The NSSF put together a fact sheet on what exactly is going with the ammo shortage, after talking to various manufacturers and resellers. Here’s a link to their fact sheet on the ammo shortage. Additionally, Tam, who worked in the firearms industry for years, sheds light on some of the major issues that have caused the shortage to worsen, and have made certain calibers effectively unavailable. One of the biggest issues is that people who used to only buy ammo 100 or 200 rounds at a time suddenly jumped their consumption to 500 or 1000 rounds. That means that Johnny Blastomatic rolls into Wal-Mart to buy some 9mm FMJ for the range, instead of getting 2 of the 100 round value pack, he buys an entire case. The problem that’s created is for people like me, who normally buy their ammo in lots of 500 or 1000 anyway, because we tend to shoot a lot of ammo anyway, but the sudden surge in people buying cases of ammo has dried up our supply lines.
Last week or so, I was at Plainfield Shooting Supplies, and they had a cap on the amount of 9mm or .45 ACP that you could buy. Mind you, two weeks before that, I had bought a case of 124 grain FMJ from them, so needless to say I was confused. The thing about the ammo crunch is that people need to do a couple of things – 1) chill out, and 2) seriously, chill out. In about 3-6 months, everything’s going to die down, and all of a sudden the second hand market is going to be flooded with guys who need to make a car payment or something like that trying to unload the 5k rounds of Winchester White Box or Federal American Eagle that they stockpiled; or conversely those same “100 rounds a weekend” are going to spend the next few months shooting up that ammo before they even think about going to buy more.
