We have all seen it. It is hard not to notice when visiting your local gun shop or big box retailer sporting goods section. Bare shelves line the walls behind gun counters, nary a box of ammunition to be had. This past year you would have had a better chance of witnessing Sasquatch riding a mountain lion down State Street in Augusta than to see a box of 9mm Luger or .223 Remington on a sporting goods retail shelf. So what gives? Well, the answer is a lot less dramatic than most of the conspiracy theories I have heard over the past few years during similar shortages of .22LR and before that – primers.
Supply and demand
It’s the most basic of business principles. Manufacturing processes ebb and flow with the consumer demand for the products the manufacturer’s produce. When rapid changes in the marketplace occur, there is bound to be a concurrent reaction on the manufacturing side. An unprecedented amount of social and political events over the past year or so contributed heavily to the ammunition shortfall. If the average gun owner who usually purchases a couple of boxes of cartridges during a visit to the gun shop suddenly is buying cases of ammunition at a time, thousands of rounds are moving out of the supply chain in quick fashion. Multiply this scenario by even a fraction of gun owners in the country and you are talking big numbers.
The National Sports Shooting Foundation estimates that over 12 million guns were bought during the first seven months of 2020, according to data provided by the FBI’s National Instant Background Check System. You can bet that a lot these firearms belong to new gun owners and I suspect they didn’t leave the store without ammunition, likely a pile of it.
The fear of not being able to purchase ammo causes this bulk buying reaction; case in point – I recently heard someone joke that ammunition is the new toilet paper.
Manufacturer challenges
Winchester, Browning, Hornady and Vista Outdoor (the conglomerate that owns Federal, Speer, CCI and the recently acquired Remington Ammunition brand) all report overwhelming demand despite operating at full manufacturing capability and shipping product daily. The problem they say is that as soon as the retailers receive their ammunition through the back door, it goes right back out the front door.
Raw materials are a big problem too. The Covid pandemic has caused shortages in the supply chain of everything from brass, primers, copper and lead and believe it or not – Department of Transportation approved cardboard that is required to ship live ammunition. The pandemic has also stressed the workforce who manufactures ammo.
Remington Ammunitions’ plant in Lanoke, Arkansas, one of the biggest ammunition manufacturing facilities in the country, shut down during Remington Outdoors bankruptcy and asset sale proceedings, adding to the supply shortage. There is a glimmer of hope however. Vista expects to have 400 to 600 laid-off workers back at the presses and shipping the popular yellow and green boxes of ammunition by the time you read this column.
Future and politics
Previously, we could usually predict a firearm purchase surge when anti-gun politicians were elected to office or ammunition purchase surges when we hear about legislation being crafted to limit the sale of certain types of rounds, but those were singular issues causing hoarding; thus a shortage. This time around, there is a plethora of issues facing gun owners and shooting enthusiasts – the Covid-19 pandemic, an uncertain climate in the general public regarding gun ownership and the election of one of the most outspoken anti-gun presidential tickets in modern history. Folks are worried about finding ammunition for the times they may need it most and are uncertain when the shortage will end. It’s a perfect storm for hoarding.