You think this ammo shortages is just a ploy to make more money? Gun owners ammo consumption is not much. Can you imagine if war break out tomorrow. We will spiting at the enemies
No it’s not a ploy. US military, consumes something on the order of 2 billion rounds of ammo per year. The US civilian market is roughly 8 billion rounds. Us military demand could quadruple and at worst, there’d be civilian to military shift in production. Yeah, yeah same deal some of it is rimfire, .45LC, etc. but centerfire Ammo lines can pretty quick be converted to 5.56 and 7.62 production.
On top of that the military (the US military anyway) like a good prepper sits on tons and tons of reserve ammunition supplies. Now they might run out of JDAMs and cruise missiles fast, but they’ve got on the order of tens of thousands of rounds per individual soldier (their annual turn over is on the order of 1400 rounds per deriving member of the Army Per year. Doesn’t matter if they are an intelligence clerk, a nurse, or a grunt. Actual war fighters I’d imagine that works out to more like 3k rounds a year.
And civilian production could again shift fairly rapidly (though it might largely be producing M193 and not M855A1 and M80 and not M80A1)
Ammo manufacturers don’t typically sit on large reserves. They do just in time manufacturing. Why incur the cost of having a months factory production sitting around? That’s margins you are cutting in to.
Same reason our hospitals didn’t have a bunch of PPE sitting around. That costs money. Just buy what you need every week.
We’ve just in timed ourselves up a creek.
