Kinda weird how the ammo shelves are still empty. I mean, the demand is there and has been for years. Why can’t I walk in and buy 22 longs?
--they are concentrating on the big sellers ( .223,.308,9 m/m,.45 ACP)--.22 rimfire is low margin and more difficult to manufacture---
If you have a WALMART or Academy near you, find out what day they get their shipments. Get there early, and you can likely buy three bricks every delivery day.
“...Why can’t I walk in and buy 22 longs?”
Because 22 Longs, rigorously speaking, have not been in demand much. The last guns made in this country chambering those cartridges, and those only, went out of production before 1914.
If Art is thinking of 22LR (Long Rifle, postdating the Long by several years and today’s most common rifmire cartridge), there are plenty of factors that constrain higher production rates.
Ammunition manufacture is more complicated, risky, and exacting than gun manufacture. Profit margins are also lower, and raw materials have become tougher to obtain, in great measure thanks to foreign competition.
A rimfire cartridge is less complex and less powerful, but making of rimfire ammunition is more complex and dangerous than other types, while promising less return on investment.
Contrary to what many forum members apparently believe, demand has increased a great deal recently, especially since the school shooting in Connecticut.
Many assume - breezily - that ammunition producers can expand to meet demand without much delay, fuss, or expenditure. Not so: producers were turning out cartridges at top rates before 2012. Going higher would entail more headaches.
New ammunition plants, and production machinery needed to equip them, are more costly and take longer to build than in any other sector of the gun industry.
Such problems must be confronted by established manufacturers who already know what they are doing; entrepreneurs and other hopefuls not yet in the business face all the same problems, plus many more (learning the trade themselves, finding and training workers, securing their own raw materials, attracting a customer base, forging a reputation).
Depressingly, no bad situation exists which cannot be made worse by government regulation. Workplace safety rules, labor compliance rules, environmental regulation
(just to name a few) all pose more problems for ammunition manufacture than the making of most other products that might be of interest to the gun buying public.
And this infers that the regulators are knowledgeable, interested, and honest. Dare we assume so these days?
Since the regulatory establishment has been captured by Leftists and radical environmental interests, one can longer assume regulators are friendly. They pose even greater problems for ammunition producers, new and old.