Just to be clear, this man is complaining that his feelings are hurt because people are saying he’s not doing everything he can to get ammo out the door faster.
You know what? If I have a virtual license to print money like the ammo companies do right now, I take the offense and pout alllllllllllll the way to. the. bank.
Cry me a river, buddy.
I was looking at the ammo shelf in a local store yesterday and it was, naturally, picked over pretty hard. Of the ammo that was left it was a box of this, three boxes of that, two boxes of the other….nothing left in any quantity. As for what was missing….that pretty much tells the story.
Hit any preparedness forum and you’ll see the endless posts about “What calibers should survivalists standardize on” and you get the usual list. But, simple observation of the shelves shows that this nation runs on 9mm and .223. QED.
Right place, right time:
Rem. 158 gr. JHP….2600 pieces at $0.06 ea.
I have a case of AA#2 powder, a five gallon bucket of fired .357 brass, and a Dillon Super RL1050….looks like its time to put my .357 needs to rest.
Friend Of The Blog ™, Tam, over at View From The Porch, has a post up about the ammo shortage and it’s depth.
I don’t know if Tam is old enough to remember the Great Primer Scare back during the Slick Willie administration, but it was, in some ways, a nice warm up for the present situation.
I have an 06 manufacturers FFL, so I get more than the normal advertisements from vendors. I also get advertisements directed at manufacturers, where you buy your brass and other components by the fibre drum. There is, indeed, a bit of scarcity running around.
Many folks feel that reloading is the answer to these ammo shortages, but thats like saying cooking your own hamburgers is the solution to no burgers at Wendy’s because of a beef shortage. If larger manufacturers can’t get the components to keep up with demand, neither will you. Usually.
I say ‘usually’ because, as an individual, you have more maneuverability than Remington or Speer. You can literally troll Gunbroker and pick up 100 cases here, 400 cases there, and another 250 cases from a garage sale down the street. And if you’re willing to expend a little sweat, you can almost always just find brass growing under feet at the range.
But, overall, if you shoot any of the ‘common’ stuff like 9mm, .223, .40, etc, you’re probably going to have a hard time finding it and when you do the prices may not be to your liking. If you reload, you’ll have a bit of an advantage because ammo is often snapped up before the components are since reloaders are outnumbered by non-reloaders.
Tam’s a smart cookie, and the nature of her profession is such that she has, no doubt, a stockpile that would suit her needs in virtually any crisis. But she’s also savvy enough to know that meat doesn’t come from a pink tray in the supermarket and .45 230 FMJ doesn’t grow on a tree in the stockroom at Bass Pro. Amateurs talk strategy, pros talk logistics.
Having been chicken-littling for the life of the blog, I’ve already gotten most of my ammo situation squared away. So much so that the only time I really buy large amounts of factory ammo anymore is when an uncommonly good deal turns up.
When will things get back to ‘normal’? Years, dude. If you don’t have the ammo you want right now then your biggest quandry is do you a) buy the ammo now at the inflated prices or b) risk waiting for prices to drop and availability to increase? If you choose plan A you’re gonna get the sandpaper joystick where the sun don’t shine…but you’ll have ammo. Plan B saves you money when you finally do buy, but that purchase might be two years down the road, if at all.
And then, there’s Plan C….have purchased all this crap years ago and it’s quietly sitting in ammo cans in a safe location just waiting for Der Tag. I’m a Plan C kinda guy.
It was one of those deals where you had to buy a significant amount of product in order to make the deal and get the good price. But…it worked out.
$0.15/round. Delivered. Farctory FMJ 115 Ball. And it’s off to the Deep Sleep.
I do a lot of reloading, but for end-of-the-world purposes I try to stock factory ammo. Why? Because if all the fiction novels and zombie movies are correct, and we are trading ammo like currency, no one wants a ziploc baggie of reloads from some yahoos garage that may or may not be loaded with fireworks powder. Factory ammo in factory packaging will be, IMHO, more desirable than mixed reloads from someone who may not know the difference between Bullseye and IMR4350.
But remember a couple years ago when a brick of .22 ammo was like finding a four leaf clover? And those insane prices? Yeah, well….
Trivia:knock off the bottom row of this endcap and you get an accurate representation of how much .22 ammo I have in Deep Sleep.
Not as great as when it was ten bucks per brick, but at least its available. Did I buy some? Of course! Because theres Ammo To Shoot and Ammo To Store. I have plenty of Ammo To Store but Ammo To Shoot is always in flux.
Plus, someday I might get $60/brick like I did a few years ago. 😉
Here’s why my Roth is underfunded:
But, with most .223 running around $0.32/@ it seemed like a nice way to get some blasting ammo. For you young bucks who are too young to remember, back before Slick Willy was flavoring his cigars with brunettes we could buy cheap Chinese guns and ammo. How cheap? You could get an SKS and a case of 7.62×39 for about $125-150. Seriously. My UPS guy hated me. Quality-wise it was…interesting. At one point even Chinese gunpowder (hey, they invented the stuff, right?) was on the market very briefly until it turned out that it was basically fireworks powder..it had a burn rate measured in Planck time. Their ammo was a mixed bag…always dirty, often underpowered, but always cheap. Kinda made Wolf look like Federal. All those SKS rifles you see these days were purchased because ammo was nine cents per round.
But, if you were just going to the range to break rocks and make noise…well, it was a pretty good deal. I know a lot of people who salted away cases and cases of this stuff. Not my first choice for Der Tag, but some ammo is (usually) better than no ammo.
This stuff? I’ll probably just use it for playing around with the Mini-14’s.Box says brass case but believe it when I see it. As Uncle Duke says…
Took long enough.
10,000 rounds added to existing stockpile. Assuming everyone in this town turned into a zombie, and assuming it only took one round to the head to put them down, and assuming I actually had the time…..yeah.
Three cents a round….delivered.
Thats almost enough to make me wanna pick up ten thousand.
ETA: Ah,. what the heck…I’ll always be able to make money off it.
One is none, forty thousand is one.
It occurs to me that one of the better reasons for having a ‘group’, rather than being solo, is to have some folks to help you carry the damn ammo up and down the stairs. Whew.
This will be Deep Sleep ammo. For target and plinking I’ll use whatever is available at WalMart or wherever, but this stuff goes right in there with the Mountain House stuff. The only time I expect to see it again is during some enormous crisis or when I transport it to the Beta Site. And, for the record, each 40mm ammo can holds 8,250 rounds…or 165 boxes of 50. And they’re heavy….right at the limit of man-portability.
