Supply shortage makes buying ammunition a shot in the dark
Peter René, adjunct politics professor at Texas Southern University, never thought he’d own a gun until last summer, when violent political rhetoric struck a fear in him that a gun helped quell. He also never thought he would be lining up at Academy Sports and Outdoors before it opened to buy ammunition.
René, on a recent Friday morning on Westheimer Street, was joined by about 50 others, all with the same goal. Over the past several months, gun owners have had to contend with severe shortages of ammo, requiring them not only to get up early to line up at sporting goods stores and gun shops, but also to comb social media for tips on ammo shipments and drive long distances to the stores that are getting them.
Ammo shelves at big retailers such as Academy Sports have been bare for months, said shoppers.
Smaller gun shops said their days are spent fielding dozens, if not hundreds, of calls from customers wondering when their next shipment is coming in.
Retailers like Danny Clark, owner of Collectors Firearms on Westheimer, said it’s so hard to get enough supply through the formal channels that he’s buying from customers who have ammo stashes tucked away — and paying top dollar for it. A box of 9 millimeter rounds, which used to cost $15 a box, now goes for as high as $75.
“We get accused of price gouging all the time, but really it’s supply, demand,” he said. “I’m paying three, four times what I was paying.”
The ammo shortage is driven by a surge in new gun owners, like René. About 21 million people nationwide bought guns last year, up from 13.2 million in 2019, said Mark Oliva, public affairs director for the National Shooting Shooting Sports Foundation.
More than 8 million of last year’s buyers were first-time gun owners, according to the organization’s data, which takes FBI background check data and filters out duplicate checks, administrative ones and those not associated with firearms sales.
When you inject 8 and a half million people into that market at a very rapid pace, it disrupts it,” he said, “and that’s what you’re seeing” with ammo.
Ammo shelves at big retailers such as Academy Sports have been bare for months, said shoppers, who have been lining up outside stores before stores open to get their hands on whatever scant supply is available that day. The spike in demand has driven the price of ammo up as much as 300 percent for those lucky enough to find it. Bullets that used to cost between 20 and 35 cents per round now cost $1 or more.
Representatives of Academy Sports declined to comment on ammunition sales, but owners of smaller gun shops said their days are spent fielding calls from customers wondering when their next shipment is coming in. Distributors are still getting product at the same levels as before the pandemic, Clark said, but it’s not enough to keep shelves stocked at Collectors Firearms.
“It’s not coming down in the quantities that everyone needs or wants,” Clark said.
So he hustles, pulling connections with distribution chains and leveraging buying power, he said as he stood next to a stack of cardboard boxes near his registers holding 130,000 rounds.
“We just got that in last night,” he said. “It’ll go today.”
Kyle Harrison, general manager at Top Gun Range in west Houston, declined to comment on how he’s getting ammo these days — it’s a proprietary secret — but said finding and acquiring it is a full-time job for two employees. It used to take the click of a button.
In normal times, he said, “it takes longer to unload it from the truck than it does to order the ammo.”
Oliva, whose trade association tracks the firearms industry, said manufacturers produced more ammo last year than usual in an effort to keep up with soaring demand.
As manufacturers scrambled to increase production, Oliva said they took on additional expenses, such as paying overtime and costs associated with shipping more frequently.
“Some of that is going to be baked into the rise of the cost, but by and large it really is a matter of supply and demand,” he said. “They’re burning the midnight oil to make as much as they can. Nobody has an extra manufacturing facility in their backyard.”
Troubled times
People are buying guns for protection in turbulent times, Oliva said. Women accounted for 40 percent of gun sales in 2020 and African Americans saw the largest yearover-year increase of any demographic group, he said, citing his organization’s survey of retailers.
Background checks spiked 41 percent last March, when the pandemic took hold, from the previous year, creating a new baseline for demand that stayed high throughout the rest of the year. In June, the volume of national firearms background checks soared by 70 percent year over year and stayed up in July, when volume was up 79 percent from 2019. As a result, manufacturers have not been able to keep up.
Background checks spiked again with the election and its aftermath, with volume up by 60 percent year over year in January. About 2 million people bought guns in January alone, Oliva said. He attributed the most recent spike to President Joe Biden’s ascension.
“Everybody pretty much knows the deal. They’re scared the Democrats are in control and they’ll pass legislation to tax ammunition or tax the weapons themselves,” said Mario Gordon, who started the Facebook group Ammo Watch Houston in January. “So people are just trying to stock up.”
A competitive shooter himself, Gordon, of Crosby, said he started the group as a way for gun owners to come together and share information about where they’re seeing ammo shipments coming in.
Practice problem
Gordon, for one, is hitting the shooting ranges less because ammo is too hard to get.
“I’ve slowed down because the supply isn’t there,” he said.
The range Rene had been going to, Boyert Shooting Center on Westheimer, had a sign on the door informing visitors that the shooting range has been locked out by the landlord. Rene said it was largely empty when he went in recent months, and he’s not surprised to see them shut down. “It’s too hard to find bullets,” he said.
Boyert did not respond to a request for comment.
Harrison, of Top Gun, said it’s important for a shooting range to have ammo available for customers, and that it’s getting harder to do — even with two people working at it full time.
“It’s like having a car rental company but nobody can buy gas,” he said. “It just doesn’t work well.”
Top Gun has gotten creative about how to source bullets, he said, at times resorting to buying people’s stashes.
“We still have ammo, so our customers who aren’t able to procure it through the market for a reasonable price, they get it from us,” he said. “The bad part is it looks like we’re probably looking at 18 months to a year before we see some kind of normalization.”