I mean...I guess arrows are reusable and much more easily created by hand than bullets? I guess?
Even Kentucky long rifles which were very effective against infantry were pretty much worthless against mounted natives who could fire dozens of arrows a minute.
This was the case up until about the 1850s.
"It is common to deride early modern firearms as slow to load, inaccurate and undependable in wet weather. Indians had a more favourable opinion of these weapons, particularly of the flintlock muskets that became available at the beginning of the 1630s. ...
Flintlocks were still cumbersome. They required about 25 seconds to load, and were accurate only to about 100 yards. Yet Indians did not intend to use the weapon in open-field, pitched battles. Rather, they wanted flintlocks to fire on human or animal targets from ambush at close range. After firing, they would rush in with hand weapons. The manner in which Native peoples used guns is critical to understanding their demand for them."
Not necessarily. Early guns were inefficient; one shot every minute is nothing compared to what a good bowman can do and you couldn't place an accurate shot outside of a few yards.
The reason an army switches to guns is because they require very little strength (and consequentially, training time) to use. In fact, for a musket, the limiting factor would be the user's height (they're 5 feet tall; being much shorter than that would make reloading much more difficult).
For American Indians, it would make sense to switch as their stocks of trained bowmen were depleted. Not before then.
You still need a significant amount of strength and time to ready a crossbow. Anyone can fire it, but not everyone can load it. Also the bolt is relatively slow (the shot travels in an arc that's more pronounced the slower the projectile), requiring you to be close to what you want to hit.
And if you're hunting game, even firing a crossbow will likely spook your target.
Or you could buy some 100-year-old military rifle and become proficient with it. Nearly all of them fire rounds that can be (and frequently are) successfully used for taking all North American game.
And a bolt-action surplus rifle (or any other repeater) is still faster than any bow, and you can carry more rounds than you can arrows in a quiver for the same weight, and bullets don't snap in half or depend on delicate pieces on the shaft to fly straight.
Given that there are probably a thousand cartridges for every man, woman, and child in the US today, it would take at least a decade to burn through the available supply, particularly if people were not profligate with their expenditure (which I imagine would be the case in a post-apocalyptic world).
If you include .22, I probably have 25,000 rounds in my closet in my apartment. That's only about a year's worth of ammo for practice at most.
People who shoot regularly go through seemingly ridiculous quantities of ammunition. It takes hundreds of thousands of rounds to become a skilled marksman.
I have a replica Remington Model 1858 black power revolver. It shoots lead balls which are easy to make, same with its percussion caps. The kicker is, once loaded, its tactically the same as any modern single action 6 shooter.
If things really got bad, I have a heard time imaging my .55 cal muzzle loading flint lock would be out of commission either. I'd save the cross bow for stealth actions and maybe hunting smaller game, for which it would rock.
There is also the fact it would take years to burn up all the ammo floating around out there, so this would be gradual.
Really, they should never had allowed college students to run around a refurb'ed castle without a supervisor.
I can't see weapon tech falling much below the 1850s.
The USA could be viewed as an outlier, given the amount of gun-ownership: 22% of the population (and as some people own many guns, the total number of guns is more than 1 gun per person). By comparison, less than 1% of the UK population own a gun.
So in some countries, there may be guns around for the taking, but in other countries, those guns will be in the hands of very few people.
I'd imagine a period of a year or so where more primitive weaponry took precedence, during which we would have to relearn how to make tools, weapons and ammo without the benefit of technically advanced manufacturing.
a brisk trade in AK-47's would develop
How long would it take for them to become commonplace in western countries/Europe?
Hypothetically imagining a trade in AK-47s between Turkey and the UK (around 3,000 km), how quickly could those guns (and ammo) be moved, in enough numbers to be significant? Would the traders be threatened along the way?
Would that trade be on foot (maybe 20-25 km per day), or would they still have the advantage of car/truck/air transport? Would the trade give enough value to account for the traders' risk?
I think that an immediate, catastrophic societal breakdown would give a year or two of extreme regression, during which archery might be useful.
Given a couple of years for the reappearance of traditional techniques (such as hand-crafted blacksmith work) or the redistribution of AKs, things to change.
All that said, it's all guesswork…for all I know, one week without electricity and we could all be Mad-Maxing.
On the one hand, our guesses are based on little except media dystopia fiction like Mad Max and Waterworld, on the other hand, our exposure to those genres could influence our actions to bring about those very outcomes.
So, er, I'm just going to fill up some waterbottles and go stock up on cans of corned beef and archery kit. Although they're definitely not stored at my home, no sirree.