Take an election year with a clearly anti-gun party, add COVID impacting the entire manufacturing process, add riots where the police are unable/not allowed to do anything and you get the perfect storm.
We've seen a drastic increase in NICS checks with a lot of new gun owners, all desperate for ammo. Ammo makers can not keep in the production of loaded ammo, so the availability of reloading components is shrinking to the point of non-existence as primers, brass and bullets are being allocated to producing new ammo. Even reloading machines are back ordered and/or out of stock.
Production is focused on the most common calibers, so the annual productions runs of, for example, .30 Mauser, have been postponed indefinitely. Foreign suppliers (Italy & Brazil) are being hit even harder by COVID than the U.S. so there is minimal help from those producers.
Basspro/Cabela's should be a good predictor of what the future will hold. Yes their prices have gone up, but only by a little. Cases of Herters 12g has gone up by maybe $5 and the price for 50 rounds of 9mm has gone up maybe $1-$2, which is reasonable given the increased costs to ammo companies in just overtime for the workers.
As to who is shooting, I go through a case of 12g every 4-5 weeks shooting skeet and I see plenty of others shooting about the same amount. So when we do see ammo at Cabelas we tend to buy as much as allowed because we don't know when we will see it in stock again.
