Quantity

[tegyrius]

So we have some folks who want to flag any purchase of a thousand rounds of ammo as an indicator of an incipient mass shooting.

Bullshit.

Buying a thousand rounds at once means that someone found a good deal online, or that he's planning to take a shooting class (most of those I've attended have had a 500 round/day minimum), or that he trains at a high volume but doesn't own a reloading press, or that he trains at a lower volume but wants to build a backlog to get him through times of ammo shortage like the current one, or that he just got a new collectible gun in a rare caliber and wants a lifetime supply for taking it out to the range once a year. It doesn't mean he's going to go dump a thousand rounds into a mall.

(Also, from a practical perspective, carrying a thousand rounds to a gunfight is stupid unless your gun is a belt-fed support weapon and you have a few friends to help you carry the load. Even with standard-capacity AR-15 mags, you'd be waddling around with roughly 45 pounds of lead and powder.)

Since 2006, I think I've bought ammo at retail prices twice. Both times, I was at a range teaching friends or relatives to shoot and they were having so much fun they went through the several hundred rounds I'd brought to start them off. Except for a couple of small quantities of odd calibers for some of my C&R guns, all my other purchases since then have been online... and in excess of a thousand rounds each. Why? Not pure evil - pure economy. Buying a kiloround at a time at online prices, even with shipping, saves me 25 to 50 percent over retail.

Comments

Re: So what.

[tegyrius]

Point of order: Reagan didn't "ban" fully automatic weapons. Ownership of those was restricted under the National Firearms Act of 1934 (along with several other classes of weapons). What Reagan did in signing the Firearm Owners' Protection Act of 1986 was prohibit any additional automatic weapons from being added to the NFA registry - thereby imposing a de facto ban on the transfer of new automatic weapons to private citizens. This did nothing to prohibit the private ownership or purchase of those already on the registry. Legally, they occupy the exact same space as my short-barreled rifles (also restricted under the NFA). The difference between full auto and SBRs is price, which is an outgrowth of a market with increasing demand and fixed supply.