Quote of the day—Larry Correia

We need to wrap this shit up. I’m hoping for a Trump victory mostly so that ammo prices will go back down.

Larry Correia
Facebook post on October 12, 2020
[Fair enough.

I would have said you should have stocked up when the prices were reasonable but who would have thought the prices would go this high for this long?—Joe]

Share

13 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Larry Correia

  1. Is demand really that much higher and continuously so? Or are the suppliers not ramping up in response to the demand? Usually shortages come from demand spikes or transient supply disruptions, but a long lasting market disruption is a different matter and must have a different cause.

  2. I suspect Larry has plenty of ammo on hand. But, like me, he’s probably cut down on using it since it’s so hard/expensive to replace.

    And few indications that it will get better soon.

  3. There is always a bottleneck in any production system. In WWII the Allies were bombing ball bearing factories. This caused a shortage in ball bearings which affected all mechanical things in the German military.

    Bomb the shipyards and fewer submarines get repaired or built, but the tanks still roll out of the factories. Bomb the aircraft factories and submarines and tanks still get made and repaired. Bomb the tank factories and aircraft and submarines still get built and repaired.

    No more bearings? No more engines, no more axles, no more lots of things.

    When I first noticed the ammo shortage I went “ho hum, I’ve got my reloading supplies (thanks Joe for pushing me in that direction.)” And I do. And I can still find brass and buy brass, I can still find and buy powder. I can’t find primers.

    I think the ammo shortage is a direct affect of a shortage in primers. Everybody uses the same primers and those are difficult to make and require skill to make. We don’t want a primer factory going boom.

    There are thousands of places that manufacture ammo. If you include reloaders 100s of thousands. But how many places actually make primers? And everybody needs those primers.

    In the same way I believe that there is a shortage in AR15 lower receiver forgings. All the places that sell 80% lowers are out of forgings, they are doing billet receivers in house, but they have to compete for those forgings. And there are only a few that make them. There was one place I could find where I could buy “20% lower” which was a raw forging. They haven’t had raw forgings for sale in months.

    I think we are looking at a significant bottleneck. As soon as they come back in stock, I plan on buying many more primers than what I use to have in hand. Instead of having 3000 large pistol primers and reordering at 1000, I’m going to go for 10,000 and reorder at 8,000. Not so much small rifle but at least 3 times as much.

    • Primers, interesting. Yes, that’s a specialized skill. In some ways it’s easier than other parts of ammo. For example, powder charges have to be very close to the nominal amount; primer charges have to be somewhere between good enough and not so large that things break. That’s a much wider tolerance band.

      • I spent some time looking at how things go “boom”. I’m not scared of black powder, I’ve made it and boy do I respect it. Smokeless I don’t want to attempt to make. Nor other things that explode instead of burning. I’m sure Joe knows a lot more about such things than I do.

        The problem with primers is not the getting exactly the right amount into the cap, it is all the rest of it.

        The primer mixture has to be sensitive enough so that when it is crushed between the anvil and the base it ignites. It has to be insensitive enough so that when you seat the primer it doesn’t ignite. It can ignite if it gets up to a few hundred degrees sitting in a car or rifle chamber.

        At the same time we have to create the cup to match a certain specification. This requires brass that is to the right specification for malleability and thickness. Same with the raw material for the anvils.

        Now you take the right mixture and add it to the cup. My guess is that the amount to be added is controlled a heck of a lot tighter than loading powder in a shell. Titegroup is one of those “a little goes a long way” yet you still have a couple of grains of give in the loading tables. I’d be surprised if the tolerances on primers was more than 0.05 grains.

        Now the cups with primer mixture have to dry, safely, and then the anvils added but not so much they crush the primer. again very tight tolerances.

        So I seat my bullets and use an old Brown and Sharp dial calipers to measure the seating depth. It is good enough for shooting out of my 1911s. I wouldn’t dream of using calipers for most measurements in my shop as they just aren’t accurate enough. I use micrometers that read to 0.0001 inches.

        When I’m doing setups, I might work to a 0.001 of an inch, but for some things I get out the 1/10s indicator and measure in to 0.0001 over 6 inches and I know other machinists that would consider that “crude work”

        Primers scare the heck out of me. Powder not so much. Same way that blasting caps scare the c… out of me, but ANFO doesn’t.

        So yes, I think the people making primers are running full out and they are just not keeping up with the demands.

  4. I stocked up before but then shot most of my stockpile in matches…. Gotta hit the reloading bench now.

  5. The real problems lye in uncertainty about the future. As companies aren’t going to expand to meet temporary demand. Just to get destroyed by a likes of Obama. Who started the first shortage by buying up normal production through government agencies.
    At this point one pretty much has what you have. And it’s not going back to normal. Down at the shop. We watched people blowing out their credit cards. Only to have sales slump for months after the crisis was over. So production would get cut back.
    Lets pray this is the only thing we have to lament over. Go read a little Selco for perspective.” If some 13 year old doesn’t shoot you in the back with an AK. You’ll probably die of a simple infection.” Or something to that effect.
    I like O’Remus in these matters. “Stay away from crowds.”(That way you won’t need so much ammo!)

    • Who or what are Selco and O’Remus? The rest of us will need some sort of link or reference to be able to figure out to what you might be referring. Neither appears to be what comes up from a simple Google search.

      • Ol’Remus, of the Woodpile report fame. Passed not to long ago. One of his dictums was to “stay out of crowds”. Sage advice in this day and age. We lost a good one in him. RIP.
        Selco, was a man who survived Sarajevo. He use to write a blog about the dynamics of societal collapse. How for the first three weeks everyone sat around wondering when the lights were going to come back on. So they could go have pizza an beer again.
        Then people started killing each other. Stealing what they couldn’t trade for. How the gangs grew. Smaller gangs you fought. Hid from the larger ones. Until their weren’t any left but the larger ones fighting each other. Making it look like you had nothing to steal.
        How long time trading partners would sucker you to a trade. just to steal, because they had nothing left.
        The most sought after trade item was spam, or corned beef. Because you not only got a meal, but you render the grease out for a light.
        Lets pray we never get there.

        • He also talks about the fact that many in the country weren’t really worried about heating because the countryside was heavily forested. How by the end of the first winter, there were no more trees.

  6. Well the current shortage began with trump in office, so it is a failure in sound reasoning to believe that his reelection will somehow fix it. Or maybe, like Mickey Mouse having borrowed his master’s magic want, Trump can waive that wand and make all the shortages go away. But then why hasn’t he done that already by way of a campaign stunt, or, if he’s that omnipotent, why didn’t he prevent the shortages in the first place?

    Thus; “Orange Man Good” is no different, in terms of logic, in this case, from the declaration, “Orange Man Bad”. There is an absence of what used to be basic common sense in either declaration.

    Further, if DT is reelected surely the left will go just as bonkers as they would if you stood, as a grey-haired white man in hunting camo, on a soapbox in downtown San Francisco, wearing a MAGA hat, waiving an American flag and shouting “All lives matter” and “Jesus is the one way to salvation” and “give me liberty or give me death” through a megaphone.

    So it’s not who gets elected so much as it is which leftists (of either party) conspire to whip up what kind of trouble.

    The current shortage resulted from, first the COVID scam, and then the BLM/AntiFa rioting looting and murders supported by blatant lies. If anything, Trump, having been on board with the virus scare tactics and unconstitutional “lockdowns” (i.e. mass insanity perpetrated by authoritarians for their own purposes) could be seen as one of the causes of this round of shortages. You don’t go to the perpetrators of the cause for the solution (well, not if you can think rationally) So, Meh…

    I couldn’t care a whit about the results of this election because liberty, as always, is absent from the ballot. Liberty would not even be considered for the nomination. May as well let the authoritarians have everything they want, including their days of rage, plunder and murder, and let them burn out and go up in smoke. There’s no power on Earth even trying to stop them, and, I assert, no power on Earth that would even know what “stopping them” would mean, or even who “they” are.

  7. As an employee of an ammo factory, I can tell you there are literally millions of rounds leaving the docks daily. The factory where I work has increased production many fold over what was being produced just a few years ago.

    It is really pretty simple, when ammo gets hard to find people will stock up. A shooter who used to buy 500 rounds a year goes to the store and finds no ammo, they panic and when they find ammo they buy 5000 rounds. When new gun sales have increased exponentially it shouldn’t shock anyone when ammo sales increased exponentially as well.

    I find a lot of humor in listening to people put on the tinfoil hat about why ammo is hard to find. DHS purchased 450 million rounds over 5 years (less than a couple weeks production a year for my company alone) and somehow this was to prevent gun owners from getting ammo. The best was the guy who told me rimfire was hard to get because all the factories changed over to make .556 and 9mm because the margin is higher. The idea is similar to the idea that you should be able to use a magazine for a 10/22 in an AR-15 because both use a 22 caliber bullet.

    • Thanks for posting this. Ground-level insights from industry insiders are always helpful in trying to figure out what’s going on in any given situation.

Comments are closed.