How to get AMMO when there is NONE at the store.

Image courtesy of blog.whitesites.com

DrudgeReport: "'Homeland Security' Buys 1.6 Billion Bullets... "

Crap, I better get busy before they're all gone...

My modest weapons cache is steadily growing and a recent inventory of ammunition indicated I was woefully ill-prepared.  I began stopping by the usual places on the way home from work, hitting a couple of stores every other day. What soon became painfully obvious was that there was a huge ammo crunch in my area...or so I thought.

Realizing what a waste of gas is was to drive around looking for ammo, I began calling local stores. My local Walmart Superstore informed me that they were out of ALL ammo and didn't expect to be restocked until March 2013. The employee then proceeded to inform me that ALL Walmarts in a 150 mile radius were out of ammo. "Yeah, right," I thought. (It wasn't just MY area, it is NATIONWIDE)

So I began calling Walmart stores located a good 100 miles away from me. Son of a...! Sure enough, several large box stores hundreds of miles away were bare. I finally called a good 300 miles out to what I considered the hinterboonies and was told they had two boxes of .40 cal left and that was it.

Courtesy of my friend at Planning and Foresight

Having a world of information at my fingertips (read: YouTube), I quickly began studying up on reloading. There are several well made videos on how to reload different calibers and many include cost breakdown analysis. Concluding that this may be a future hobby for me, I shelved the idea as a possible Plan C.

Then I stumbled across Plan B. While target practicing at a local indoor range, I noticed a lack of ammo on the purchasing shelf. When I commented on this to the helpful staff, they shared what was soon to be my saving grace. "We have plenty of ammo to sell, but it HAS to be used on our shooting range only." And the bonus, some of it was cheaper "reload" ammo and didn't cost as much as professional grade.

Since I brought three weapons with Wifey and my neighbor brought her new xD 9mm, we had ample reason to repeated visit the ammo counter and request yet another box of this and another box of that. Once I would get down to half or less of my ammo remaining, we'd take turns requesting another box and put the partial in our BOB (bug out bag). Not that staff would notice, the place was so busy we had to wait 45 minutes to get a shooting lane. My instincts also tell me that the staff isn't too worried about letting some ammo go home with friendlies either.

Two plus hours on the range and we ended up taking home 300+ rounds of .22, 200+ rounds of .40, and 200+ rounds of .38 special. Our goal wasn't to be greedy and rape the ammo counter. In fact, we came in with 250 rounds of 9mm and left with none. I let my neighbor and Wifey burn up our 9mm in the new xD since we sold her Taurus a while back.

Wifey looking MIGHTY FINE!

The range made good  money on us, we took home some decently priced ammo to add to our cache and got a good two hours of target practice checked off in the meantime. I REALLY wished I could have taken home the piles of brass. The idea of using that for reloading had my head spinning.

A good poll with insightful comments is listed at Planning and Foresight.  Paul J. Watson communicates the breakdown of ammo purchases during the  recent frenzied buying by our friendly government. He calculates over 1.6 billion bullets have been purchased or are being purchased right now.

Don't wait friends. Uncle Sam is stocking up and so should you. Be it lucky hit-and-miss purchases at box stores, reloading, or range ammo...go get it...and FAST!

~OJD