Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

Cheaper Than Dirt, Home of the $99 PMag, has jumped on the bandwagon of businesses that are refusing to deal with those who stomp on gun rights. This is akin to the guy who just let go with the ‘ol one-cheek-sneak looking around and innocently asking “Hey, who farted?”

I have some issues about prices. I don’t believe in ‘price gouging’..I believe in charging what the market will bear. The guy you bought his full-auto Uzi for $400 in 1985 decideds to sell it in 1987 for $4000. Is that price gouging? Well, the law changed and his Uzi bullethose is no longer available except only to LE/Mil/dealers….so I thin we’d argue that since the scarcity of his merchandise went up, so did the price. Heck, thats just good business.

So CTD buys a couple pallets of PMags back in October for about $7 a mag in bulk. Suddenly the market explodes with demand and theres a risk that all those PMags may be all that CTD will ever have. So…they raise prices. Fine.

Here’s where me and the laws od supply-n-demand part ways. There’s the old saying about how you can eat a sheep once but you can shear it a bunch of times. CTD pissed off scads of folks and many of those folks have long memories. I know people who still won’t touch a Ruger product even after Billy Ruger finally hit room temperature.

CTD, realizing that they may have accidentally screwed the pooch, in terms of public relations, is now saying “Hey, we’re just like you guys!” in an attempt to distract from what some might characterize as unreasonably high price increases.

Again, I’m not going to tell anyone what to charge for something. If I dont like a price, I dont buy it. That simple. I’m free to do that. I think price controls are absurd and do nothing beneficial. But…with great power comes great responsibility, as we were told by Stan Lee. You can charge $100 for a nice PMag that everyone knows you were selling for $19.95 two weeks ago, and that’s your decision….but you need to really think about the consequences of that sorta thing. One consequence is that guys like me are gonna make fun of you for quite a while.

On the bright side, as gun control gets pushed further and further down the news cycle it looks like prices (but not availability) are slowly sinking from the stratosphere. Saw a new RRA basic AR carbine for $1150 at the show this weekend, so thats an improvement. And mag prices has stabilized around $20-$30 for AR mags.

Regardless, this is just a good example of why you shoulda stocked up on this stuff years ago.