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I hope that Dunedan weighs in on this one. He’s been telling me about all of the local yokels coming into his shop and buying anything and everything that is magazine fed. I may be misquoting him but I’m pretty sure that he was saying his distributor’s inventory is completely exhausted. Apparently they’ve sold something like 10,000 AK’s and 8,000 AR’s in the last 3 months.
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We've sold probably 3,000+ weapons in the last 6 weeks, and we're in BUTTFUCK. Hundreds of stripped AR receivers, hundreds of ARs, probably close to 1,000 AKs of various kinds, 100,000+ rounds of ammo (almost our whole inventory) mostly in 5.56mm, 7.62x39 and 7.62x51NATO. I've lost count of the magazines, stock sets, sights, flashlights....we had a guy offer to buy our entire last shipment of AR mags at $40.00 a piece,
100 of them, sight-unseen, over the phone. We have other -dealers- calling us and looking to buy inventory; FULL RETAIL. We're selling almost as many guns to other FFLs as we are to individual buyers! I shipped our last Saiga-12 to a fellow FFL!
And yes, the supply-stream is TOTALLY cleaned out. Ellett Brothers, RSR Group, Centerfire Systems, Century Arms, Inter Ordinance...nobody has ANYTHING. No weapons, no mags, no spare parts, no ammo in any military chambering and damned little of -anything-, NOTHING. Numrich and Brownells are running out of spare parts! We're getting dribbles. One gun here, two guns there as they roll out from the factory. All of our distributors are saying it'll be mid-late January or early February before they're restocked: and of course there's at least an operable chance that most of the stuff we really want will be illegal by then. One distributor called us in raptures last week, delighted to be able to offer us -something-. The only thing he had to offer, the source of his excitement, was a pink Crickett .22LR.
And all this from a tiny converted house in the middle of the woods. I can't imagine what the last 8wks have been like for folks with bigger establishments, larger inventories, and more paperwork. We've run out of room in our filing cabinets for the in-house forms and 4473s.
And the thing is, a lot of these people (and I mean a LOT) are folks who never touched a "black rifle" before. But they're coming in and throwing down thousands of dollars for rifles, mags, and cases of ammo...all of which we then have to show them how to use. Lots of them are shooters, but many have never used such a weapon and may even not like them very much. But they're buying 'em now, at whatever price. We haven't had an AR or AK last 24 hours on GunBroker in over a month: we could price it at 3x normal retail and people would pay it: some dealers -are- pricing like that, and people -are- paying it!