what was it like in 2008? (run on ammo/reloading supplies)

[vujade]

I wasn't reloading back in 2008. I experienced the shortages on ammo; I remember buying my 380 LCP but couldn't get rounds for at least several weeks.

I would hear stories of reloading supplies being hard to find but never really experienced it since I wasn't into that then.

Can someone explain what it was like? What items were hard to find? (was it just primers or powders or bullets or all the above? Were some sizes/calibers harder to find than others?) What prices/price increases did you see? Did prices go back down? I assume since less people reload than just shoot, the shortages of reloading supplies were just a fraction of what the shortages of ammo was?

I know gun stores are probably busier now but there seems to be no sign of any shortages/price gouging (not yet and hopefully just not).

[GlockSpock]

I remember going into Sportsman's Warehouse in Chattanooga and only seeing one firearm on the wall: A cowboy style single action revolver. I also remember seeing a Glock magazine (standard capacity) sell for close to $50 at a show (perhaps they still do, haven't been to a show since).

(This is answering the "What was it like in 2008?" question. I didn't and still don't pay much attention to reloading supplies, although I'd love to I currently don't have room in the rental I live in. Perhaps someday...) Edited November 12, 2012 by CZ9MM

[Guest Grout]

a lot like it was in 93,couldn't find primers for several months then the panic subsided and they reappeared.Hi cap mags were sky high however because the sale of new ones had been banned.

[scoutfsu]

I'm always a little amazed when I read about people asking these sorts of questions (not a knock on you).....

I bought my 1st G17 in 2000....I remember $100+ G17 mags...

Here's the thing about magazines - they're ultimately disposable items. When they begin to malfunction, toss them or mark them accordingly for drill. You can [b][i]never [/i][/b]have enough...

Same with reloading components and ammo. The price only goes up. It's not like it's going to go bad (w/in reason) and you're most likely going to use it anyways. Buy in bulk, however you need to arrange it. A recent example is 55gr .224.....it was going for around $70 per 1k.....now it's around $100+ per 1k. That's only in the past few months. It used to be even cheaper. Everything is up across the board. It might go down a little but ultimately it will keep going up. You can't go wrong buying early and stocking up. The worst that happens is you use it.

[TGO David]

I wouldn't toss any mags... I'd simply buy new springs.

[ttocswob]

At the end of the 2008, ocasionally hunting, I only had .22, .38, and 12 gauge, about 2 dozen rounds combined. So I went to local wally...

[i]They didn't have any.[/i]

Well, a few boxes of shotgun, mostly target, no slugs or buck. No .22 or .38 spl. at all.

Panicked - went to everything within driving distance - box or two at a time. Signed up for HCP class, and finally found .38 for the snubby - one box of 50, a week before qualifying, no practice.

Slowly stocked up, as ammo returned. A box or two per payday. Got into C&R. Found TGO, et al. Got a Lee anniversary kit and started reloading.

Won't happen again.

[Hershmeister]

It took 2-3 years for ammo and reloading prices to reset

[gregintenn]

Prices were inflated, and shelves were bare save for a few boxes of bird shot. I recall one guy at the Nashville gunshow selling 380 ammo for $100 per box. I vowed to never buy anything from that jerk then or ever.

[RobertNashville]

It was a very peaceful time for me...I just waited for all the idiot buying to die down and then went back to doing what I always do.

[Guest Lester Weevils]

Yep unless you wanted 12 ga shotgun ammo, stores and online ordering didn't have much to choose from. Had to "make do" with what happened to be for sale, rather than using what I was accustomed to use. And sometimes nothing at all was for sale, which encouraged hoarding behavior and buying a lot of whatever might come available.

Haven't gone looking for primers lately, but a few months ago small pistol primers were already getting scarce, especially if picky enough to want a particular brand.

[vujade]

interesting read guys.

I try to stock up when I can but with family and bills, it's hard to do when especially when I tend to shoot a lot. =)

Reloading has helped but I only started that a few months ago. Never too late to start right!

[vujade]

another curiosity; how bad was it during the Clinton ban years? I heard of high cap mags going for over $100. Was that the price tag and no one was buying or were shelves empty and so folks can command those types of prices and folks would actually buy them?

I'm also curious - I assume you all knew when the AWB was coming, there must have been some major panic buying the months that lead up to it? and then all quiet during those 10 years? I imagine some folks who already had a decent stash, just laid low and waited for the 10 years to pass?

I'm slowly building some inventory like I said, part of me asking this is if I should concentrate on buying primers because powder and bullets will always be available or did you all have issues finding powder or bullets as well. i figure brass will always be pretty readily available.

[S&WForty]

I had only had my first pistol for about a year when we had the panic four years ago. It sucked trying to find .40 S&W just to spend quality time with my pistol.

I remember when I bought my first 100 rd box of WWB it was either $22.97 or $24.97 at WalMart. It increased some to around $26.97 due to increased raw material costs prior to Obama winning the election. For the last few months it was $34.97. It had been $28.97 or $29.97 for most of of the last two years.

I wonder where it's headed now...

[Dolomite_supafly]

I can't remember hearing anything about the AWB before it passed. The 1986 MG ban was also passed unexpectedly. I think the next round will be the same. We will wake up one morning and our hobby will never be the same.

As far as finding reloading supplies I had no problems as long as I was patient. I could never walk into a place and find primers, which were the hardest thing to find. But I would ALWAYS ask when they expect more in. Most times they didn't know but there were a few shops that knew when they were receing them. And I made sure to show up to buy what I needed, not everything. I had one place set back about 5x what I needed. I grabbed what I needed and put the rest on the shelf for them. After I paid for what I had I turned around and the shelf was bare.

Powder was always available as was bullets.

22's were a little hard to buy. Not hard to find but hard to get without being marked up. I watched some dealers with storefronts come in and buy every bit of .22 ammo at Walmart for $15 a brick. And as the customers were getting upset the dealers would tell the customers to come to XXXXXXX gunshop to buy this ammo for $30 a brick. I seen it several times by the same dealer. We all forget all too soon how some of these dealers feed us fear monger stories to convince we need to buy ammo at 3x the cost. These are the same dealers who mark guns way up then try to fear customers into buying them. I remember and they are the ones who will never see a red dime of mine.

Dolomite

[Raoul]

What's weird is that it took so long for people to panic. Last time it got bad the runup to the election. This time it seems to have been delayed until just before the election. Maybe everyone knew McCain didn't have a snowball's chance.
This time Karl had us convinced we might take it back.

[Oh Shoot]

[quote name='vujade' timestamp='1352760320' post='844480']
another curiosity; how bad was it during the Clinton ban years? I heard of high cap mags going for over $100. Was that the price tag and no one was buying or were shelves empty and so folks can command those types of prices and folks would actually buy them?[/quote]

???

No hi-cap mags were on shelves because new ones couldn't be made and sold. Only existing pre-ban ones could, which just like machine guns after the '86 ban, meant that the prices soared since there was a finite number of them available. And yes, people paid exorbitant prices for them.

- OS Edited November 13, 2012 by OhShoot

[dlm37015]

if the gunshow in tulsa is anything like whats coming look out.my supplier of brass and surplus powder told me this morning supplies are very short.

[Guest Lester Weevils]

[quote name='Raoul' timestamp='1352762752' post='844504']
What's weird is that it took so long for people to panic. Last time it got bad the runup to the election. This time it seems to have been delayed until just before the election. Maybe everyone knew McCain didn't have a snowball's chance.
This time Karl had us convinced we might take it back.
[/quote]

That is a possibility. OTOH I haven't gone nuts stockpiling because I'm already stockpiled fairly wide and deep. Maybe I'm not the lone ranger and a lot of people have better-stocked hoards than in 2008.

However, I really did expect Romney to win, at least until the day before the election. Had planned to vote Johnson rather than Romney, expecting that Romney would not do a significantly better job than Obama. Because R's don't seem to have got significantly smarter than when they screwed the pooch under GWB. I expected that if the R's win, they would just screw it up again. Screwed up in a different fashion than the D's, but overall screwed up just as bad as the D's have managed.

Hadn't been paying attention to the election, but it seemed that Obama just wasn't popular enough to hang on to it. That people were ready to jump from the fire back into the frying pan for at least the next four years. The day before election day I looked at the RCP averages and it looked dicier than expected. A long row to hoe for Romney to win. Maybe a lot of people never studied RealClearPolitics and believed propaganda spewed from orifices of right wing talking heads. Or wishful thinking.

Wonder how much of the building shortage might be "shortage speculators" buying up components, expecting to large future profit on resale?

[Clod Stomper]

I do remember the build-up to the passage of the '94 AWB. I bought plenty of mags for what I had even though I was in college at the time. I really didn't expect the law to pass (as I said in another thread), but I do believe in prudent caution.

I was in Sports Unlimited, or whatever its name was at the time, in the Windsor Square shopping center in West Knox when the clerk told me that the AWB had been passed. I was flabbergasted. It was right then that I bought several Mec-Gar mags for my Taurus PT-99. They hadn't even had time to mark them up yet.

It took a lot of deal-making, arm-twisting and probably even fellating to get the bill through, even in the Dem controlled House. But it did pass. I have no doubts as to the possibility of another, worse, bill getting through this time. And this time there will be no sunset clause. A grandfather clause was one of the compromises that allowed its passage LAST time. Without that, thousands of American citizens would have become criminals without any action on their part. I knew that I would. Even as a youngster, I wasn't about to turn my guns in to anyone. How easy would it be to omit a grandfather clause this time?

Anyone thinking that it won't happen hasn't been paying attention. It HAS happened. Government's sole purpose is to get larger and stronger. In order for it to do that we have to be weaker. Study history, it's the story of the world since governments have existed.

Oops, I got off on a tangent from the OP's question...

Primers went up in cost significantly and still haven't come back down to "normal" prices. Tula was the closest to old prices, but I don't know where it is now since the election. Ammo in the most common rounds (5.56, .308/7.62, 7.62 Russian short and even .22 LR) was hard to find and marked up to ridiculous prices by the same unscrupulous dealers that Dolomite mentioned. This was for a couple years.

One thing that I like to point out to people who want a gun to shoot "the most common rounds, because they are the ones that will be easiest to find" is that those are the ones that disappear during a panic.

Will Edited November 13, 2012 by Clod Stomper

[dlm37015]

i drove 800 miles to pick up primmers today none of the wholesalers have any
my surplus powder supplier has ran out and doesnt know when he can get more

[Dirtshooter]

It was tough in '93 and '08. I remember trying to buy 1K of small pistol and large rifle primers in '93 and they had a limit of 200 I believe. Well every day I would go in at lunch and after about 3 days the owner of the store asked how many I wanted and he sold me 1k. I saw a guy on Gun broker pay $105 for 1k of large rifle primers plus shipping in '08. He must have really needed them badly. My suggestion has been to buy a few extra's each time you buy supplies or ammo or beans for that matter. It was kind of eerie going to Wally world and they had no 22,380,9mm,38,357,40,45, you get the picture and I checked several of them and all had virtually no ammo. That is bad for the guy that depends on factory ammo to shoot.

[Jamie Jackson]

Like Dolomite said. The Clinton AWB kinda snuck up on us.

I was a hard core 1911 Gunsite junkie at that time, but I did manage to pick up some 30 rd AR, AK, and Mini-14 (factory Ruger) mags prior to the AWB...rumblings and rumors and such. I was happy I did.
I did own a Glock 23 at that time and fortunately had plenty of mags for it. But that's all relative. I wished I had a whole lot more before the sunset occurred. As has been mentioned, mags are the weakest link in a semi-auto and they do in fact wear out, get damaged (feed lips and bodies) and lost. I still write my initials on all of my range mags as I've had a few go missing in the past. It happens.
I regularly saw 15-17 round non-drop free 9mm Glock mags sell for +$50.00 each and 33 rd Happy Sticks go for $100.00 plus. I think it was more the forbidden fruit syndrome versus true need...who knows?


The hardest thing I had trouble locating during the '08 mad rush were reasonably priced .22 LR and standard small pistol primers. But I managed to keep a good stock of Magnum small pistol primers around and worked up very good and reliable loads for my 9mm Glocks with them.



I greatly appreciate David keeping us updated. David is definitely someone I feel I can trust.



An AWB without a Sunset is a terrible thing to contemplate. But it's an unfortunate possibility. God Help us all.

[Guest 6.8 AR]

I got lucky in '08 with getting parts. I bought three complete lowers before they and a lot of stuff got high and
sometimes scarce. I ordered two barrels for my 6.8's and they took six months to arrive. No doubt things got
silly. I didn't have primers and waited seemingly forever to get them from Midsouth. I ordered 5 cases and after
I got that order, they called me back to let know my order, which I knew wasn't right, but I graciously took the
order again. I ended up with around 40-50,000 primers and never looked back. I had to wait for bullets several
times, and repeated the same process on them, also.

During the AWB, I ordered a pre-ban lower from a shop in Cali, of all places, and another off a forum, and built
my first two AR's. That was my only problem during that time.

I think we are in a continual rush with Obama in office. It doesn't take much with the frequent scares of some
bill proposed or a treaty being pushed at us.

[superduty]

I was at the Nashville gun show this morning, and several of the vendors were essentially out of .223/5.56. One told me it's generally due to the election, etc and that if everyone would calm down, there would be enough for everyone. He also said the day after the election, he had 4 guys waiting at his door first thing in the morning who bought his entire stock of 18,000 rds. of .223/5.56.

[Guest Lester Weevils]

The way the AWB mag capacity limits got phased in, and grandfathered to only ban new construction, either the mag selling companies had massive over-stock already, or they got busy and had a crap-load of new mags manufactured fast before the law took effect. Does anyone know which way it was?

Just sayin, after years of the AWB being in-effect, maybe you didn't like the price of the mags, but you could still buy a high-cap mag for about anything from places like cheaper than dirt, up to the very last day before the AWB sunsetted. So there must have been a crap-load of old-manufactured but brand-new mags sitting in huge warehouses somewhere.

As far as that goes, mags have generally stayed expensive for some guns, at least if you want a mag that will actually work rather than being the genuine jam-o-matic brand. AR mags got pretty cheap, but for about any of my guns except AR mags, the mags continue to be priced a lot higher than I think they are worth, but if you don't want a jam-o-matic, what are ya gonna do?