Local businesses, law enforcement work through nationwide ammunition shortage | News

Prior to the pandemic, Montana Tactical sold boxes of 300 Winchester Magnum ammunition, a popular hunting ammunition, for around $ 30 a box.

The last time it had boxes of those 300 Winchester Magnums, they sold for $ 99 a box.

“I’ve never seen such a shortage of ammunition, and at the price,” said Aaron Hagen, who has owned Montana Tactical on Gooch Hill Road for more than 20 years.

Today, Hagen spends about 20 hours a week finding ammunition to order, he said. He also had to limit the number of crates of ammunition customers can buy so one person doesn’t store and leave the rest of the customers without them. Shotgun ammunition, which was “always very plentiful” in the past, has been particularly difficult to track down recently and more expensive than usual.

“Prices for some ammunition have normalized and improved, but most ammunition is around twice what it was before the pandemic,” said Hagen. “As traders, we pay two to three times what we paid for ammunition 18 months ago.”

Internationally, supply chains of all kinds have been disrupted by the pandemic. Toilet paper is a memorable one, but it is far from the only product that has had a significant impact on the supply chain from the ongoing pandemic. Some were directly related to COVID-19 – stores struggled to keep merchandise such as gloves, masks and bleach on shelves.

There are several reasons the supply chain for so many goods has been messed up, said Carly Urban, an economist and associate professor at Montana State University.

At the beginning of the pandemic, economists and manufacturers feared that demand for all sorts of things would fall, and some manufacturers cut production or had to close factories because of the pandemic. Commodities – what economists call “inputs” – were scarce, which meant that the prices of inputs rose as various industries, including the munitions industry, vied for the raw materials.

But there was no real decline in much of the expected goods, and the demand for some items skyrocketed. Shipping ports were increased, and the previously smooth global supply chain suddenly had major hurdles to overcome.

“For me, it’s easier to think of a bike than ammunition,” said Urban. “The frames were actually on time and still running well, but they couldn’t get chains… the material for those chains was behind. So you can’t have a bike if you don’t get a chain. “

The global supply chain is complicated, and the disruptions during the pandemic show how interconnected supply chains are and how seamlessly they used to work.

“We took for granted how smoothly everything worked before the pandemic, in my eyes,” she said. “All the different countries specialize in different inputs, different production components and have been able to link these together in order to manufacture products at the lowest possible cost … once you get behind it, it’s just a continuous cycle.”

The ammunition shortage caused by a pandemic is nowhere near the first ammunition shortage in the United States, although more factors are influencing the increase this time around than in the past, said MSU economist and professor Richard Ready.

One of the reasons gun and ammunition sales have risen so sharply over the past 18 months was because of fear, although Ready said more money in many people’s pockets was also causing the surge.

“Most of the time we saw a shortage of ammunition, it was concerns about possible new laws governing the purchase of firearms,” ​​Ready said. “Every time we get a Democratic president, for example, there is concern that there will be new laws that restrict firearms.”

“The recent (ammunition shortage) seems to be due not so much to concerns about gun control laws as to concerns about safety,” Ready said. “The murder of George Floyd, the riots in Portland and places like that, coupled with the pandemic, just made it feel like people didn’t feel so safe.”

Just like some people stock up on groceries before a big storm, some people who felt unsafe went to their local gun shop. Many of these people were first time customers in stores like Montana Tactical.

“We saw a 400% to 800% increase in business during the pandemic,” Hagen said. “We had people every day who had never owned a gun … it was pretty incredible.”

The sharp rise in arms sales had another factor that set it apart from previous policy-driven increases in purchases.

“A lot of people like to think of the arms industry as a pretty conservative industry, but we saw both liberal and conservative, people of all kinds, men and women,” Hagen said.

And while fear undoubtedly played a role in the scarcity, Ready said that people who have extra cash and want to go outdoors were also a factor in the surge in arms and ammunition sales.

“You buy guns when you have extra money,” said Ready. “I’m sure some of the new arms sales were due to people having money that they would normally have spent on things like restaurant food or plane tickets.”

Across the country, the ammunition shortage coupled with public tensions over policing has worried some law enforcement agencies. But local law enforcement officials say they have what they need, but not without paying more for it.

For the Bozeman Police, paying increased ammunition costs was the biggest blow of the shortage. BPD uses two different types of ammunition – one for training and one for weapons in service.

“We have plenty of supplies of both,” said Patrol Captain Joseph Swanson. “Although there can be some difficulty in finding it, especially since the price volatility is gone, we were able to easily get what we need for ongoing operations.”

The shortage does not have a major impact on police training in Bozeman, but the department is waiting longer than in the past for ammunition deliveries.

“We got the ammunition, it’s not necessarily the same amount, and the price has roughly doubled,” said Swanson.

The Gallatin County Sheriff’s office is definitely not running out of ammunition, Sheriff Dan Springer said, although it was still “severely” affected by the shortage. Even after a larger than average order at the start of the pandemic, the department struggled to get ammunition in stock on time and diverted some of its training from using live rounds.

“The delivery time has deteriorated significantly,” said Springer. “It’s been 6 to 8 months now.”

The problem with this isn’t necessarily running out of ammunition, Springer said. To pay for something with a fiscal year budget, the item must be purchased and received in that fiscal year. The large delay in ammunition deliveries means the sheriff’s office could potentially be forced to pay for ammunition purchased in 2021 with the 2022 budget, which would decrease the amount of money for the next year.

Like the police, the sheriff’s office uses two different types of ammunition – one for on-duty weapons and one for training weapons. It scaled down its training ammo by shifting some training to a virtual system called the MILO Range that came with the purchase of a Four Corners shooting range last year.

The MILO system is a 270 degree screen with a computerized system that plays training videos for the sheriff’s deputies to practice de-escalation and assess how much force needs to be used in different scenarios. (It also has a zombie function, Springer said. However, other than the start of a zombie apocalypse, that setting is not used for law enforcement training.)

The system uses air rifles, so while it saves ammunition, it doesn’t quite replicate with a loaded firearm with active cartridges. The department has worked to bring the virtual training in line with the live lap training so that the deputies can still feel the real thing.

“(Shooting) is a training necessity, and of course it’s something you hope you never will,” Springer said. “But when you use it, you want to make sure you are using it in the right situation.”

While the sheriff’s office doesn’t run out of bullets as quickly while on the clock, they could just be on their days off. Springer, who hunts, said he had difficulty finding ammunition for himself and that he had heard the same views from all of his co-workers who are hunters.

Ready, the MSU economist, shoots something in his spare time. He’s had no major problems sourcing ammunition for his .22 caliber, but that’s because he did what he says contributed to the scarcity – he stocked up on supplies.

At the beginning of the pandemic, Ready went to Murdoch to buy a box of ammunition. (Murdoch’s declined to comment on the impact of the scarcity on its inventory). The store was sold out, so Ready went online and found a place to buy not just a box but an entire suitcase.

“I bought probably 100 times what I usually buy,” said Ready. “So I don’t have to worry about the rest of the shortage, and I’m part of the reason there is a shortage. This is how these bottlenecks arise. “

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