Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

Demand actually was on the upswing before the year 2020 even began. Then the dumpster fire that is 2020 wrought havoc on both gun and ammunition availability. This is a pure demand-driven issue. The government guys who may or may not be in black helicopters are not interested in small rifle primers or .22 Long Rifle. Good luck finding either on the shelf.

How bad is it? Let me give you some anecdotes.

Just two weeks ago, I received a call that probably should not have surprised me.

“Do you have any .30-30?” This was not a question I was expecting. I mean, after all, there might be some parachute-cord-wrapped lever-actions somewhere if they haven’t been snarfed up, but .30-30 ammo? Really?

It seems the friend of a friend was heading out on a hog hunt and left it too late to buy ammunition. Nowhere in northern Virginia could you find a box of .30-30 on the shelf. He was headed for a wild boar trip and had exactly four rounds. I dug into my personal stash to make sure his hunt wasn’t ruined, but this is a symptom of a much larger issue today.

Back in April, one of our field editors received a call from a pretty prominent gun shop asking, “How much 9 mm do you have?” He answered and was told that he would be paid twice what he paid for it, and a truck would be there tomorrow.

A friend at Hornady recently reached out to me to ask that I spread the word. What’s going on with ammunition is nothing sinister, nor a conspiracy. It is simple supply-and-demand. In fact, it’s hyper-inflated demand like no one has ever seen. I certainly haven’t in the 30 years that I’ve been paying attention to such things.

Much has been made of the fact that guns, especially guns suitable for personal defense, have been hard to find. It would stand to reason that, with gun sales at an all-time high, ammunition will not take long to follow. At first, it was 9 mm Luger and .223 Rem., with local outages of things like .300 Blackout and 7.62×39 mm. It is not because the ammunition makers are not working all-out. American ammunition makers have all increased output and productivity as much as they can. They are making more ammunition than they ever have before. As soon as it goes into distribution, it is gone.

Despite this, they are being hammered by their customers who ask, “Where is the ammo?“ It’s not being diverted to top-secret government contracts. It’s being bought by your friends and neighbors before you.

Snip.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, protests, riots and then the most rabid anti-gun platform ever introduced being pushed by the Democratic party, it’s no wonder that people have increased their demand for guns and ammunition. When a candidate for national office—even a poorly performing one—utters, “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15,” what did you think was going to happen?

This is not even attributable to supply-chain problems, with the exception of the Remington ammunition plant in Arkansas. That plant was sidelined by the sale of the company by an Alabama bankruptcy court. Talk about a series of unfortunate events. One of the largest plants in the country couldn’t make ammo at full capacity because of the financial problems of its parent company. The good news is that Vista Outdoor picked up that facility, and the Vista team is very good indeed at making ammunition. I am told after the first of the year, ammunition will be flowing out of that plant, and many of its workers will be rehired.

We have been through conditions similar to this before, but nothing like this. It’s to the point that waterfowlers looking for ammo are having a hard time because people looking for defensive loads have decided that steel BBs are better than nothing.

A friend at a major retailer told me one of his managers was approached by a customer who found a box of .38-55 sitting alone on the shelf. He asked if there was anything in the store that would shoot it, as it was the only box of ammo there.

This is a great year to be in the replica-cowboy-gun business, but for entirely different reasons than usual. I personally watched a fellow who entered the gun shop wanting a Glock and left with a Uberti single-action revolver in .45 Colt simply because it was the only handgun in the store. Once that was gone, the shelves were bare.

I have spoken with representatives of every major ammunition company in the United States, as well as quite a few importers. It’s not that they aren’t trying to meet the demand. It’s just the demand is so high that as soon as product enters commerce, it’s gone. There’s an insatiable appetite out there now, and once rumors about ammo being in short supply start leaking out, much like the many primer scarcities we’ve had over the years, the demand increases. Panic begets more panic.

• Ammo was at a premium. Pricing was high and it looks like dealers were buying out other dealers before the show started (and then marked each box up). While I’m not enormously well stocked, I’m well stocked enough not to have to spend $20 for 50 .22LR (!). I mean, seriously?
• There was a LOT of Donald Trump stuff there, and not in a let’s clear out the old inventory sense. People were walking around in MAGA hats and there was what looked like a lot of fresh inventory being scooped up by the crowd. However this plays out, The Donald is not fading away. Oh, yeah – several vendors had “Biden Is Not My President” T-Shirts for sale and I saw more than one dude walking around in them.
• Didn’t see any tables of Nazi memorabilia. Might be the first gun show I’ve been to that didn’t sport that.

The last point accords with my own experience at the San Antonio gun show in October.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has accused the Fort Worth-based website Cheaper Than Dirt, which primarily sells firearms, ammunition and hunting gear, of price gouging at the start of the pandemic.

The AG’s office identified over 4,000 sales that involved price gouging and has directed Cheaper Than Dirt to pay $402,786 in refunds to consumers, according to court documents filed this month.

Over 100 people have complained to the AG’s office about Cheaper Than Dirt, the Houston Chronicle reported earlier this year.

The same week that Gov. Greg Abbott made a pandemic-related disaster declaration in Texas, ammunition orders to Cheaper Than Dirt substantially increased. In response to the increased demand for its products, the website raised the prices on hundreds of its products, according to the AG’s office.

The Texas AG’s office has identified ammunition as a necessity and, as a result, is arguing that those price hikes were against the Texas Business and Commerce Code. The code forbids businesses from “taking advantage of a disaster” by selling “fuel, food, medicine, lodging, building materials, construction tools or another necessity at an exorbitant or excessive price.”

This is sheer folly dressed up as righteousness. The market pays what the market will bear, and prices adjust to meet demand. As the first of today’s roundup links note, this year’s ammo shortages are overwhelmingly driven by consumer demand. High prices are the market’s signal to bring more capacity online to meet demand. Short-circuiting that signal helps no one. Paxton’s lawsuit displays an amazing ignorance of basic economics.

To drive home the scale of the current panic buying, I checked on both Cheaper Than Dirt and ammo.com for .45 ACP ammo prices and both were completely out, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. The cheapest price over at AmmoSeek is 68 cents a round, up considerably from from the 50 cents I paid at the San Antonio gun show two months ago.

1. Bill Survival 101 (Slide deck)
2. The TLO Website
3. Talking to Legislators (Slide deck)

Useful information if you want to help influence the legislative process.