Originally published at: America has an unprecedented shortage of bullets | Boing Boing
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It’s kind of cool to see parts of the factory.
I wonder what a comparison of the raw motive force of USians’ ammunition would look like. How many lunar landers or mars colonies could be launched with all of that explosive power?
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What is this, the start of an H. G. Wells “A Trip to the Moon” fan fic?
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Yeah, the struggle is real. I mean EVERYTHING is gone. I just went by bass pro, which usually has a two whole rows of shelves stacked, one of them with nothing but various shotgun shells. And this time there was just one ~4ft wide column of shelves with a very meager offering. I was in luck and they had what I wanted, but it was mostly high end shot shells, some .460 corbon, and a smattering of other stuff. At least it is at regular prices. I’ve seen other stores selling for 3-4x normal costs.
This is why you get stacks of stuff when it is cheap and easy to find, because the next time you want to go out, you might not be able to find anything.
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Ah, Ameristan…
“Their fathers believed that the people in the cities actually gave a shit about them enough to want to come and take their guns and their property […] So they put money they didn’t really have into stockpiling trillions of rounds and hunkered down waiting for the elites to come confiscate their stuff. There’s no use for any of it. So they come here sometimes and ‘vote with bullets.'”
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That book was such a trip. I kind of like how the Dodge-Sophia arc came full circle at the end. On the other hand, the Facebookification of the US cut a little bit too close to the bone.
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Yup, some day someone will decide that there has to be a use for all these bullets just sitting there, doing nothing.
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America has an unprecedented shortage of bullets
I live for the day, may come in my lifetime, that the headline reads:
America has an unprecedented shortage of stupidity
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The good news is that America will never be short of soft fleshy targets!!
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One step closer to the Mad Max style apocalypse of my dreams!!!
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Yeah, it’s crazy out there. Even .22 long rifle ammo is scarce. Forget about 9mm.
Pistols, too. I’m looking to buy a .380 ACP subcompact, and every website seems to be sold out.
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Not to mention covid has cancelled a lot of gun shows, so that narrows the availability as well. Heck, I’d buy WWII luger ammo from some sketchy-looking one-eyed gun show vendor at this point.
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Nothing new under the sun. When Democrats get elected, yahoos are going to yahoo. Gun sales themselves also go up.
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Probably 0. In general rocket fuels are either much more common things like hydrogen and oxygen or kerosene and oxygen, or they are far, far more toxic than modern gunpowder, like dinitrogen tetroxide and hydrazine. Even solid fuel rockets tend to be very different compounds from bullet propellant.
This is mostly due to the need for slow measured burns in rockets, while a bullet needs to evenly ignite the whole propellant and ensure it is fully burnt before the bullet leaves the barrel.
I suppose this is the point where I bring up that more “explosive” options have been considered for rocket propulsion in the past:
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They need to build more Thoughts and Prayers factories, instead.
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Ammunition prices tripled in the last year and have only now (as in, the last two days) have begun to stabilize or drop. I feel like W.C.Fields when I complain about the high cost of ammo and that most of it isn’t fit to shoot. Any centerfire ammo you’d like to use is effectively chambering your gun with 1 and 2 dollar bills. I give the industry until the middle of 2021 Q3 for prices to drop down to tolerable levels.
The shortage causes are multiple and incompletely addressed. They were well-inflated before Biden published any opinion pieces on gun control. SHTF/boogalu militia types over-purchased and hoarded in anticipation of their personal Armageddon. These Trump-emboldened militants didn’t just piss off liberals; they scared them into first time gun ownership. Both have driven the firearm and ammunition shortages.
If Biden doesn’t screw up his gun regulation agenda, we’ll see a lot of scarcely-used firearms in pawn shops around Q3 2021, too.
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Never understood how the gun nuts glossed over the fact that Barack Hussein Obama was in power for 8 years…and never took their guns away.
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It should be painfully obvious at this point their strong points are not reality and logic. I don’t get it either, but there it is.
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I don’t think the majority of people buy ammo at gun shows, though. Especially when you can, normally, order stuff to your door.
But yeah - nothing like an influx of new shooters (2 boxes for each person equals millions of rounds), and civil unrest to make more people run out and buy stuff. It is even too cold to shoot right now, but this has been a problem most of the year. I wanted to do more USPSA in the after times… but might be next year at this rate.
The addition of electing a Democrat as president again gets people worried they need to get stuff to get grandfathered in, or before it goes up due to taxes. 
This is much, much worse than 2008-2016 as far as ammo availability. During that time .22lr was scarce, but everything else could be found pretty regularly. You just could no longer find the good bulk deals or cans of surplus ammo.
I think you missed their point. They weren’t suggestion one uses gunpowder to blast probes to outer space - which is what they did in H. G. Wells “A Trip to the Moon” - but rather if you took all of the energy from off those rounds and added it together, how many payloads could you send to Mars. Not that you would literally use gunpowder to do such ta thing.
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