Olongjohnson,
Yep--but all those things are the results of shooters buying up .22 LR ammo wherever and whenever they find it, not the cause.
The cause of all the so-called shortages is the longest-lived shooter's buying panic ever. It turned some of us into automatic buying machines, grabbing whatever we imagine we might need off shelves, in hopes of collecting a “lifetime” supply. It doesn’t matter if only some people do this: If enough grab-and-buy it’s impossible to keep store shelves reasonably stocked.
I refused to play the game at first, because I had a pretty good supply of ammo and loading components on hand, and thought that like previous buying panics it would ease after a year or so. But when it didn’t I sometimes couldn’t get ammo or components needed for magazine articles, even directly from the powder companies and bullet makers, because they couldn’t make enough to fill demand. As a result, a couple years ago I turned into a “hoarder” too, just to have stuff when it was needed for my job, but I know others who started doing the same thing, even though they didn’t panic-buy at first.
Other factors have helped extend the panic, notably smart phones (which allow us to instantly inform other people when we find rimfire ammo on a store’s shelves, often by sending a photo so they know exactly what’s there) and the Internet, which has fundamentally changed the way many shooters shop, because big Internet companies can indeed order more stuff than small local stores. But even Internet shopping often turns into a variety of panic buying: Every time a bunch of “affordable” rimfire or hard-to-find powder shows up on a website, somebody posts it on an Internet forum, and the stuff’s gone within a day or so.
All of this has become so systemic I doubt things will change much even if a Republican is elected president next November. We just keep buying ammo and components whenever and wherever we find them, whether in stores or on the Internet—and telling everybody else where we found them.
