The bullet bubble
 

America armed, but guns not necessarily loaded

By MARY FOSTER, Associated Press Writer – Wed Sep 23, 2:51 pm ET

NEW ORLEANS – Bullet-makers are working around the clock, seven days a week, and still can't keep up with the nation's demand for ammunition.

Shooting ranges, gun dealers and bullet manufacturers say they have never seen such shortages. Bullets, especially for handguns, have been scarce for months because gun enthusiasts are stocking up on ammo, in part because they fear President Barack Obama and the Democratic-controlled Congress will pass antigun legislation — even though nothing specific has been proposed and the president last month signed a law allowing people to carry loaded guns in national parks.

Gun sales spiked when it became clear Obama would be elected a year ago and purchases continued to rise in his first few months of office. The FBI's National Instant Criminal Background Check System reported that 6.1 million background checks for gun sales were issued from January to May, an increase of 25.6 percent from the same period the year before.

"That is going to cause an upswing in ammunition sales," said Larry Keane, senior vice president of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade association representing about 5,000 members. "Without bullets a gun is just a paper weight."

The shortage for sportsmen is different than the scarcity of ammo for some police forces earlier this year, a dearth fueled by an increase in ammo use by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"We are working overtime and still can't keep up with the demand," said Al Russo, spokesman for North Carolina-based Remington Arms Company, which makes bullets for rifles, handguns and shotguns. "We've had to add a fourth shift and go 24-7. It's a phenomenon that I have not seen before in my 30 years in the business."

Americans usually buy about 7 billion rounds of ammunition a year, according to the National Rifle Association. In the past year, that figure has jumped to about 9 billion rounds, said NRA spokeswoman Vickie Cieplak.

Jason Gregory, who manages Gretna Gun Works just outside of New Orleans, has been building his personal supply of ammunition for months. His goal is to have at least 1,000 rounds for each of his 25 weapons.

"I call it the Obama effect," said Gregory, 37, of Terrytown, La. "It always happens when the Democrats get in office. It happened with Clinton and Obama is even stronger for gun control. Ammunition will be the first step, so I'm stocking up while I can."

So far, the new administration nor Congress has not been markedly antigun. Obama has said he respects Second Amendment rights, but favors "common sense" on gun laws. Still, worries about what could happen persist.

Demand has been so heavy at some Walmarts, a limit was imposed on the amount of ammo customers can buy. The cutoff varies according to caliber and store location, but sometimes as little as one box — or 50 bullets — is allowed.

At Barnwood Arms in Ripon, Calif., sales manager Dallas Jett said some of the shortages have leveled off, but 45-caliber rounds are still hard to find.

"We've been in business for 32 years and I've been here for 10 and we've never seen anything like it," Jett said. "Coming out of Christmas everything started to dry up and it was that way all through the spring and summer.

Nationwide, distributors are scrambling to fill orders from retailers.

"We used to be able to order 50 or 60 cases and get them in three or four days easy, it was never an issue," said Vic Grechniw of Florida Ammo Traders, a distributor in Tampa, Fla. "Now you are really lucky if you can get one case a month. It just isn't there because the demand is way up."

A case contains 500 or 1,000 bullets.

At Jefferson Gun Outlet and Range in Metairie just west of New Orleans, owner Mike Mayer is worried individuals are going to start buying by the case.

"If someone wants to shoot on the weekend you have to worry about having the ammunition for them. And I know some people aren't buying to use it at the range, they're taking it home and hoarding it."

With demand, prices have also risen.

"Used to be gold, but now lead is the most expensive metal," said Donald Richards, 37, who was stocking up at the Jefferson store. "And worth every penny."

I honestly don't know why I even let this kind of thing bother me anymore, but technically sloppy reporting just gets under my skin. Used to be the big wire services took pride in technical accuracy of their material. Oh well. Could someone help me find bullets for my shotgun?

People are idiots. I haven't bought a single bullet and only a couple boxes of 12 gauge shells since Obama got elected. I've got plenty, I hardly ever shoot anyone.

It is stupid, but it also stimulates the economy.

Is this even still true? Seems like this was a story 6 months ago, but I'm seeing emails from Ammoman on decent stock and Natchezss was having a sale on various .22 last week.

Just received an email about a gun show last weekend. They sent out messages to everyone to get there early if you were going to come due to the ammo shortage.

Friend of mine went there on Sunday and except for .22 and some unusual calibers every seller was sold out of ammo. People are still scared and rightly so in many cases. Watching the two stooges speak in the United Nations this morning was more than enough in many cases.

Prices have softened slightly and availability seems up a bit over early in the year, but it's still pretty darned expensive to go shooting now and it's also still pretty tough to find some calibers.

I've been stocking up steadily and surely. It's only a matter of time before the *******s try a gun grab or an ammo grab (this is already pending legislation here in CA). I don't trust the stability of the situation at all.

Ammunition makers, distributors, and sellers must be loving it.

Keep feeding the panic of the more paranoid sort of gun owner, make them buy more ammo, spending $1000s when money is hard to come by, buying ammo at inflated prices, accumulating more ammo than any sane person needs outside of a war zone.

And they call other people "sheepies" . . .

I guess bubbles are hard to see, for those who are caught up in them.

Did the panicked folks at the gun show turn on their computers and check out the big mail order ammo sites? You can buy 9mm, 45 ACP, 40 S&W, all the popular calibers. Not all brands are available yet, but a Remington cartridge will go bang just like a MagTech or Federal.

At the Cow Palace gun show last weekend, there was plenty of ammo. Granted, one vendor had most of it, but they had cases of pretty much everything available.

Sam thing at the big Scheels store in Reno last weekend. I chatted with one of the sales guys for a bit, he said the only thing they are having a hard time getting is primers.

I did see quite a few primers at the gun show though, but way overpriced.

That being said, I was in a Wal Mart Monday (North of Santa Rosa) that had been picked clean.

Quite true. The gun industry has been on mega overdrive since the day after election day.

This just blows my mind in so many ways.

It's just ridiculous, not the actual shortage - I understand how only so much ammo can be made per unit of time- but the reason for the shortage. It's fundamentally, well, retarded.

You're not all going to run out next week and participate in an armed, hot-fire revolution. This is not Columbia. This is not the Congo.



There, I PARFed it all up.

I gotta say, I find it funny that BHO has cause an explosion in gun industry profits.

The point is that it COULD happen here. It did once back in the late 1700s.

Throw in some serious economic instability and the tangible prospect of open looting, civil unrest, etc. and it suddenly makes sense to have a certain amount of firepower.

Everyone has their own definition of what "reasonable" is. For one person, it might be enough to have a nightstand .44 "just in case". For others, it's racks of AR-15s, AK-47s and .50 BMGs with a hundred thousand rounds of each - "just in case".

One thing's for damn sure - it's better to have someone call you crazy today just because you feel like being prepared than it is to find onesself in such a scenario wishing you'd thought differently a little earlier.

"Be Prepared".

And yes, I agree wholeheartedly that now is not the time to go out and buy like mad. Stuff is expensive. Buy a little here and a little there when and where you can.

If nothing else it makes the prospect of armed invasion/occupation of the United States entirely untenable, and it keeps a hell of a lot of Americans gainfully employed.

America needs Guns for Clunkers plan. Trade in clunker with less than 20 mpg, get .50 BMG and 2 cases ammo.

"Reasonable" isn't that wide a range. One of them is wrong.

Don't you just love living in America? :)

Lots of mistakes in that report.

The military and police don't compete for ammunition, as military-grade ammunition is made of separate machines to distinct specifications. I have seen quite a bit of military surplus ammo on the civilian market though--my local Farm & Fleet doesn't have any .223, but it has plenty of date-stamped 5.56.

As a person who hits the range (at least) once a month and maintains a relatively small stockpile, I've found that I have to buy a few boxes every few months no matter the price. Just like in RE, the stock market, and oil speculators, I think the people that are buying massive amounts to sit on for a future profit are those that will get burned. All of the sudden in the next 12 months the market will free up and prices will drop, and the people with big for-profit stockpiles will start panic-selling, which will further depress prices. I expect to see gun shows piled high with cheap ammo. I'll stock-up then.

The entire gun and ammo industry is living in fear of the inevitable hangover from all of this craziness. Ammunition factories will close, dealers will go out of business when they can't give the stuff away, and even firearms manufacturers will be hurt. It's coming - it's just a matter of when.

Once that happens, the ability to ramp up ever again for increased production will be all but gone. The tooling and equipment will have long since been dismantled; the personel will have moved on. America's ability to produce even "normal" quantities of civilian ammunition will be severely curtailed. Pelosi, Feinstein, Schumer, et. al. will have won.

Obama is smarter than he looks. He is laughing his ass off right now at the reaction of America's gun owners. It's exactly what he wanted.

There was a similar boom after Clinton was elected. The industry survived. This time, the bust will take place during a period of economic recovery and reviving credit markets, which will cushion the blow.

The alternative, if no Obama gun boom, was for the gun industry to suffer 20-30% sales declines like the rest of consumer durables, in an environment of no lending. I think that would have been worse.

True; it just seems this one is much larger than the Clinton era panic. I seem to recall many small manufacturers going under back then, along with the larger ones laying off a substantial portion of their workforce. I wonder how much worse it would have had to have gotten to have left a permanent impact. I hope we don't find out this time.

And yes, I agree it could have been worse for the industry if everyone had inspanned and quit buying. Had McSame been elected, this probably would have been their fate. No reason to panic, no reason to buy - gun industry goes into recession along with the rest of the economy.

I guess we will never know which would have been worse - a post-McCain yawn or the post-Obama panic. I think the panic; it definitely forestalled their turn in the recession, but I think it will make their turn very much deeper, very much longer, and very much more damaging. I know they will survive; it's just a matter of at what capacity.

That depends on who you talk to.

I get what you're saying, but it sounds an awful lot like the "tyranny of the majority" cloaked in legalese.

Who decides what "reasonable" is then? And more importantly, what the range of "reasonable" behaviors is? Do we identify a median and then establish what one standard deviation is from that median? Is that "reasonable"? Two standard deviations? What exactly?

Oh, I know - we'll just continually re-test it in the courts, ensuring a non-stop endless supply of money to lawyers.

"Reasonable" in this sense only exists to make lawyers rich and keep the courts busy (I suspect it indirectly encourages our society to be as ridiculously litigous as it is today too...)

Maybe we should just accept people's right to be different and decide what's best or "reasonable" for them, rather than trying to prescribe and dictate it to them. One of the things I love about America is that we (supposedly) value individuality here. If I wanted homogeneity, I'd go to China.

I have always had a couple boxes on hand for all my firearms and was fine with that, but last spring I got a .22 target pistol and was going thru several 550 packs of once easily found cheap plinking .22 a month. I NEVER thought the day would come that I cannot buy a cheap box of plinking .22 at any gun store.

Now after purchasing a Glock 34 9mm for IDPA competition, I find myself needing/wanting at least a few hundred rounds a week to practice with. I thought I was fine and was able to "limit out" (6 boxes) at Walmart several days in a row when I got my new gun, but now I can't find it cheap (about $10/box 50) anywhere again. The on-line places do not have the cheap stuff either.

Just this week, I almost ordered reloading equipment until I found out that Federal primers (best primers for my newly modded competition gun) are backordered for over 6 months... same goes for Winchester and CCI.

I sure hope I can continue to occasionally luck out get some more $9.99 Federal or $12.00 WWB over the next month or two at Walmart. If not, my new hobby, IDPA competition, is not going to happen. Ideally, primers will become available again and I can buy 10,000 or so to allow me to reload and practice this winter so I can compete this spring and next summer, but it is not looking good.

The question is, will they get a bailout? I'll bet there's some lobbying to that end going on right now.

Not from the Obama administration. It'd be a cold day in hell before they'd do that.

I think it'd be very interesting if one of the big manufacturers openly announced their intention to "offshore" all their ammo production to China - just to test Obama's resolve to "keep American jobs here".

It would be very telling indeed.

I have a very hard believing the day will ever come when stores will sell ammo dirt cheap again or have a hard time moving inventory. Ammo sales are not due to gun nuts like me or the survivalists out there. They're due to the millions of people taking up shooting for the first time and getting really into it. Not all of them will stick with it, but no one has ever fired a gun for the first time and thought, "Na, this is no fun. I won't be doing this ever again." Lots of the new gun owners will grow their collection and also ammo inventory. I see no downside to stockpiling. At the very worst, you'll have a ton of ammo to get you through months or years of trips too the range.

The govt is not prohibiting companies from moving jobs to lower-cost locations, laying off workers, using more automation, or otherwise making their operations more efficient.

Why would they attempt to do so with ammunition mfgrs - who are small potatoes in economic terms.

I check my Walmart from time to time, sometimes 2-3 times a week, sometimes just once a week. I pretty regularly find ammo there. Usually either $9.47 for 50 Fed FMJ or $20.97 for a box of 100 WWB. It seems like it's getting more common too. Not only are the 9mm more common, but other calibers. Some folks on a Texas board that I'm on have started seeing .380 bullets too.

I haven't seen .22LR for sale in Bloomington since last November.

I think with Wal Mart's wonderful inventory system, since it hasn't been stocked, it hasn't sold. Because it hasn't sold, it is no longer stocked.

Take two guys living in the same neighborhood. They obviously have the same risk of their country experiencing societal breakdown, civil war, zombie uprising, invaders from Mars, whatever. You think one guy has a "reasonable" need for a .38SPL and 100 rounds and the other guy has a "reasonable" need for a .50BMG and 100,000 rounds? That devalues the word "reasonable" so that it means nothing. What you're really saying is that each guy is free to have as much or as little ammo as he feels like and our society allows that freedom. I agree with that. Just don't pretend there is a rational, reasonable, or logical way to justify a "need" for both 100 and 100,000.

That exactly what I did after getting my gun a few weeks ago, but for whatever reason, the shipments have dried up to a trickle again. One local Walmart did get a small shipment of WWB/50 ($12/box) last night, but they will likely be all gone by the time I get there after work today. A few weeks ago they had a couple shipments of something like 100 boxes of the Federal/50, WWB/50 & WWB/100. With their 6 box limit, they lasted several days. I hope start getting the bigger shipments again soon.

The internet/mailorder ammo dealers are pricing 50-round boxes of 9mm for $20 (S&B stuff, nothing special) to $40.

That is 2X the 50-round for $10 at WMT you're seeing.

A substantial part of the gun industry is gouging the hell out of their panicked customers. I hope you all remember them kindly when the ammo boom is over and ammo sellers are hungry for business again.

I have heard from a couple different sources that the big difference this time is the big players are being smarter about it than last time. They know this is great for their business, but it will not last.

Everyone is running at 100% capacity, but nobody is adding capacity because they know demand will return to normal, and when it does they won't need it.

Are there barriers to opening an ammo factory? I don't understand why we haven't seen any new ammo manufacturers.

I'd imagine the environmental regulations (with handling lead and gun powder) would be pretty immense.

Also, from what I understand, there aren't any companies left that actually make the machines that make ammo. The machines in use today are decades old.

Besides good business sense? See my post above.

I suspect there are several issues. Under normal circumstances, do we need another manufacturer?

If you're going to start producing Ammo, that sounds like a pretty big deal ($$$). I suspect it would take a while for the initial cost to pay off. If the bubble bursts before then, ouch.

Considering it's explosive materials and ammunition, I suspect there may be some extra regs.

I can't imagine that it's that cheap or easy to open an "ammunition factory".

Makes sense. The industry has the Clinton precedent to look back to. I think they are adding shifts because workers can be easily cut when the boom ends, unlike facilities/equipment.

Last I checked, S&W was still cutting costs and consolidating facilities. The big PE guy who was buying gun companies (Cerebrus) has had its wings clipped. Everyone sees the potential for the war(s) to wind down. Credit for expansion and working capital is not free anymore.

Sig Sauer has a Guns for Clunkers program.

They will pay $200.00 for any trade-in toward the price of a new Sig Sauer.

9 billion rounds of ammunition this past year is hardly small potatoes.