Unheard of prices on .22 lr.

[tazman]

Going to remember what? That they had the decency to raise the price instead of just give it all away to hoarders? Would you rather have high prices or bare shelves? I will never understand this reasoning.

I have plenty on the shelf but if I didn't, I'd much rather part with $80 than not have any to be found anywhere.

That's because you have the $80 to spend on just a little bit of ammunition. People who could afford only the lower prices, simply can't spend that kind of money on ammunition. All that high priced stuff will still go to hoarders who can afford to spend a lot for it.
Us poor people can't do that. We might be able to catch up with the occasional box at a lower price but the expensive stuff is out of reach, even if it is on the shelf.

[John Boy]

I reload 22LR’s ... $36.00 per 1000 ... $1.80 for a box of 50 using primed empty cases. Bullet molds & dies not in the calculation. About 4800 empty cases in inventory. The reloads are black powder and smokeless. Reload time is less than 20 minutes per box
A couple weeks ago, shooting a JM Marlin Ballard with a vernier, totally obliterated the center at 50 yd with a few in the 10 ring shooting 2.1gr Bullseye at 1533 fps with a 46gr bullet. 4.5gr of Swiss Null-B are 1320 FPS

[Cargo]

It might be time to buy a new bow...

[Shawlerbrook]

If the Georgia Senate race goes bad people will gladly pay anything to get what they want. As far as using the NICS checks to see what you own, I thought part of the law was that the information wasn’t supposed to be kept after the check is complete. If that is true the ATF would need to use the ffl dealers bound book to trace what you own.

[uscra112]

In more than one apocalypse novel .22 ammo becomes an item to barter for food, along with tobacco and liquor.

[uscra112]

@John Boy: In my Quickload modeling of powder choices for my .25 Stevens rimfire project, I turned up this little factoid: the Vihtavuori powder they tout for .22 RF (3n37) is very close to Alliant's Herco. Slower than Bullseye. Have you done any experimenting on that direction?

[remy3424]

Simple solution, quit shooting/buying 22lr, use something you can reload if you don't have 22lr. If you don't have supply to do that, you likely don't NEED to be shooting. Anyone that really enjoys shooting isn't buying now, they could see this storm coming and prepared years ago. Let the new shooters buy the current supply, they might have to at these prices if they want to shoot, everyone else can slow down and stretch their inventory if they question the amount of their inventory.

[GhostHawk]

I cleaned, oiled, and cased my old well worn Ruger 10/22 in the last .22lr shortage.

Towards the tail end I could find plenty of what my pair of Ruger Mark III 22/45's like. Federal champion auto in 325 per box.
So stock them I did. But CCI Mini mag high velocity 40 gr HP were more expensive and hard to find. So the Ruger stayed in the safe. I did eventually find a couple thousand at a fairly reasonable price. But they were harder to find.

And now it is firmly back in the safe for the duration unless I have a real need for it.

Too many other things I can do that will do the same thing with more whump on the far end.

Excel Accellerator .22mag pistol 10 shot with Red Dot sight. At 100 would put all 10 and cover them with a 50 cent piece easy.

.223rem single shot with loads from mild to wild.

.30-30 single shot that will outshoot the .223rem with 90 gr truncated cone cast over 3-6 grains of Red Dot.
No louder than a .22lr with a whole lot more whump.

And if I really needed to bust something I have .357 mag and .44mag and .45colt and .444marlin single shots that will stack them into a single hole at 100 and cost less than what people are paying for .22lr. All using cast boolits, BLL, and low to moderate levels of Red Dot powder. None of them cost more than 9 cents a round to load.

3-6 grains of Red Dot at about 25$ a pound to my door including hazmat makes a whole LOT of loads and at very reasonable costs.
And it is not fussy what size the boolit is. But you do need primers. So when primer prices come back down I'll be stocking up.

[uscra112]

Reloading in lieu of .22 shooting is would be all well and good if there weren't an equally severe drought of primers.

[uscra112]

I'm thinking about going back to flint lock black powder.



Sent from my SM-G960U using Tapatalk

I have a 1943 issue of the Rifleman which covered the black powder flintlock option in great detail.

During the war there was no ammunition of any kind for the civilian sector for several years, lasting into 1947. (There was .22 ammo but you had to be running an approved youth training operation to get any.) For whatever reason, black powder was not in short supply, so cleaning up and tuning up Grandpa's "smokepole" was an attractive enterprise.

[dverna]

Shooting is not a good hobby for poor people. By that I mean shooting for fun. I know poor people that hunt for food but I will shoot more in a day than they shoot in three years. I doubt 1% of .22 ammunition is used to kill something.

The poor people I know will never be short of ammunition as I will give them what they need to hunt or control pests with. They often will barter something they can do for me in exchange. It can be as simple as changing light bulbs, as I am afraid of heights; or stacking firewood etc

John Boy offered a solution that is worth considering. I would want at least 10k primed cases on hand before investing in molds/dies, in case the primed cases are discontinued or snapped up by those, like me, that plan far ahead.

But I have enough .22's not to worry and will likely sell half, or more, as I did during the last shortage, and triple my investment. I do the same as GhostHawk and shoot .38 Spl's that cost me less than $3 a box and outperform .22's on critters.

[rbuck351]

With a couple of exceptions, everyone on this thread has a join date of more than five years ago. This indicates that you have been around the shooting/shortage game before. So, unless you are dirt poor, you have had time and reason to stock up when the price and availability was good.

I have several rifles and pistols that can be reloaded for much less than you can buy 22lr now if you can even find any. Some of mine are 22H, 22KH, 25/20, 256win, 32/20, most any handgun round and even larger rifle rounds. My 223 works very well as a 22lr replacement.

I am sorry for those that have gotten into the loading game lately. I help those that are close by get started reloading with powder, primers, boolits brass and even loading equipment.
For those that have been around a while and didn't stock up early, why didn't you?

[JoeJames]

In more than one apocalypse novel .22 ammo becomes an item to barter for food, along with tobacco and liquor.

"Alas Babylon" comes to mind. Old one, but a good one.

[uscra112]

"One Minute After", too.

[John Boy]

the Vihtavuori powder they tout for .22 RF (3n37) is very close to Alliant's Herco. Slower than Bullseye. Have you done any experimenting on that direction?

No, never considered Vihtavuori powder. In fact, I have no Vihtavuori in inventory

[cp1969]

What people are calling "gouging" is nothing but capitalism at work. Any time a deal is voluntarily struck between two parties, regardless of price, both sides got what they wanted. Otherwise, one party would have backed out of the deal.

You may not like it, but capitalism is the most efficient way to bring goods where they are needed most.

http://walterewilliams.com/price-gouging/

[uscra112]

Not necessarily VV powder, just something slower than Bullseye.

[uscra112]

What people are calling "gouging" is nothing but capitalism at work. Any time a deal is voluntarily struck between two parties, regardless of price, both sides got what they wanted. Otherwise, one party would have backed out of the deal.

You may not like it, but capitalism is the most efficient way to bring goods where they are needed most.

http://walterewilliams.com/price-gouging/

It would be gouging if the seller had a monopoly. Not so in this case.

Yes, I understand it. I'm an Austrian as far as economics goes.

[Conditor22]

Cabella's Jacked the price on primmer early on, I never did like them much anyway.

[JoeJames]

To me the 32 S&W Long is a good replacement to the 22LR for pistol shooting. I have plenty of 22 ammo, but I like shooting the little 32's, and don't worry about running out of boolits. About 70 per pound of alloy