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Posted by David Sherman on Sunday, May 03, 2009 at 20:46:26 :
In Reply to: Gun Shows? posted by Dave Speed on Sunday, May 03, 2009 at 19:32:11 :
Where are you at? I'm always surprised at how many gun shows I stumble upon around here. They don't seem to be advertised much, and sometimes they're just in the school gymnasium, but somehow people find out about them and there's always a good turnout. I bet there are more gun shows in your neck of the woods than you think there are. The big-time ammo dealers, however, only seem to go to the big shows. Ammo at small shows is usually just collectible stuff and homebrew reloads.
The only cheap ammo (in the $.17 range) I've seen this year is 5.45x39 (AK-74, steel core FMJ), and Tokarev pistol ammo. Surplus 7.62x54R is still available is hasn't gone up too much. The best deals consistently seem to be Sportsman's Guide, especially since their shipping is reasonable (ammo is heavy) and you always get a coupon that just about covers the freight on orders over $100. Once in a while one of the other on-line dealers has something good, but the glory days of cheap foreign mil-surplus ammo are gone thanks to the UN "traffic in arms" treaty. .50 BMG has actually been coming down in price, strangely enough. It's not down to the $1.50/round that it was before Talon went out of business, but it's down from about $6/round to $3 if you shop around.
The only component that seems scarce/expensive is primers. They're simply not available. Powder and bullets only went up a little bit. I don't reload so I haven't followed it very closely. Primers are one of those things that are pretty hard to make yourself. You can save your brass (or pick it up where the yahoos go to blast away at junk), you can make your own bullets if they don't need to be fancy, and if books are to be believed, it's even possible to make your own gunpowder, but making primers is beyond the capability of a back-yard workshop. The chemistry is non-trivial (you don't just buy a jar of lead styphnate at the drug store), and I'm not even sure it's legal. Even if it is, messing with pounds of a chemical that is eager to explode even in pin-head sized blobs would scare me. Tap on it just a little too hard and there goes you, your garage, and all your neighbors' windows. I'm all for doing things myself, even I have my limits.
I'm still pretty sure the ammo shortages are just a bad combination of panic buying based on fear of Obama and fear of economic collapse, combined with heavy buying by the DoD and law enforcement (there is still a war on, the last I heard), combined with a lot of dealers who waited last summer to see if prices would come down and then got stuck with no inventory and placed huge orders all at once. Ammo prices last summer jumped just like all commodities did. When the prices of lead, copper, and zinc tripled within a couple years, ammo had to jump too. There's definitely also a certain amount of speculation and profiteering going on. I've seen .223 advertised as high as $700/1000 rounds these days, when $250 would be about normal.