Rifles, part 3.

I mentioned rifle attachments earlier, but never really got into them.  All you really need is a good scope, but goodies like the bayonet are always welcome.  But there are a few options that you really should consider.
  I've got mixed feelings about suppressors.  While they do reduce the sound your gun makes, they cost a lot and are difficult to buy.  You need money, a clean record, and sometimes a few connections just to get a license for one.  Then you need to get a specially threaded barrel to use it, and then you need the suppressor itself. and once a suppressor is worn out, you have to go through the whole system again to get it.  Don't misunderstand me: suppressors are useful.  I want one.  They're just a pain to get and replace, leaving out the whole "suppressors don't work like the ones in the movies" thing.  If you can get one, go ahead, but test out how quiet your gun actually becomes when you use your "silenced" weapon.
  If you're in an urban environment, you'll want to exchange the scope for some sort of reflex sight.  The red dot ones are probably the most famous, but there are other types out there. It wouldn't be a bad idea to pick one up.  They're fairly cheap, as far as attachments go, and they aren't regulated like suppressors.
  Laser sights and tactical lights are good nighttime equipment, and the combination laser/light models are, as they say, "twice as nice," but this stuff isn't actually critical.  Still, take what edges you can get.

Rifles, part 2.

Rifle calibers are a lot like pistol calibers.  However, while pistol round casings are almost always cylindrical, rifle rounds are often tapered.  Not always, as you can see with the .22 Long Rifle (.22LR) round, but usually.

  Now that the warning is out of the way, you’re free to think about what you want to use.  The .22LR is an excellent choice, made for closer range than most rounds but extremely abundant.  The .270 Winchester, .308, and .223 Remington rounds are all good choices as well, and the .30-06 has sniper-level range and precision to make up for its weight.  All of these rounds are useful in their own way, and each is better than its fellows at something.  It’s all give and take, just like with different pistol rounds.  Test each round out and make your choice; it’s hard to go wrong with a rifle.

  Now, let's talk about feeding systems.  There are five in all, though you probably only have access to four of them, and they are as follows: bolt-action, lever-action, pump-action (yes, for a rifle), semiautomatic, and automatic.  Bolt-, lever-, and pump-action rifles are some of the sturdiest and most reliable firearms you can get.  If you operate any of their actions fully, they pretty much will cycle.  They also tend to be the most accurate, shooting accurately at distances approaching--and even exceeding--a mile.  You'll have an extremely hard time of finding a gun more accurate than a bolt-action hunting rifle.

  Semiautomatics are all-around rifles.  They snipe well enough, often as well as the revered bolt-action rifle, and can fire quickly when you need a lot of lead in a lot of bodies.  But since hunting semiautomatics often have small magazines, you'll probably find that this technique works better with carbines.  Still, hooray for options!

  Fully automatic rifles are the ones you'll have trouble getting.  The license to buy an automatic rifle is much more expensive than a normal rifle license, and also harder to get--although this is affected by where you live.  Automatic rifles are excellent weapons, useful for mowing down infected and making any would-be thief’s day very, very bad, but the kick of automatic fire is hefty and takes practice to control, and you probably won't have enough ammunition to justify using five or six bullets on one enemy.  Even if you do have a ton of ammo, it should only take you one or two shots to put a zombie down.  Why waste valuable ammunition on the kill?

Rifles, part 1.

Rifles are excellent weapons for an outbreak.  They're hefty enough to give an enemy a solid whack, but not so heavy that you can't backpack with them.  They have excellent sights, even iron sights, compared to almost any other firearm class.  There are all sorts of rifle attachments on the market, from bayonets to reflex sights, and while they are amazing at long range, rifles can still be used close to an enemy with devastating effect.
  Now, let's move on to camouflage.  If you don't know where you're going (this is bad, but sometimes unavoidable), pick something that fits in everywhere, like grey or brown.  Digital camo works better than solid colors: it makes us think that what we're looking at is background, not worth noticing, and generally the visual equivalent of "white noise."  If you do know where you're going, keep some camouflage sleeves with you just in case.
  You should also get your rifle an accessory rail onto which you can mount a scope.  Then buy a scope.  These aren't just for scoring head shots; they're for scouting an area.  Of the rails you could buy, a Picatinny rail is the best.  Most rail attachments are made to fit it, as was intended in its design.  The better your sights, the further away you can be when attacking infected and the better your chances of surviving the encounter.

Pistols.

Pistols:
Well, it depends.  Is it magazine-fed or does it have a revolving cylinder?  What will it fire?  How reliable is it?  Is its ammunition common where you are now and where you are going?  Is it accurate?  Can you handle the recoil? Some of these questions overlap a bit, but you still need to ask them, and more.
  What type of pistol are you thinking of?  Each has interesting advantages over the other: revolvers are reliable, have few moving parts, are easy to fix (compared to pistols), can chamber large rounds easily, and have a completely customizable grip, while pistols have high capacity, are almost as reliable as revolvers (some pistols more so than others), and are now used by more people.  Revolvers can be reloaded by hand much more easily than pistols, but a pistol can simply change magazines if one is available pre-filled.  If you want my opinion, I'm inclined to say that a pistol would be a better idea.  Pistols have a clear lead in time spent reloading versus ammunition replenished, so long as you have spare magazines.  They are also, as I said, becoming as reliable as revolvers.  And the spare parts issue isn't really that dire; if you take care of your pistol, you will be able to use it many thousands of times--many more than you'd expect to fire it in a zombie outbreak--without incident.  Still, that's just my preference.  Try both types and decide which you like more.  Now, on to cartridges!
  There are two generally accepted ways to measure the size of a cartridge: caliber, which measures by hundredths of an inch, and metric measurement, which uses millimeters.  Between the two, metric is more informative.  Every metric round tells you its width and length, in that order, separated by an x.  For example, a 9x19mm cartridge has a diameter of 9 millimeters and a length of 19 millimeters.  This helps you figure out which cartridges you can fire and which ones you can't. Even then, though, you have to be careful: most cartridges have nonstandard "loads," with either more or less powder.  For example, an overpressure cartridge--a cartridge filled with extra propellant--can damage a gun not designed to fire it because of the additional pressure in the barrel (hence its name), while a standard cartridge may not fully push back the slide of a gun designed for overpressure loads.  Fortunately, most overpressure ammo is marked with a little "+P" sign somewhere on its base, and really high-pressure stuff is marked with a "+P+." That stuff can blow a normal barrel apart!  And that's why you should always know what your gun takes for ammunition.
  Finally (for now), reliability.  Read online reviews on the pistol you're planning on buying.  Go to gun shops and ask about its reliability.  Ask owners about how it feels, how often they shoot it, and how many times it's failed versus how many shots it's fired.  It doesn't take all that much effort, but it's the main difference between choosing a reliable piece and a comparative junker.  And reliability isn't the only thing you need to consider: think of the features you want, the recoil, the report, and how many are in circulation.  Colt 1911s, Beretta 92Fs and 92FSs, and Glocks, have all proven themselves to be reliable, durable, and accurate, and have many "relatives" that you can salvage for parts (especially the Glocks).  Take the time you need to research the pistols you've got in mind, because if you pick the wrong one, you won't get a retry.
  Calibers and cartridges:
There are a lot of different cartridges from which to choose.  All have their unique advantages, circumstantial perks that you can use with certain tactics.  However, I find that these six cartridges in particular are suited to the zombie apocalypse.  Maybe you'll like one.
  First, the .22 Long Rifle (abbreviated to .22 LR).  It's a small cartridge, but it's racked up as many brownie points as any other cartridge.   First, it's easily the single most common cartridge available.  Pretty much every gun store has tons of boxes in the ammo section.  Second, it's tiny; you can carry ridiculous amounts of .22 cal with ease.  You won't run out and you won't be loaded down by the ammo.  It's true that this cartridge doesn't have as much punch as larger calibers, but, as you've probably heard from numerous sources (I certainly have), it'll rebound in your enemy's skull, causing massive damage to his or her brain.  Even if it passes through the enemy's head without that brain-scrambling rebound, you'll still be shooting him in the head.  And although the .22 might not penetrate a skull at long range, we're talking about using this in a pistol, a close-range weapon.  The .22's lack punch won't be an issue at fifty feet, or even fifty yards.  Ultimately, despite its deficiencies, the .22 LR is an excellent cartridge.
  Next, the 9x19mm.  This is, I'll openly admit, my favorite cartridge.  First, while it does plenty of damage to the average infected head, it's small enough that you can cram around 16 or 17 rounds of it into a pistol without extending the magazine.  It's light, so you can keep plenty with you, and it'll protect you from both raiders and infected.  Finally, the 9x19mm cartridge has been around since before World War II, on both sides of the conflict.  It did its job then, and still does it now, maybe even better if you consider all the advancements we've made in gun technology.  Plus, it's metric.  Now, on to the next round!
  The .40 Smith and Wesson cartridge (abbreviated .40 S&W) is also a solid chambering.  it's a lot like the 9x19, but just a liiitle bit larger at about 10 millimeters wide.  This, in turn, means that it takes more flesh and bone with it as it passes through a zombie's body, creating a larger wound channel and destroying more flesh.  And while it travels more slowly than a 9x19, it still gets to--and through--a body very, very quickly.  Whatever your preference, you can't say that the .40 S&W isn't a solid round.
  Next, we've got the .45 ACP.  This is quite possibly the most recognizable cartridge in the US.  It served in the US army for close to a hundred years and in several commendable weapons, including the ever-popular Colt M1911 pistol.  In fact, the main reason for was because the US wanted to be able to share ammunition with its allies during a war.  Every country had to be able to able to make the same ammunition, and since the rest of the world is metric, we had to pick a metric round.  Anyways, the .45 ACP is a powerful, popular, reliable cartridge.  You can fit around 13 rounds into a double-column magazine without extending the mag past the butt of your pistol, and while it is heavier than other rounds, the .45 is still small enough that you can easily carry a few hundred without too much trouble.  Overall, this is an excellent round to choose.

  Finally the .357 Magnum and the .38 special round out this list of cartridges.  While they sound like they've got dangerously different specs, the .38 and the .357 actually have exactly the same case diameter.  When S&W made the .38 spl, they measured the case instead of the base of the exposed bullet.  The case had a .379 inch diameter, rounded off to .38 inches (hey, "thirty-eight" is easier to say than "three-seventy-nine").  The .357 Magnum, on the other hand, was measured at the bullet's exposed base, giving it a different measurement.  The upswing of all this?  The similarities give a revolver chambered for the .357 Magnum the ability to fire the .38 special.  However, this doesn't work in reverse: thanks to the .357 magnum's longer case (and the extra powder inside),  it's fired at a much higher pressure than its parent cartridge, and a revolver built for the .38 special can be damaged by that extra pressure.

  You probably noticed that I was talking about using the .38 spl and .357 Mag in revolvers.  This is because a magazine-fed pistol is designed for a specific diameter and length of cartridge, whereas a revolver can almost always shoot shorter cartridges, so long as they are of the same diameter as the cartridge for which they were chambered.  If you want to fire either one at your option, get a revolver (or a second pistol, but that's more weight).  Both cartridges are common enough that you'd probably have enough ammo for them, but if you want a revolver, I'd suggest the "Caliber .357, Magnum load."

Useful skills and knowledge, part 7.

Carpentry:
Absolutely awesome.  Before steel and iron, wood will be your primary building material.  And with this, carpentry will become your best friend.  You'll be able to build defenses, traps, equipment, even carts and wagons.  Sounds good, doesn't it?
Metal is everywhere.  In traffic signs, buildings, appliances, tools, and millions of other things.  If you can get at it, you will need a way of working it.  Cutting and welding are easy enough skills to learn, and very useful for reinforcing structures and making weapons.  Sheets, bars and spikes of metal all become workable material.  Just think of all the things you can do!

Weapons, part 7.

Spear:
I like them.  Spears are reliable weapons, both easy to make and good for fighting.  You probably won't be able to hit an infected in the head with one, but a chest stab will stop a zombie dead(er).  If you make a spear with a crosspiece, you can stab repeatedly without worrying that the spear will become stuck too deeply in your adversary.  With time, skill, and a straight bit of wood, you can make a balanced javelin to throw at pursuers and save your arrows and other, less common projectiles.  You can make lethal barricades with spears, add them to pits and swinging traps, or even just jab at your enemies during a siege of your base (all of which, incidentally, is belong to us).

  Alright!  I think I finished everything worth covering except for firearms, explosives, chemicals, poisons, fire itself... you know, I'm absolutely nowhere near done.
  ...It's probably best not to think on that too much.  One post at a time: that's how I should think of it.  One post at a time with the best ideas I can think of.  But I am glad to have finished most of the things that don't go boom, sizzle or crackle when you use them.  It makes what's coming next sound even more fun than it is!

Finally, I'll be covering pistols, carbines, rifles, and shotguns in the next two posts.  They will be biased, but then, what hasn't been, so far?  Toodles!

Shameless pedantry.

PEDANTRY BEGINS.
In gun terms, a magazine is not a clip.  A magazine is the container for the cartridges, shells, or other projectiles and is loaded into the firearm prior to usage.  A clip is a piece of metal that is used to hold cartridges in place to either load them directly into a firearm or into a magazine; it may of may not be inserted directly into the firearm, as is the case for an M1 Garand, but if pops out once the cartridges have been loaded.  Magazines are vital to the operation of a firearm, whereas clips are helpful but not vital.
PEDANTRY ENDS.
That said, I'm still going to use "clip" as a term for a gun's magazine.  Screw the grammar, I have artistic license!