother-in-law fund will get the contract, and you won't be selling any more bullets to us, ever, at any price. If the community thinks your prices were too steep, you might not be selling any to anyone else either.
Now, let's look at that SAM site. I'm convinced your site gives the best possible coverage against incoming attacks. Well, it would, you chose a very nice piece of oceanfront property that, due to geography manages to stay dry, (cliffside overlooking the ocean.)
Now, for whatever reason, you've place a, in my opinion, rather high value on that piece of property, but then again, the SAM site wouldn't be protecting you, would it? Once I bought you out, you'd be without property and possibly moving on.
Well, I prefer your spot, but your neighbor does have a suitable site, and if he won't sell, your other neighbor plus a small patch just north collectively provide good coverage. After that, I tell everyone their city is in danger, I'm throwing up my hands and leaving. The property values of that place just went down because it can't be reasonably defended. You now have a bunch of people who won't talk to you. Fewer than you did, because quite a few decided they'd rather live down the coast a ways where there is good SAM coverage.
As to who can best defend a nation. I like being defended by a A. large. B. well organized, C. modern military, that also happens to be D. all volunteer. It frees me up from having to carry a rifle.
As to large. Every able bodied man?
As to well organized. Corporations are well organized, or at least as well organized as any government agency.
As to modern. The army regularly "borrows" from civilian tech and methodologies when they need to cover a new angle. The only reason, I believe, the same isn't true of weapons is the government hasn't let us actually "Play with" weapons outside their careful control for a rather long time. Guns should be potentially as complex as modern cars. As it is, we get machining improvements and materials improvements. Both which are shared with non-weapons.
In absence of government SUPPRESSION of civilian weapons research, the average shooters personal arsenal would be as sophisticated, or more so, than a professional infantry soldiers'.
The points _I_ see are interoperability of equipment. My neighbor uses 12ga, and I prefer 20ga. My sidearm is 9mm, but my coworker swears by .40ca.
If any of us runs out of ammo, we aren't borrowing from the other.
The SOLUTION would be as simple. Join a militia, and to be a member in good standing you'd have to have a gun in a certain caliber, possibly even of a certain manufacture. The militia voted on this, (probably voted in favor of the elected, or acclaim appointed, armorers' recommendation rather than hashing it out themselves,) about the same time they voted on emergency chain of command. Hey. It's a free country. You can always quit if you don't like the decisions the captain makes in the field. Unless there's widespread agreement of his ineptitude, though, you can write off visiting any bar, or restaurant, or store, in town from here on out. They think you decided to quit because it was getting tough.
And before you think THIS is unlikely. I have been to two auctions where a property owner made the prospective buyers mad.
One the auctioneer caught the consignee bidding on his own tractor, invalidated the current bid and started over. Then the bidding started much lower than it had been, at what the consignee stated as the minimum he could accept, and NO ONE bought that late model John Deere.
(The lowest it started at the second time was a fraction of what other, older, tractors sold for that same day. People just weren't willing to buy that tractor after the owner pulled what he did.)
Individuals will hurt their own pocketbooks in order to teach someone else a lesson in fair play. No one has to coerce them.