Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Reloading supplies are rebounding

DakotaDeer,

Why not? The stores were basically emptied of .22 rimfire ammo two weeks after Obama was reelected, and it wasn't because factories suddenly quit making it. Shooters bought it all--and kept buying it, every chance they got. Some were afraid of not finding any when they wanted it, and some bought it to resell to those who were afraid.

Now many shooters who really wanted a stock .22 rimfires have a supply, and Trump's election calmed the fears others had of another buying panic after a Clinton victory. So yeah, I believe many people suddenly quit buying .22 rimfire after election night, in the same way they started buying it immediately after Obama's reelection. And stores that had a supply in the back room started putting more out on shelves, because the shelves wouldn't be stripped bare in a day or two.

I also believe a big part of the "shortages" was cell phones and the Internet. Any time anything showed up anywhere, whether on store shelves or Internet sites, shooters texted, called or posted other shooters about the supply. And it would be gone within a day, or even within a few hours. More than once I saw people, with the store's limit of .22 rimfire already in their hands, taking cell-phone photos of shelves and sending them to friends. One guy even posted here that he'd go buy his limit of .22's, then take them out to his pickup and put on a "disguise" and go back in to buy some more. How the hell were supplies supposed to last in stores?

As for primers and powders, they've been pretty easy to get for at least a couple of years now, if not in stores then off Internet sites. Many shooters still somehow refuse to accept the Internet as a major part of American retailing, despite the fact that the percentage of Internet sales for the majority of goods keeps rising every year. Instead they still judge supplies on store shelves.

There have been exceptions, such as Federal primers and certain kinds of brass, apparently because shooters have been buying bunches of ammo, so more primers and cases are going into factory ammunition. But Federal has also been making lots of stuff for the military, which has priority over the civilian market.

There have been actual shortages of certain kinds of powders. Some of the problem with certain Hodgdon powders was caused by a bottleneck in New Zealand while shipping powders to the U.S. The plant that makes Ramshot rifle powders in Belgium had a fire about 2-1/2 years ago, which put them way behind--and when they got back on-line military contracts in Europe were the first priority. But TAC started to show regularly up almost two years ago, and within a year the others started to follow, with Big Game, Hunter and Magnum easily available on several websites.

I don't know for sure what's going on with H4350, but have my suspicions (based on some inside knowledge) that it's due to business dealings that have nothing to do with "shortages." If so, it's connected to the introduction of the IMR Enduron powders. Other Hodgdon Extremes have been relatively easy to buy for a year or more.