My local Walmarts are always out of stock because the employees buy and resell online instead of putting on the shelves. There is a shortage.
I am not buying this line of reasoning. Walmart, Academy etc. are slowly getting more stock and selling them at a reasonable market price. Unfortunately the demand is greater than the supply and is probably about 50% more than two years ago relative to price.
This is good as it means supply is getting close to demand. What one must really worry about is when there is NO SUPPLY!
Do not blame Walmart, Academy etc. The blame for elevated prices is fear of government.
I haven’t even looked, I have plenty.
My best friend owns a gunshop. You are wrong.
Less people shooting centerfire for enjoyment because they can’t afford it any longer, so it naturally puts a heavier demand on the rimfire.
I haven’t noticed a shortage of ammo for several months. Certain reloading components remain difficult to find however.
What happens in reality is that the sellers are lowering the price, and some buyers decide to buy some more for those lower prices. In the end the natural market forces bring the prices to some sensible level - no matter where the ammo is sold, in stores or on Web sites.
The shortage can be only explained by demand that is higher than production. But I do not understand where would higher demand come from. I haven't bought .22LR in couple of years; it's not a good hunting round, I use .17HMR for that. Limited availability should automatically reduce the demand among those who cannot reach far and wide in search of the ammo. I also do not see people around me who, out of the blue, would get a .22LR firearm and start practicing like mad. The only feasible explanation is that production is reduced, or bought out right off the assembly lines. There are government-level players with deep pockets who can afford such an operation. They can even pay good money for shutting those lines down, and they can order the manufacturers to be silent about that.
Still, it would be weird that .22LR got subjected to such manipulation. It is not a very useful round for anything but training at short distances. If the government wants to disarm the population, it would first try to undermine serious rounds, like .223 and above - and the easiest way to attack those is by restricting availability of primers.
I have a single .22 rifle. It’s from the 1930s and is a manual-load single shot bolt action. It’s the only thing I have that fires .22 rimfire.
Still, I have a few thousand rounds of Aguila SSS Subsonic for it, and can’t ever imagine shooting it all up in my lifetime.
When I saw it was selling for $0.30/round, my wig almost flew off. Who on Earth needs .22 rimfire so much that they’d be willing to pay that price for it?
Instead of theories, you need math.
Prior to the ammo crisis, the U.S. had spare manufacturing capability for an extra 2 Billion rounds of ammo.
Well, what if 100 people in each state were buying a single brick of .22?
That’s 100 people * 1,000 round brick * 50 states = 5 million rounds.
Times 365 days = 1.825 Billion rounds.
Poof! There goes the entire spare manufacturing capability of .22!
It just takes 100 people in each state buying a single brick of .22.
100 people buying a single box of .22, per above, and you’ve got yourself the ammo-equivalent of a bank run!
Math is an amazing thing...
I traded 5 rifles last year for motorcycles, got some outstanding deals, I have 12 now, 4 Goldwings, one is a 95 the other an 85, a 95 Yamaha Virago, an 89 Yamaha Venture Royale. They all run.
Would have cost me over $10,000, maybe more if I paid cash, instead I just traded some guns I have not fired in a decade, now I have several calibers of excess ammo.
I’ve been able to buy all the .22LR I want at Dicks Sporting Goods for the past 6 weeks or so, but I get CCI Stingers online from Midway.
I buy it online all the time with no problem.
It is all falling in to the bottom of lakes with all the guns out there. There are lot of unseaworthy gun owners out there
Delusional.
This is happening everywhere?
Is there not a single honest man in the land.
Oh, right...they are ALL conspiring against YOU.
You might want to look up paranoia.
My last order for .22 w/ Cabela’s was made in Dec 2012, and hasn’t been filled yet. I get a new backorder notice each month.
It's possible that they're using it all up on a weekly basis but frankly, I doubt it.
People don’t seem to appreciate a key tipping point in the supply and demand curve. So long as a stable product is available on demand, demand itself tends to remain low relatively. The moment the demand for that product exceeds supply, demand tends to spike. This is most dramatically seen in gas shortages: nobody worries about getting gas, then just fills up whenever they need it, but the moment there’s any hint of gas being not available, everybody races out and buys up as much as they can topping off whatever containers they can. Likewise, ammunition supply behaves the same. People do not buy all that much ammo a time usually, but when there’s any hint of a shortage everybody wants to buy up as much ammunition as they can - so the demand triples quadruples or more overnight. The supply-chain empties out and suddenly we have a real shortage just because there was a very slight shortage briefly. Of course done this inspires lots of conspiracy theorists to claim all kinds of absurd schemes going on by evildoers in the background.