Ammo Prices

SayUncle linked to a great piece on ammo prices. Seems mostly caused by what we’ve talked about before. High commodity prices, war demand, higher fuel prices, and shrinking surplus supply. One thing caught my attention, because I had never heard of this before:

I think the scariest part of all of the shortages are the role that our own government has had in the shortages, and this role is only going to get worse. As part of the 1994 Gun Control Act that gave us the assault rifle bans and high cap magazine bans, we also got a great many more things that people never heard about. Ever wonder why US made surplus for 223(5.56mm), 308(7.62mm), and 30-06 disappeared from the market? Loaded ammunition in government inventory cannot be sold to the public any longer as of 1994. If it was in private hands, controlled by another government, or was demilled with the original primer killed and removed then reassembled with a new non-milspec primer then it can still be sold. I’m not going into every deatil, but only the ban on assault style weapons and magazine capacity had a sunset in 2004, everything else was signed into law. If you think this isn’t real, look into this a bit further. You might be surprised! There is a lot more to gun control than banning guns, and I feel all shooters should broaden their horizons a bit when it comes to laws.

When you measure up and total the overall damage that was done to the shooting community during the Clinton Administration, it’s staggering.  Recall also that it was during Clinton we saw the Civilian Marksmanship Program get de-funded.

It seems to me this restriction would be easy to remove as a rider on another bill, like maybe the NICS improvement?   Too much to ask maybe?  I suppose we could always tack it on to a bill protecting children or something.