My Headline Misinterpretation of the Day: "Federal Ammo Support of Injured Veterans Approaches $250,000"

Interesting, I had heard about the ammo shortage; is the federal government sending free ammo to injured veterans?

D'oh.

Comments

[vansid]

Tossing leftover bullets at disabled vets kinda seems like adding insult to injury.

[Eugene Volokh]

I was thinking more of a care package, for the next trip to the shooting range.

[Dr. Ed 2]

The excise tax money is supposed to go to wildlife habitat....

[Kazinski]

Before California's ammunition background check law went into effect I bought 1500 rounds of .357 from Federal.

Obviously it was Russian.

[ragebot]

WARNING: RANT ALERT

Recently every couple of weeks the prez of Federal has put out a vid on youtube addressing the ammunition shortage. Federal is kinda umbrella company that also produces CCI, Remington, and Speer ammo. Of interest to many recreational shooters who reload is not just the shortage of ammunition but primers as well. Jason Vanderbrink, the Federal prez, has consistently taken the position that most libertarians would agree with that when demand increases and supply can not keep up prices will increase. The Federal factory is running full bore. In the past when demand was not so high Federal would sell it's excess primers to reloaders. Now Federal is using all the primers they make to try and keep up with demand leaving no excess to sell to sport reloaders.

As for the price I use to be able to buy 9×19mm Parabellum rounds for around eighteen cents a piece but after the BLM mostly peaceful demonstrations and the COVID-19 virus running wild the price is over fifty cents a round if you can find it in stock. Not to mention the defund police movement drives home the point that the police at best are minutes away when seconds count. These prices are not just for ammo from Federal but other ammo makers as well, and not just for 9mm but other ammo as well. Truth be told I have not bought any ammo in well over six months both because it is not on the shelves and the price is shockingly high.

While I have seen conflicting numbers it was widely accepted that at the beginning of 2020 there were 300,000,000 small arms in private hands in the US. Since January of 2020 every month the FBI has had requests for more background checks than any month prior to 2020. Reports are at least 35,000,000 small arms have been sold and some claim the number is well over 60,000,000. While reports vary there is wide spread agreement that over 40% of the sales are to first time gun owners with many of them being liberals.

As the old saying goes 'what good is an unloaded gun'. So all these new gun owners need ammo to load their new weapons with.

Not trying to dis Federal but a quarter of a million dollars is a drop in the bucket compared to how much money is changing hands due to the massive increase in demand for small arms and ammo for small arms. As a long time marksman I can still remember when Obama was dubbed the best gun salesman in history, but what is happening now dwarfs the increase in sales after Obama was elected. Truth be told most guys like me who have been competing in local shooting matches are still shell shocked at how long the increased demand has been going on with no light at the end of the tunnel. Not to mention how the new, and more liberal, small arms owners will react to proposed laws that will turn them into criminals over night if passed.

[Brett Bellmore]

The ammo manufacturers are in a bit of a bind here, and have been for years. Sooner or later, one of two things is inevitably going to happen:

1) The legal system gets serious about upholding the 2nd amendment, no more reason for panic buying, and the market for ammo tanks for years while people gradually empty their closets full of it.

or

2) The anti-gunners win, and the market for ammo tanks because hardly anybody is permitted to buy it.

In either scenario, if they've borrowed money to increase their production capacity, the ammo manufacturers are hosed.

So they run their existing plant 24/7, flat out, but aside from necessary maintenance, they do NOT invest in equipment.

Regulatory/political uncertainty is keeping the market from adjusting to demand.

[Rossami]

That is a distressingly cogent analysis.

[Grifhunter]

I'm puzzled by the absence of the foreign ammo manufacturers flooding the US market to cash in on shortage driven price hikes. Armscor, Sellier, Geco, Prvi Partizan, IMI Systems, Aguilar, etc. On the rest of the planet there is no panic over BLM violence or Democrat fascism. Foreign supply excess should be on the shelves, but where are the imports?

[Brett Bellmore]

Why Can’t I Buy Chinese Ammo & Guns?

"It all goes back to the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. That legislation was most notable for the assault weapons ban that lasted until 2004.

That “Assault Weapons Ban” had other impacts as well. It included the fact that you cannot legally import most ammunition to the United States."

[ragebot]

While there may have been some panic buying due to the mostly peaceful demonstrations I am not convinced that is the source of the ammo shortage.

For most of 2019 I had no problem finding 9mm in general and what I call specialized 9mm in particular. For matches like action pistol, steel challenge and open matches I really liked the newer polymer rounds; basically plastic resin and copper dust. They were lighter than more conventional sold metal rounds so they shot flatter and had less recoil. They are no where to be found now but were easily available then. My club has at least four matches a month, and I normally would shoot action pistol, open, steel challenge, rimfire silhouette, and high powered rifle. For action pistol, steel challenge, and open I used 9mm; for rimfire silhouette .22, and Creedmoor for high powered rifle which I normally used S&B 6.5 Creedmoor (surplus NATO rounds from the EU). It is now possible to find all metal 9mm at greatly inflated prices. Since silhouette is limited to 80 yards my choice was subsonic rounds to avoid any minor tumbling as the rounds transition from supersonic to subsonic; problem is only standard .22 is all I am able to find. Forget Creedmoor of any flavor, you just can't find it.

So not only are prices sky high but the normal match ammo most competitors favor are simply not being made since there is such great demand for what I call the normal beginner shooter choice since they don't know any better. While I don't shoot traps, I do have good friends who favor traps over anything and they and they have the same issue finding match ammo I have for the matches I favor.

Point is I remember the Obama ammo/small arms shortages but this is something completely different, I had no problem finding the specialty ammo I used. I am still claiming my original analysis along the lines of 'cops are minutes away when seconds count' became obvious when the 'mostly peaceful demonstrations' with fires and looting being shown in the background and hammered the point home.

What ever one thinks about 6 Jan that demonstration/riot really was mostly peaceful and even if they were outnumbered there were LEOs. When Biden was sworn in DC was basically an armed camp surrounded by fences topped with razor wire. But for private citizens not only were LEOs scarce but likely to be less available due to 'defund police' movements. Murder rates sky rocketed along with some other violent crimes. Not to mention sporadic civil violence. Along with the threat of more 'mostly peaceful demonstrations' once Trump is not convicted by the Senate and Rittenhouse gets off for legit self defense while retreating, along with who knows what cop shoots criminal 'mostly peaceful demonstrations'.

It seems more like a real sea change to me with lots more folks realizing the 'mostly peaceful demonstrations' include looting and arson and there are likely to be more of them with even more limited LEO presence. These noobies are the ones worried about protecting their family, homes, and businesses and are buying up all the guns and ammo they can find.

[Dr. Ed 2]

OK, it's time to be serious here -- as this *is* a serious issue.

Natural uranium contains about 0.72% U-235 which is used for bombs. When you take it out, you get "depleted uranium" which is about 0.3% U-235 in what is less radioactive U-238 (which also won't go bang, i.e. fissile). Remember, these are isotopes -- it's all uranium.

It's a very heavy metal, 68.4% heavier than lead, and the US military uses it for armor piercing rounds, particularly to take out tanks. A lot of it was used in the First Gulf War (1991) -- we killed a lot of tanks with it.

Well, the guys (and gals) who went to that war came back with some funky health problems that no one quite understands, even now some 30 years later. One theory is that small particles of this depleted uranium got airborne when the rounds impacted, and that people breathed it, causing them subsequent health problems. It's plausible.

Well, the veterans who believe that they were harmed by this call themselves "Ammo Vets" and they even have their own organization: http://www.ammovet.org/

[Rossami]

Plausible, yes. Likelihood? A lot lower. Atmospheric dwell time of particles is a function of density and weight. Water droplets (think fog) can stay suspended for a long time. Denser particles separate out much more quickly and settle on the ground. Larger particles (think rocks) settle out quicker regardless of density. Uranium is VERY dense - as you say, almost twice that of lead. That means the particles will drop out of the atmosphere very fast and only the very, very smallest particles have even a chance of staying in the air for long.

A nuclear explosion is even better at aerosolizing the fissile material. From the old nuclear test data, we know how to calculate the downwind risk area and it is quite small. (Remember that there are two downwind risk areas - the fissile material itself and the irradiated particulates such as surface dirt. For this analysis, we only care about the former.) The risk footprint from these kinetic aerosolizations will be even smaller.

Second, we have to remember that the real risk is heavy metal poisoning, not radiation. (The radioactivity level of depleted uranium is so low that it's actually used as radioactivity shielding in medical applications.) Uranium is toxic in its own right, though less toxic than, for example, mercury. Heavy metal poisoning is a relatively well-understood medical condition with known treatments such as chelation therapy.

The observed pattern of illnesses do not line up well with what we know more generally about heavy metal poisoning. Nor do the distributions of illnesses among affected veterans line up well with what we know about the exposure patterns.

The bottom line is that we can't disprove the Ammo Vets' hypothesis but there is relatively scant evidence in support of it despite decades of looking. In my opinion, allergies and autoimmune disorders triggered by an environment that is completely novel to most deployed soldiers is more plausible. Dusts, pollens, molds and other exposures that are unique to that environment. That hypothesis better fits the person-to-person variability that we see in the data.

[Brett Bellmore]

You can add that it's actually possible to look for indications of DU in the soldiers in question. It's detectable in concentrations far below anything that would be biologically active.

You generally don't find it.

[ragebot]

There is a reason Trump called some places 'shithole countries'.

I was in Cabo San Lucas in Nov and Dec of 2019 when a couple of out of season hurricane/tropical storms hit causing flooding in the streets and you could literally see turds floating past. Lets keep in mind there is a permanent toilet paper shortage in the Middle East. The whole region is a nasty place.

[Doug Huffman]

Illustrating that nuclear physics is falsifiable and a science. Medicine is an art depending on verification - plausible.

Falsifiability is the demarcation boundary of science from nonsense. After Karl Popper in *The Logic of Scientific Discovery*

Socially determined truth is the swamp at the bottom of the slippery slope into which we descend.

[dwb68]

Medicine is falsifiable, but requires a lot more direct experimentation on humans including challenge studies https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4258.

And if not enough people volunteer for a procedure, draft them for research.
Alas, until we get rid of all the medical ethicists, it will simply take a very long time to falsify some hypotheses in medicine.

[ReaderY]

Perhaps your last sentence was meant as a joke. But scientists are indeed constrained by ethics and can’t pursue every hypothesis they’d like to explore.

If you think medicine is a problem, consider the plight of the poor nuclear weapons scientists, who are pretty much completely boxed in by the ethicists and are prevented from conducting almost any live experiment to assess the effect of their creations on cities.