Ammo Shortage

I can’t buy ammo online. I live in Montgomery County Maryland, and this one county won’t permit ammunition shipping to private residences. I can use MBtGE for a mail drop, but that’s not convenient. I have to coordinate through him, pay him in cash rather than an online credit card, and then pick it all up when it arrives, and he lives over an hour away. (If there is traffic in Northern Virginia it takes 4 hours. And there is a traffic in Northern Virginia… ALL the TIME!) On rare occasions when I can scrap $500 together I go that route. Not lately, as the online ammo suppliers are all back ordered, it seems.

No, I sort of took a page from Kim Du Toit. Every time I visited the gun store I’d buy boxes in onsey twosey. It hurts the wallet less that way. Or seems to. Over time it is more expensive, sure, but if I waited for a deal I’d have none. It's slightly more expensive, too, at the gun store, but it helps HIM pay the rent so he will be in neighborhood longer. And he is never out of ammo.

A coupla three boxes a month for a couple years adds up. So I have a halfway decent supply. So that sets up the “never dip below this level” emergency store. A floor I do not dip below. I can rotate out old stuff from this cache to keep it fresh, but I am not too worried about that. This is the stock for Zombie Apocalypse. Aka the Zombacalypse

And I accumulated the majority of all this before the recent unpleasantness. All in ammo cans, out of sight and out of mind, and in a stable, cool, dry place. Plenty of my primary calibers.

So that is one category of ammo. “Storage Ammo.” There are two others: “Training Ammo” and “Blasting Ammo.”

When I contemplate a future training course, like Defensive Pistol (hop to take this summer), I will start to squirrel away ammo to use there. Since a course like that asks you to bring 300 rounds, minimum, I need to lay up 500 or so in the appropriate caliber. A big weeklong course like Gunsite asks for 1000 or 1500. Phew. If no specific training course is contemplated for the coming year, this segregated storage area of Training Ammo can whittle down to nothing.

Blasting ammo is just the pile I can freely grab from on a range day. When there was no shortage, and I could just pop into a place like Wal Mart and get anything needed right before a trip, this pile of ammo was pretty thin. Not now. Now it has to be horded and built up. But I have plenty. I don’t account for amounts because this ammo goes downrange so quickly. It merely a judgment of “that’s a big pile, I should go shooting” and/or “that’s a small pile, I better hunt up some more.”

If I get into shooting competitions I will need yet another pile. A “IDPA Ammo” pile. This pile will have a serious burn rate, so I am reluctant for that reason alone.

Oddly, the one caliber I don’t have a lot of in permanent storage is the newest one. The .40 for my SIG P229 DAK SAS. (MAN that is a mouthful…) I am also not contemplating laying in a lot. I am not sure why. Sure ammo is scarce, but I could slowly build up. Sure, that’s my primary blasting and training gun right now so the burn through is severe. And it’s the go-to CCW piece on the rare times I am in Virginia and can, but that’s self-defense ammo, not full metal jacket. So why no stores? Dunno. One thing is, I have plenty of ammo cans and don’t need to clutter up the closets with another. Another is that the 1911 would be emergency gun and the revolver it’s backup. If I had to bug out I’d take them in the truck. Another big ammo can for another pistol is taking up valuable Bug Out Truck space and weight. The .40 is sort of a tertiary gun in that case. Like the .380 Colt. I don’t have much ammo for THAT one either, as a matter of fact. I guess I’d have to leave it behind if I had to flee for the Free-Zone in Michigan and get out from behind enemy lines. You know, in case Venezuela and Cuba pull a Red Dawn scenario and invade CONUS.

Wolverines!