Did you guys ever read the unabridged version of The Stand? King takes a detour from the main characters and spends a whole chapter describing how a lot of the people who survive the plague die anyway because they don't adapt to the post-civilization environment. One of them is reclusive, middle aged spinster whose view of men has been warped by her mentally ill mother. She is deathly afraid of being raped, and arms herself with her father's gun, which she finds in an attic trunk. The first man she comes across makes an advance...she pulls out the gun...aims...and blows her own head off because the decades-old ammo misfires.
So folks, if you don't know how to use the gun, don't mess!
When I was reading it a few years ago, I mentally tabbed that chapter as "Darwin's Follies."