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If you’ve tried to buy ammo anytime in the last year, you know we’re in the heart of a historical ammo shortage. This scarcity has endured since March 2020, and it won’t be resolved any time soon. So what’s causing the empty store shelves and out-of-stock notices online? Are ammo companies stockpiling supplies to intentionally increase demand (and prices)? Is the military buying up all the civilian ammo? Are ammo scalpers driving the price increases? And, when should you buy your next box of hunting ammo? We answer all those questions about the ammo shortage, and more, in this week’s episode of the Outdoor Life Podcast.
We interviewed three contributors about their reporting on the shortage, and hear from folks like Jeff Hoffman of Black Hills Ammunition and Jason Vanderbrink, the president of Federal Premium Ammunition, CCI, Speer, and now Remington ammunition.
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“I’m not wishing to insult anybody, but people who think that way have never really been in business,” Hoffman says of the accusations that his company and other manufacturers are stockpiling ammunition and contributing to the shortage. “They don’t understand how economics and capitalism work. We’re in business to sell stuff. We’re not OPEC. We can’t just tell everyone to sit around and play cards for a while because we’re not going to make any ammo and wait for the price to go up 20 percent. That’s just not how it works. We’ve all got bills to pay just like everyone else. We’ve already set our prices for the year and we are very reluctant to raise our prices. It takes an extreme situation to cause us to raise our prices from what we’ve set at the beginning of the year.”
You can find the Outdoor Life Podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts.