Reader David B. writes:

For some time, I have been pondering where all the .22 ammo is going. Our Wal-Mart gets a small shipment every Wednesday and our Dick’s Sporting Goods gets a minuscule amount every Thursday. Surely, I thought, the ammo has to be going somewhere. Well, I have confirmation that it most definitely is. It has been stockpiled by RETAILERS for the past several months in anticipation of Black Friday and the Christmas shopping season . . .

We, the gun owning public, have been tools used by the corporate execs to drive business at their stores and up the foot traffic as we search for a few rounds to shoot every week. The .22 shortage, for all intents and purposes, has been deliberately created–not by the ammo hoarding public or by the ammo manufacturers, but by the retailers. I noticed that Dick’s has a huge amount of .22 ammo for sale on Black Friday. They are advertising nationwide 525 rd bricks for $19.99. Gander Mountain is advertising that each of their stores will have a minimum of 1000 boxes–limit 10 per customer. Cabela’s is offering 300 round boxes for $16.99. Bass Pro is offering 500 rd bricks for $25.

This all adds up to these major chains exploiting gun owners and ultimately hurting the shooting sports. I am not calling for a boycott of these stores, but it sure does tick me off.

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102 COMMENTS

  1. Basic you just said that the .22 shortage was retailers holding out on us to sell them at a DISCOUNT this weekend? So ass backwards, foot traffic be damned they could’ve sold the stuff at a profit better than any of this Black Friday crap!

    Also, sorry for swearing at hard working manufacturers pulled into the scheme.

    • Can you think of a better way to get shooters into the store than to have .22LR available. Then once they get you in there what else will you buy.
      ps. This morning I went into a Walmart and used their online purchase program to order 2 Plano rifle cases at Black Friday prices ( 8 hours before the in store sale started ) for in store pick up next week.
      No crowds for me !

      • I think the dumb part is how this guy things a few million nation wide is “Hoarding by retailers”.

        If they had like 500 million+ sure i can see hoarding. Doesn’t the United States alone produce 1billion+ .22 LR rounds each year?

        • Exactly. This is as specious as the whole “DHS Ammo Grab!” nonsense. Do the math and it evaporates quicker than brake parts cleaner sprayed on a hot manifold.

          I do wish I knew where these magical sporting goods retailers are that have .22lr on the shelf. Because I never see it anywhere for more than an hour – just enough time for the profiteers to buy it all up and resell it on armslist at 100-200% markup.

        • I actually swung by my local Walmart tonight. They haven’t had .22 in stock for a few days and had none for black friday. No 9mm either. They did, however, have at least 30,000 rounds of Federal Lake City XM855 62 grain 5.56 in 1,000 round boxes for $420. Plus lots of other .223 and 5.56 options.

        • Yep – production of .22LR ammo is a total of 10 million rounds per day, roughly 3.6 billion rounds per year (mainly CCI, Federal, Remington, Winchester). The problem is the demand. With 100 million gun owners in the US, all of them owning a .22, that amounts to a production of 36 rounds per gun owner per year. (3,600,000,000 / 100,000,000 = 36) Even if only 10% of gun owners are actively looking for .22 ammo, that is 3.6 billion divided by 10 million = 360 rounds per buyer per year. (Source: Tom Gresham’s “Gun Talk” radio program.)

    • So true about the stores causing some of this S _ _ T!! During black friday last year, I purchased a 22lr. The sales clerk asked me if I needed any ammo with the rifle. I said yes. He pointed to the shelf and asked me if I wanted Remington or Winchester. This was at Big 5 Sporting Goods in the Bay Area. I purchased the rifle around 2:00 p.m. Why did they still have all that 22lr ammo on the shelf at that time of the day? Weird. Now when I go to buy some at the same store, they say it sells out within minutes of opening the shipment. They must be hoarding it under the counter and bringing out a crate of the stuff during black friday.

  2. We have all been had during the past year. Starts from the manufacturers to the idiots buying at insanely high prices.

  3. Non-issue for me. They are not price gouging but rather discounting them. I believe they just wanted to ensure that had enough product for the biggest shopping day of the year.

  4. My theory is that centerfire ammo is more profitable than rimfire ammo so the manufacturers have all been diverting resources to maximize profits since they’ll sell out of whatever they make right away anyway. I can’t condemn someone else for doing the exact same thing I’d do if I were in their position.

    • Not a theory – Federal had stated earlier this year that since they were unable to get sufficient amounts of material to make centerfire primers, they were diverting supplies from the rimfire manufacturing lines. Probably happened to Remington and the others as well.

    • This is what I have thought all along. Rimfire makers have been making primers. The only flaw in my theory is that primers have been scarce too. So WTF do I know.

      • My local gun store has a fairly good selection of primers, and finally powders too (they’ve gradually been building up over the last 2-3 months).

        If companies diverted resources away from .22lr production towards primer production, it seems likely that the overwhelming demand for primers/powder has simply slacked off enough to allow them to start putting more resources into .22lr production.

    • Well it’s no secret there was a run on ammo. I don’t know how long it takes to receive an order of a few hundred extra tons of lead right when there’s a run on it from everyone else, but once you get it if you can turn it into a million dollar profit or a 2 million dollar profit, I’d take the extra million. I’m sure 22LR makes a nice profit under normal circumstances, but I can’t see selling it in 40 grain lots at 4.5 cents per unit and making the same profit as selling it in 55 grain lots at 50 cents.

      • A typical 40gr .22lr cartridge has very little powder, very little brass, and a cast lead bullet.

        A typical 55gr M193 5.56 cartridge has considerably more powder, considerably more brass, and a copper jacketed boat-tail bullet.

        The price difference is based on the increased component weight, and the increased component complexity.

    • Agree. After what they did to customers and Troy after New town I haven’t been back in their store. Not once.

    • I can’t stand going to Dick’s, but where I live there is not much of a choice except Wally World or Gander. I’ve been finding 325 count 40 grain .22lr boxes anytime at a few small mom and pop gun shops at very reasonable prices. On top of that, an employee at my local Dick’s store had the audacity to tell me that the employees get first crack at the ammo when it comes in and if there is any left, it goes on the shelf for the public! WTF?

  6. For the record, my Gander Mountain Black Friday flyer said nothing about “1000 per store” or “limit 10.” The only .22LR in my copy of the flyer was 1400 round buckets of Golden Bullet and it only says “while supplies last,” which means there’s no guarantee that every store even has any.

    My Bass Pro flyer does have 500 round boxes for $25, 300 per store, limit 1. This is solely a device to get you into the store.

    I’m not shopping at any of these places anyway, because they’re all open on Thanksgiving day, and I refuse to support that behavior.

      • Ah, I’ll have to look again. I admit I glossed over the pages of “fuzzy winter fleeces.” Those are only attractive to me if they’re wrapped around an attractive woman.

  7. Cabelas has had 22LR every week available through their website. Last time I was in the store they had a full shelf of CCI mini mags for $9/100. I’ve been getting other brands in quantity of around 500 a week (on average) for $25 or less.

  8. again….if you had not stocked up before all this happened, bad long view.
    not saying to all that you deserved to get boned…but you had to know obama wouldnt be your ally

    • Sadly, there were lots of pro-gun folks duped into voting for Toby the commie. Lets hope they learned their lesson.

      • I did. You better believe that I did. Plus, before Obama was elected, I had no significant income. By the time I got old enough to sit at the adult table, dinner was already cold :/

    • You are correct stockpiling 5 years ago was the way to go, that’s why I still have bricks of .22 most price marked at $15 a brick or less. 7.62 and .223 same thing, most of the .223 price tagged at $2.39, any one remember those prices?

      Yea I could have made a fortune selling at scalper prices, but then I would be in the same boat as every one else. Hunting ammo instead of shooting it. Or bitching about the price gouging.

  9. What is to say there is a stockpile? Just because it is advertised means nothing. Heck that would be smart if I were them, it would get more people in the door. They might have a few but I doubt the quantity is significant. Could just be car dealer tactics where they have 1 or 2 stripped models to advertise at the insane low price but no one ever sees them so they buy something else…..

  10. Our local Gander has the same ad for the 1000 boxes of CCI SV 50ct. But they had the same deal at the end of the summer. A couple of months ago, they had 1200 round ammo cans of CCI Mini Mags. So, they haven’t been hoarding too much.

  11. Selling them at discount is an easy way to increase foot traffic and get people into buying other stuff at the store. Younger folks like myself though are mor prone to wandering big stores just so then we can login somewhere online to buy it at a better price. Small business Saturday though, I’ll be supporting my LGS and making a purchase.

  12. I believe in free enterprise however we need to remember who’s been asking $75.00 for a brick of Fed

  13. The Gander Mountain ad is for 50 round boxes of CCI Standard. 10 per customer at $5 each is just the same as a $50 box of 500, and 1000 per store is just the same as only 100 boxes of 500. That’s not a store hording a stockpile in my eyes.

      • I’m not sure what you are getting at – 1000 boxes of 50 rounds per store is 50,000 total rounds. This is the same as having 100 boxes of 500.

  14. If it were truly a competitive market then supply ought to have caught up by now, as it has with most other calibers. All the ammo manufacturers have loudly proclaimed to the heavens that they were cranking out ammo round the clock, especially .22, yet I haven’t seen or heard of any for sale at my local Walmart for more than a month now, and over the course of the entire year, just a few crumbs compared to last year. And I’m on a first name basis with the department manager in sporting goods. I pretty much gave up on spending time looking for .22LR. Thankfully I managed to build a decent supply at reasonable prices over the course of the year, but I’m hard put to shoot what I have if I can’t replace it.

    Bottom line….somebody’s been lying to us. Probably a lot of people have been lying. It really needs to stop.

    Tom

  16. It’s been coming and going at the local Bi-Mart and Wally World. I just got my one brick allowed 2 weeks ago. Regular price of $18.99 for 500 thunderbolts.
    Federal match, cci mini mags, the 525 round bricks of ?It’s all been trickling in. Slow but sure. Prices have been normal.

  17. Why do people care if stores are open on Thanksgiving day? I had to get gas today to visit family. Shoul I have been stranded? Or maybe the government should shut down all transportation for that day. Better yet send all police and firemen home too.

    Get over yourselves. Some people actually CHOOSE to work on that day, so give it a rest.

    • I’m sure that many retailers asked for volunteers to work today. I’m equally certain that precisely zero of them managed to fully staff their schedule with those volunteers. That means there are people working in retail today that didn’t want to, that disappointed their families when they told them they wouldn’t be at the table today with everyone else. I refuse to support that. If anything, those retail employees deserve today off more than most, because of the hell that the next month of their life is going to be.

      If you’ve worked retail in the last 10 years, but especially in the last 5, you know what I’m talking about, because it gets worse every year. If you haven’t, then you’re not speaking from a position of authority, so save it.

      And for anyone who read that and thought something like “LOL, if you don’t like it, get a real job!” or “If you don’t like it, quit!” well… you can GFY. Twice.

      • Having worked black Friday at target last year, I can agree. No one outside of retail understands. Its like giving facts to MDA…

        I’ll see your 2 GFY’s and raise you a third!

      • I hated Black Friday when I was in retail. Now that I’m out, I don’t venture outside until about 2-3pm, and then it’s mostly to looka t the cheap Blu-Rays (I saw BB here has Alien for 3.99…I’m buying that if they have any left).

  18. My Gander Mountain made no mention of .22 lr ammo and the local Walmarts
    have been in supply a few times a month all year. I have more than enough
    .22lr ammo for myself and now when I see .22lr I buy the 3 boxes Walmart allows and then sell one box each to 3 friends I shoot with who do not have time due to work
    to get to Walmart when they have it in stock.

  19. Our LGS just got 150,000 rounds of .22. At $99.99 a brick, I hope they eat every one of them. Trouble is some idiots will pay that.

  20. Who shoots tons of .22 anyway? A box of .22LR lasts me 10 years, its the 40SW and 5.56 that has been price gouged for the last year. Just like gasoline, supply and demand is no longer part of the equation, there is plenty of it but the prices are up 40% from Dec. 2012. Russian 7.62×39 has returned to pre scare prices, thankfully, but 5.56 and most handgun calibers are still pricey.

    • Hahahahaha
      You need to come fishing with me. If it’s slow, we’ll burn through a thousand rounds in a day. Easy.
      Playing the ‘see if you can hit that’ game.
      Heck, we’ll go back to camp and get more ammo, even if the fish ARE biting.

    • Me. I shoot a hundred rounds through my CZ Kadet conversion every range trip before switching to 9 mm because blowing through 200 rounds of 9 mm every week would make my wallet hurt.

    • I shoot five rounds of 22 for every round of centerfire. Shooting technique is independent of caliber. Do the math.

  21. Think about it though… i would argue that over the past several months, more often than not I’ve bought other crap while I was there looking for ammo, regardless of whether or not I found any ammo…. its GENIUS (and yet, so wrong).

    • Sounds like a lack of self-control on your part. I’ve made quite a few trips to Bass Pro and Gander Mountain, partially, but not solely to see if they had ammo. On the vast majority of those trips, I’ve walked out with empty hands.

  22. …..but where is all the 9 mm!? I’ve been lucky to find some wolf but I had to drive 400 miles to find it!

  23. At a Canadian website they were advertising 5700 rd buckets of .22lr for about $235. Yes we are being royally srewed and no vasoline allowed.

    • 1400 round bucket @ 59.99 = 4.285 cents/round
      5700 round bucket @ 235.00 = 4.123 cents/round

      Say what now?

    • Oh. Exchange rate.

      With the exchange rate of $0.94 US per $1 CD, $235CD = $250US

      5700 round bucket @ 250.00 = 4.386 cents/round

      I still don’t see the problem

  24. I’ve been visiting my local Gander Mountain pretty frequently this year to stock up on .22. For the first 9 months of the year, at least 1 out of every 2 weeks they would get pretty large shipments of .22, and if you were there earlier enough, you could score a pretty big load of ammo. Recently however and quite suddenly I noticed they went weeks without any significant stock for this caliber and had started to wonder if they were beginning to stockpile some of this for some holiday promotion. After seeing their latest flyer, it seems reasonable to assume that at least some stockpiling was going on. Regardless, although GM has always had a higher mark-up than my LGS, they were very fair and reasonable to their customers during this year’s Fire-Armageddon and did not raise their prices beyond their standard markup. If anything, I’m more disturbed that they decided to open on Thanksgiving than anything else.

  25. I put 5000 CCI mini-mag on back order at Midwest about 4 weeks ago. They just started letting people back order again. It took about 2 weeks and i received notice that it was in. Also picked up another 500 rounds that day. Over the last six months I purchased about 6000 rounds of Federal 22LR from Wal-mart. 22LR has been hard to get, but not impossible. Oh, and the price on the CCI was $6.69/100, the federal was a little cheaper.

    • One of the hidden price increases when demand is surging and prices are climbing is lower quality. In that way, dollar for dollar, a consumer is actually getting even less purchasing power during a panic than the higher price alone would indicate. It’s like when you see people eagerly buying hand loaded FMJ from Joe Bob’s basement for prices much higher than they ever would have paid for top tier hollow points before the panic. The prices are higher, sure, but factor in the quality, even safety, differential, and the *real* price for what you’re buying is even higher than you thought.

      Now, I don’t know anything specific about your LGS or the rifle brands they represent, so I won’t comment on that specifically. I am only cautioning people against thinking that every rifle manufactured during price run-up is guaranteed to be of a quality level consistent with those manufactured during the pre-panic period. For that reason, I would put off buying a new AR for a year or so, even at “discount prices”, as the 2013 production batches make their way through the supply chain. Caveat emptor.

      • MidAmerica Arms is the vague remnant offspring of a thing that used to be known as “Shooting Systems” and made gear under the handle of “Assault Systems”. Divorce, kickbacks, and a bunch of other little malfeasances killed the original – which interestingly enough, featured the involvement of the “Double Tap” guy…

        SS moved more guns that anyone in the STL back in the day, and they did it the way Charles Schmitt used to move more Rolls-Royce product than anyone else in the country when he was the big dog. Very sketchily…

        But to be in there during the halcyon days when the Chrysler plant was just on across the highway, they moved guns on payday like McD’s selling cheeseburgers. It was kinda cool.

  28. OK, so I wanted to see what all the hype was about, so I went into Dick’s Sporting Goods earlier this evening, right when they opened at 8. They had easily 200 of the 535 round bricks of Remington Golden Bullet for $19.99, limit one per customer. I said screw it and bought one since it was the first .22LR I had seen at pre-craziness prices in a long, long time.

  29. To my ears, “I believe in free enterprise/the free market, but………..” is a WHOLE lot like “I support the Second Amendment, but……….”

    Either you do or you don’t. Lets dispense with the situational principles and fluid morality, shall we? Nobody’s hoarding anything, except for your buddies, and YOU. How many times have we heard it in here where somebody brags about hoovering up all of whatever major caliber they can find at any of the ten stores on their daily ammo hunt route? And to do what with it? Re-sell on gunbroker? Stockpile it in their closet, eh wolverine?

    Look, I’m not going to conduct an entire Principles of Microeconomics course here; space and time being limited. So let’s just say that of the several major factors that impact Demand, one of the most important of them is consumer expectations. Speculators/profiteers/gougers, whatever we want to call them, actually do have a place in the market: they provide a signal to suppliers not only about current scarcity, but of anticipated scarcity, as well. That’s a very valuable mechanism because it allocates resources not only from less profitable uses from one good/service to another in the present, but also from one time period to another. Such speculators can make mistakes, though, just like any other economic actor can read the market incorrectly.

    I think a great many people, individuals and retailers alike, have overplayed their hand and probably are sitting on larger stocks of ammunition than they normally would carry. It’s not so much a matter of hoarding or “creating a shortage”, because any single player is insignificant, as it is simply waiting for prices to top out so they can sell on the peak. Well.

    We’re past the peak, my friends, and people are starting to get anxious. So you see more on the shelves and prices sliding. You get all the same email alerts that I do: You can get 1,000 rounds of .223 any number of places for not too much over $400 today. Still a bit higher than pre-panic, but much lower than the buck+ per round back in early 2013. You’re seeing what economists call the “bullwhip” effect play out with increasing force across all calibers. Retailers and manufacturers will soon rush to unload their ramped up supply, causing prices tumble as nobody wants to be the last one with excess inventory on their hands when prices reach their bottom. This happens in the commodities and financial markets pretty much every day to various degrees; but that doesn’t normally make headlines unless it’s across the board.

    • +1
      I knew an employee at a major gun store, he told me to buy elsewhere or to simply hold off on any ammo purchases. They had plenty of stock on hand, but they weren’t putting it all out or selling it at the normal prices, content to let us think “OMG AMMO! I’LL BUY IT EVEN IF THE PRICE IS HIGHER THAN IT SHOULD BE!” whenever they put a few boxes out.

      …And that’s when I started going to mom and pop gun stores.

    • Your long-winded verbosity has a major detail missing. Speculators in the middle. That is the real reason gas prices went. It creates an artificial supply and demand.

      • Hmmm……..except that I explicitly addressed speculators, which you missed in your haste to lambaste.

        Speculators don’t “artificially” drive up prices. They rationally and very importantly provide the market signal that supply in the *future* is expected to even more scarce than today, so that supply should be ramped up today to address that anticipated greater scarcity in the future. In other words, in addition to the price mechanism communicating which are the highest values uses today, prices also, through speculators’ actions, communicate which are the expected highest value uses tomorrow.

        The vital function speculators play is to allocate resources across times, as well as across uses. They and their expectations can be wrong, of course, and they’ll pay the price by losing their shirts; but there’s nothing “artificial” about it.

        • The kind of speculating I was talking about regarding gas does in fact drive up the prices artificially when they are in between the source and supplier and serve no real role in securing, producing and supplying said product. The reason that works so well with gasoline is the limited refinery capacity in the U.S.A.

        • I understand that it’s a tricky concept to get, so I’m not blaming you. It either clicks or it doesn’t. What many take for granted in an introductory micro course (or just about any other discipline, for that matter) is actually the distilled and prettied up presentation of at least several centuries of work of men and women of genius. I get that you’re focused on physical supply and transportation and storage and distribution of items and that all of that constitutes the legitimate value of something. Speculators stepping in an buying everything up means there’s less of it and therefore what is less goes for a higher price. Hence, artificial price increases. I get it, but it’s just wrong. It’s misunderstanding of the market dynamics.

          Speculators aren’t causing shortages, they’re alleviating them. You see their scooping up buying habits and see that they’re leaving nothing for others. In reality, the undersupply already exists and is expected, by the speculators, to get worse. They’re looking down the road at even worse future scarcity, so they’re getting theirs now. That’s a good thing because it prompts suppliers to ramp up production sooner rather than later to meet that looming scarcity. Think of it as a yellow light giving you a heads up that the light is changing from green to red. Speculators smooth out the flow of goods/services by regulating people’s pace of purchases, just as yellow lights smooth out traffic flow by regulating people’s speed as they approach intersections. I know, it’s not a perfect analogy, but space is limited and there’s a lot of background I’m skipping over.

          Let me put it this way and this will be it: if speculators could artificially create shortages, reap unearned profits and never suffer consequences, they why isn’t everyone be a speculator all of the time? Permanently? Why don’t prices surge by double, triple, quadruple, quintuple or more digit percentages every few days, hours, minutes, forever? Why doesn’t everyone accumulate ever increasing massive stocks of goods in their personal stashes forever? One doesn’t actually have to have the answer to those questions to acknowledge, at least, that an answer to them does exist and that that answer can only exonerate speculators of the artificial price increaser charge.

    • The problem was created by major retailers keeping prices below market clearing levels. I know they did it for customer relations but they created a classic arbitrage situation. It became profitable to go to every Dicks and Walmart, buy as much as they could at more or less normal price and then resell it on gun broker for a big profit. Had the retailers raised their prices the arbitragers would have been squeezed out We all would have paid more for ammo but we would at least have some. Price controls distort the market whether enforced by the government or corporate policy.

  30. Do you have anything to back up that you “have confirmation that it most definitely is” with regards to retailers stockpiling .22 ammo? Can you reveal the source of this confirmation? The rest of what is written in this post is insufficient.

  32. I am one who believes that retail WORKERS have a lot to do with the “shortage” of 22lr for mere mortals. I happened to pick up 2 bricks of 22lr at Walmart a couple weeks ago. Only reason I did is I spotted it in a locker under the counter. Asked the clerk for it, she looked right at it and said “we don’t have any.”

    I then pointed at the 5 or so bricks in the locker under the counter, told here I wanted two of them, and watched her huff at me, check them into inventory, and sell them to me without ever making eye contact. I’m sure they were being saved for friends and family.

    • I’ve been told my local walwart workers are “diverting” the inventory for their friends. I would love to get some proof that this is going on and then sue Walmart for millions for violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. Yes, it would apply since the bad eggs are thier employees and it is a violation since their employees are discriminating against all customers.

  33. I simply waved the white flag and gave up. I’m not spending $50 for a brick of .22lr – no way – sorry.

    I bought a Gamo air rifle and have started plinking cans and spinners in the back yard until this insanity stops. If enough buyers simply check out of the market, things will return to normal.

    For now, my 4000 rounds of .22lr sits on the shelf until the market regains its sanity. I’m not shooting it until I can replace it for reasonable prices.

    -ted

  34. I can’t comment on any store but Bass, but while Bass is doing that promotion, my local store has had .22LR on the shelf since it opened earlier year. Every time I’ve gone it they’ve had something, usually a bulk box of 300 or more rounds. The worse they do is not stock it all at once, so it lasts longer.

  35. ok editors, seriously? Can we not turn this gun forum into another attack of the 149th Tinfoil Hat Brigade (Grassy Knoll!)? This guy has “confirmation” (uncited) that there is a massive conspiracy by every major retailer to price gouge, and somehow the gigantic network of independent gun shops and internet outlets didn’t screw them by continuing to sell ammo? There is a problem, and I don’t know exactly what it is. But I do know that retailers sitting on a week or two’s supply to have something for Black Friday isn’t causing the shortage, and the fact that you give credence to this jackhole’s economically illiterate rambling only makes you look bad.

  36. I have been at the stores mentioned on black friday. Yet there is no 22 ammo for sale? I think we can safely say it is all Bush’s fault. Yep lets blame him.

  37. I caved into my wifes plea for company on black friday, But on the condition that it be at cabelas. Im inclined to think that there is something going on with 22 ammo, considering all other ammo was available and sitting on the shelves. they were pushing the little wooden boxes of 300 rnds into every camo jacketed person that had their hand out, my wife and I accepted 2 boxes even tho we have about 8000 rounds of the stuff in the bottom of a closet already thats been collecting dust in the last 10 yrs waiting for me to buy another .22 rifle.

  38. I don’t believe that they were hoarding ammo for over a year.. The demand has died down from what it was a year ago. We do know that in many cases various employees where cherry picking the shipments for various calibers. However the people in the firearms community who panicked are still to blame for the ongoing ammo shortages. Also the middleman market of ammo buyers, gaugers and resellers still hasn’t completely disappeared.. Production has caught up, but some manufacturers will be filling orders that were placed in late 2012 for the next two years. The reason there are now specials on bulk boxes is because the orders that were placed last year have now just been filled.

  39. Homeland security is buying it up and destroying it is the word I got from the last gun show. Why you ask, they lost on gun control so destroy ammo thus destroying the interest in shooting. The 22 LR is what every kid cuts his teeth on and if you ween the kid from shooting the interest down the road is lost. Give it some thought because the info came from a sheriff who seen the paperwork for the destruction of said ammo.

  40. I don’t really buy all those conspiracy theories. But I did buy 3 boxes of 375 CCI 22lr at my local wallyworld this morning. I bought a real sweet Ruger hunter at Gander Mountain and they couldn’t even get me a box. I think that’s really sad, when you really think about it. I figured I’d try Walmart to see how difficult it really was. Surprisingly all the conspiracy stuff I heard was totally untrue. I got there around 8:30. I went over by the ammo cage and seen it was full of 22 and all kinds of other ammo. Just an old man was standing there waiting for assistance with me. I told him I’ll get the salesman. All he wanted was 3 small 100 count boxes of CCI 22lr. I would have preferred the 550 brick of Federal for the same price as my CCI 375 count, but you can’t be picky if CCI is all they had stocked in 22lr. I heard the CCI 22 tactical is real accurate and clean so I should have some good shooting now. Just figured I’d let you guys know it’s not that bad as long as you get there fairly early.

    • My SIG Mosquito gobbles up CCI AR Tactical (in the blue box). I’ve had much better luck with that than with the Federal Auto-Match.

  41. Well its January now and there’s still no .22 ammo at this month’s Dixie Gun Classic. So its NOT a Black Friday hoarding thing

    ATK is a major ammunition producer that owns the CCI, Federal Premium, Fusion, Speer, Estate Cartridge and Blazer ammunition brands. They said:…

    “The current market and environment is causing stronger than usual demand for products in our industry. The current increase in demand is attributed to the civilian market. Our facilities operate 24-hours a day. We are continually making process improvements to increase our efficiency and investing in capital and personnel where we have sustained demand. We are bringing additional capacity online again this year.”

    So check out how much ammo was made 2 years ago vs today.

  42. I don’t know who to believe, the people that say they know that 22LR manufactures are at 100% production or the ones that hope they are and that the demand it greater than production. I would rather see 2013 production numbers from the manufactures than listen to the people that only assume. I am so tired of trying to circumvent the Walmart Ammo Gangs that buy all of the available 22LR each week only to double the price and sell it at gun shows and on Craigslist More than 95% of Walmart 22LR ammo is bought by less than 1% of its customers

    • Dealers need to set higher prices if they want to keep product on the shelves — if a person can buy 1000 rounds at a retail store for $50 and then turn it around to sell it that afternoon for $100, the price at the retail store is set too low for the market. The market price for ammo is $100, not $50 — and that varies depending on the geographical area.

  44. I asked the guys at various stores how they can run out of ammo so quickly. Every reply I got back was the same people are showing up at the stores before they open have several people togethere go in separately buy everything they can then head to the internet jack up the price 1000% and resell to the fools who buy it If everybody could quit buying internet ammo for 1 month I think we could force these jackasses to bankruptcy.

  45. If you’re looking for .22 or any other caliber that isnt a price gouge then you should check out a place in Tennessee, called Northside Gun Shop. These guys not only sell .380 and the infamous .22LR at great prices but they sell top notch AR’s that are much better than your typical Colt and Daniel Defense, except they’re half the price.

  46. Just dont buy! Keep what u have, let the DAMN shelves fill up. they have done us wrong again, we the people have more power if we pull together.tough it out for awhile dont give in. same goes for hunting license.

  47. Looking back when the world was going to end in 2012 and a lot of us out and maxed out credit cards on guns ammo long term food storage, the shelves were cleaned out and since then in every town across America small groups of people are cleaning out stores every morning hording them to sell to us at $50 to
    ($115.00 on ammo sites) for 500 rounds. We all need to stop buying from these people they will have to stop buying and the shelves will fill again. BUT WE ALL HAVE TO STOP BUYING THEM. The fact is these hoarders are making more than retailers, mfg. As for retailers hording they keep enough on hand for people who buy a gun, other wise it all goes up for sale. And the way ammo is today that’s only the right thing to do..

  48. Personally I agree, but it’s probably more of a way to fuel us gun nuts into buying 100x more ammo and supplies than we need. I have bought like 2,000 rds of bullets over the last two years because they are out of stock most of the year. if I live another 60yrs I will never shoot 1k rds of 270, 308, and buckshot. Even if doomsday came to pass, I would probably starve before killing 2,000 of my plundering neighbors. We are dumbasses scared into buying far more guns/ammo than we need.

  49. If you buy in a store you can pay cash. No record you bought ammo.

    If you buy online presumably you used a credit card. You have a paper trail.

    I don’t know for sure if this is significant, but if I was worried about being watched,
    i would worry.

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