I noticed it earlier this month. At our local Walmart, even with their “we have no .22 ammo for sale” sign up, they had 50-round boxes in their sales case. And on my shopping spree to Utah for some new ice fishing gear and tackle, I saw .22 ammo at all three of the major sporting goods stores. Of course some of it was weird stuff I would not like to shoot, such as sub sonic, and the prices are sky high, but it was there.
But did you know why?
New shooters, profiteers, panic buyers, electronic technology, and China.
It’s been just a little over two years since the United States had an overnight eight million new shooters join the past time of shooting, and self-protection. Of course the profiteers joined in buying everything in sight with panic buyers. And finally you can add buyers setting automatic alerts in their web browsers notify them when an in-stock status has changed for buying online. Then add the millions of firearms chambered for .22 long rifle already. This put the over exceeding demand to manufactures to fail in their ability to meet the supply, and has driven price’s through the roof for what has been available.
Another thing to look at that drove high prices of ammo up was raw and recycled material to produce ammo. And that reason was China. China a few years ago became a major financial powerhouse and its demands to build and expand within its own country saw the need to buy from other countries raw and recycled material such as tin, lead, brass, and copper. With the loss of raw material, and expensive recycled lead I have seen two of my favorite cast bullet company’s close their doors. Of course with the EPA outlawing lead wheel weights a few years ago ended that venue too.
With the high demand, slow resupply of ammo, reloading has become more popular. But even component’s such as brass, bullets, powder, and primers where hit hard on market. Just one bullet with nothing else to reload a round for my .338 Winchester magnum cost $1. But components are returning to stores shelves slowly again. If you are interested in learning reloading, and don’t have a friend to show you, I have seen a college course for reloading advertise.
This is the third time I have seen this happen, and all three times have happened in the last 20 years.
While watching an outdoors show recently, they showed a loading machine in a factory that was producing one million rounds of .22 ammo each hour.
And that was 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with close to 700 million rounds a month; it only stopped for routine maintenance. This was just one machine, from one factory. That shows you just how high the demand is for .22 ammo.
Things are looking up, and hopefully soon with the return supply of ammunition, the prices will drop too.
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