SC Gun Owners Having A Hard Time Finding Ammunition

Columbia, SC—The South Carolina Criminal Justice Academy can go through a lot of bullets. It has 18 classes of students a year, with 75 students in each class and each student using about 600 bullets. There are two giant tubs at the firing range holding thousands of spent cartridges, and those are just from two classes.

Replacing that ammo is getting harder because of a nationwide shortage. “We’ve got some orders on back order,“ says Florence McCants, special operations manager at the academy. “Course, military being the first priority, they will go first. But what we’ve been able to do is pretty much save and have a surplus.“

That’s been possible only because the training classes haven’t had the 75 students each that were planned for. Most classes have had only 60 or so, McCants says.

Gun dealers say the ammo shortage started last November after Barack Obama was elected president. Gun owners fearing that a Democratic president and Democratically-controlled Congress would pass new gun restrictions started buying up guns and ammo. According to the FBI, it saw a 25.6 percent increase in background checks for gun purchases from January to May of this year compared to the same period last year.

Mark Zimmerli, co-owner of Dunbar and Zimmerli Outfitters in Spartanburg, says, “It’s difficult to sell a handgun that you can’t get ammunition for. We can get the handguns. We just can’t get the ammunition.“

He says the shortage affects handgun ammo, not rifles, and says .380 caliber is the hardest to find, followed by .45 and 9 mm.

On top of the increased demand, bullet makers also have to pay more for raw materials and are having a harder time getting financing.

McCants says because of the shortage, and state budget cuts combined with the higher price for bullets, the Criminal Justice Academy has made some changes. If a student fails to qualify on the firing range and has to come back and go through training again, his law enforcement agency will have to provide his ammunition.

The academy also trains basic instructors and used to provide the ammo for their training. But now, the law enforcement agencies they work for have to provide their ammo.