22's at Shot Show

If you are a regular listener to sportsman spotlight, you may remember hearing this from Christopher Claunch, the owner of Hagerman Valley Sports and Mercantile, down in Hagerman, Idaho. "I saw the price of :22 shells in a brick online which started at the beginning of the frenzy at $14 for 500 and I saw that price go all the way up to over $100. That created a marketplace on the black market that was absolutely insane. To proliferate the issue, the big box stores started putting limits on how much people could buy and people actually began to hoard them and put them in the basement or the backyard or the shop. There was a shortage of ammo and that was real." In fact, the kinds of :22's that are used in recreational shooting, have been in short supply for years. In terms of sporting good stores, as soon as they stock the ammo, it flies off the shelves. Well, there was some good news. At least 15,000 gun owners got cheap shots at this year's Pacific Northwest Sportsmen's Show at the Portland Expo Center.