To protect and serve — while supplies last?
Police departments across Michigan are struggling to find ammunition during a national shortage, forcing some officials to cut back on training and shell out nearly triple the previous price for handgun and rifle rounds.
The shortage was created by last year’s record number of gun sales, combined with ammunition factories shutting down or limiting production because of the COVID-19 pandemic, experts say.
“It’s just a combination of things — you got millions of new gun owners buying up ammo right when COVID hit,” said Grant Allen, the owner of Firing Line, an indoor firing range and gun shop in Westland. “Companies shut down because of COVID, and when they started back up, they were only at a quarter-staff. And the orders kept coming in.”
And the demand persists despite rising costs, said Allen, who was a Westland police officer for 30 years.
While all ammunition is scarce, experts say it’s particularly hard to find 9mm rounds — long the most popular for consumers, and the caliber many police departments recently adopted for their handguns, after years using more expensive .40 caliber rounds.
“For 9mm ammo, it used to be $15 for a box of 50 rounds; now, on the cheap side, it’s $42 per box,” Allen said.
But police are scrambling to find rounds of all calibers. The problem is so acute, Paw Paw Police Chief Eric Marshall said he plans to make the 330-mile roundtrip drive across the state to Firing Line to pick up 250 rounds of .40 caliber cartridges.
Allen is offering the rounds to Marshall and other cops at cost — which for .40 caliber cartridges is about $1 per round, up from about 30 cents prior to the shortage. Some sellers are asking about $2 per round for .40 caliber cartridges that as recently as last year sold for 50-70 cents per round.
“Many departments do tactical training with live ammo, but there’s not enough ammo to do that now,” said Marshall, who added he’s waiting for two rifles he ordered from Allen to come in before trekking across the state.
He acknowledged it’s a long drive for a mere 250 rounds — 25 each for his force of 10 officers — but he said he’s desperate.
“You’ve got to get it wherever you can,” he said. “When I found out I could get my hands on some ammo, I jumped on it.”
‘We’re struggling’
Law enforcement experts say several events coalesced to cause the ammunition shortage.
Early in the COVID pandemic, there was a record spike in gun sales, driven by concerns that criminals would take advantage of relaxed police enforcement and that people would become violent if forcibly quarantined.
Firearm sales again surged in the fall following months of protests, some of which ended in riots, calls for disbanding police, and fears that a Joe Biden presidency would result in tighter gun restrictions.
The FBI also processed 39.7 million firearm background checks in 2020 — the most by far of any year since the agency began keeping track in 1998. The previous record was 14.9 million checks in 2016. In Michigan, the FBI processed a record 1.07 million background checks in 2020, more than doubling the 492,000 checks in 2019. The previous record was set in 2016, when 579,000 checks were conducted.
If the lack of ammunition causes police departments to curb firearms training for too long, it could have dire consequences, said Robert Stevenson, director of the Michigan Association of Chiefs of Police.
“Firearms proficiency is a perishable skill; if you don’t use it, you’ll lose it,” Stevenson said. “Most officers never have to fire their weapon — but when we do, it goes without saying that we don’t want to miss what we’re firing at.”
Taylor Police Chief John Blair said his department doesn’t have enough ammunition stockpiled to conduct the biannual handgun qualification training in May and September.
“There’s not much we can do because that’s not enough ammo to do the qualification, and we can’t find it anywhere,” he said. “We’re struggling; we’ve been calling all over the country.”
Blair said his department also has cut back on officers’ department range time.
“We’ll have open range a couple times a month where we’ll open for four hours, and the officers can come in and shoot,” he said. “But we had to cut back because we don’t have the ammo. It’s a huge concern.
“We just got brand new rifles, and we can’t find the ammo to qualify officers with them and get those weapons on the street. We have some (of the new rifles deployed) already, but we’re trying to expand that, and it’s just not happening.”
Timothy Bourgeois, director of the Michigan Commission on Law Enforcement Standards, or MCOLES, which sets training requirements for police departments statewide, said his agency isn’t planning immediate changes.
“From our perspective, our main focus is recruit training, and we’ve been in close contact with the academies, and shared information about the availability of ammunition, so there are no plans to change any of our requirements,” he said.
MCOLES requires all officers to go through an annual basic qualification course that consists of firing 30 rounds at targets set at various distances.
“Other than that, in-service training programs are designed by the individual departments,” Bourgeois said.
First dibs?
Police departments have dealt with previous ammunition shortages, most recently in 2007, when U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan were firing a billion rounds each year and needed private companies to supplement the ammunition manufactured in the military’s dedicated plant in Missouri.
But law enforcement officials say the current crunch is the worst in memory, prompting advocates to lobby for police to get first crack at ammunition, Stevenson said.
“I brought up the problem to the International Association of Chiefs of Police, and they made contact with (the U.S. Department of) Homeland Security, to see if we can somehow get an order that would give preference for police departments to get training ammo above the general public,” he said.
“There was no luck there, so they were going to try other avenues. Something has to be done; you can’t have police departments without ammunition.”
Blair agreed police should get first dibs.
“Obviously, we don’t think we’re more important than other people, but we are tasked with protecting the public,” he said. “People count on us, and when it comes to firearm proficiency, that’s a skill that, boy, you don’t want to dissipate.”
Officials in some departments, including Detroit and Livonia, say they’re not yet feeling the pinch, although Livonia Police Chief Curtis Caid said he’s been told to plan ahead because the fallout from the shortage is expected to be felt for years.
“We typically order our ammo years in advance, so we haven’t seen a problem yet this year,” Caid said. “But when we started to order for 2022, we were told, ‘you’d better place an order for 2023, too, because of the backlog.'”
Southfield Police Chief Elvin Barren said his department has enough ammunition for now but said he’s planning for the possibility of a shortage.
“We’ve taken steps if need be to modify some of our training to ensure the training continues, and we have enough ammo in the event of a critical incident,” he said.
“We have an 18-month plan based on when we placed our orders. Right now, we’re fine. But let’s say in August (manufacturers) aren’t able to supply us, at that point, we’ll go into some of our modifications.”
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Ammunition factories are not being shut down due to COVID, they are being shut down by democrat run Cities by Governors and mayors fearful of reprisals for their incompetency or outright criminal intentions, using COVID as an excuse to close down our economy, and defund our police forces who have the potential to oppose they and their social perfidy. It all began with Obama, and the Saul Alinsky group of social conspirators designed to take over a nation in deceit which they could never take over in force of arms. Their creeping socialism has created creeping ammunition shortages.
So just how does a donkey eat an elephant? One social bite at a time,,,,,or in this case one produced bullet at a time. They may just get their wish, when they eat the very lead poisoning of the crop of social discontent, they seek to use against WE THE PEOPLE ,,,one bullet at a time.
How do you change— change the U.S. from a capitalist system’,
Into a socialistic Democrat party government controlled system.??
1. Healthcare — Control healthcare and you control the people.
2. Welfare — Take control of every aspect of their lives (Food, Housing, and Income).
3. Education — Take control of what people read and listen to — take control of what children and young people learn in schools and colleges.
4. Religion — Remove the belief in the God from the Government and schools.
5. Class Warfare — Divide the people into the wealthy and the poor. This will cause more discontent and it will be easier to take from the wealthy and give to poor. Until there are only the poor.
6. Debt — Increase the debt to an unsustainable level.
7. Gun Control — Remove the ability for the people to defend themselves from the Government. (“Socialist Democrat Party State”)
8. Poverty — Increase the poverty level as high as possible. Poor people are easier to control and will keep socialists in power if they are providing everything for them to live. Encourage, protect and support multi-millions of illegal immigrants who are poor, uneducated and disease ridden.
9. Allow illegal immigrants vote and hold government positions.
Do these look like the tactics of the Democrat Party??
Scruffy when will you start saying ANYTHING ELSE other than repeating the same thing in article after article?!?!?!?
What do officers need guns for, because according to the liberals, all police officers are evil and the police are not allowed to do their job, with regard to enforcing the law?
AND its not just officers finding it hard to get ammo.. EVERYONE is! (well other than the gangs, who get their ammo from the black market..!)
For democraps, the next best thing to gun confiscation, is having no ammunition available. Patriots, get your archery equipment tuned up, and start stockpiling arrows.
I hear poison darts come in handy as well, or poison placed in the hair of Women candidates hired, elected and destined for a Biden hair sniff. God knows what Voo Doo afrodisiac our Afro-Vice President sprayed into her hairdo to drug Joe into giving her the job of VEEP? I hear she is also good at biting the heads off of Chickens,,,,like Candidate Joe Biden during the debates, only to jump into Joe’s frying pan later, when given the buck passed job or Border Control, destined to cook her own goose.
THIS IS WHY the conspiracy nut in me, THINKS THIS Whole ammo shortage, was DELIBERATELY ENGINEERED BY the Left as a form OF gun control..
I hope Hunter Biden has enough ammunition for his illegal gun transactions. Seems that if existing gun laws were enforced, Joe junior would be wearing an orange jump suit. What we have now is a shortage of ammunition spurred by the knowledge of everyone—including now liberals who see the hand writing on the wall with their mad-dog marxist administration -that the dems want to disarm the AMERICAN law abiding citizens.
LAWS apparently are only for WE the mooks of society. Not the Hoipoi…
I don’t know why they are worried, they aren’t shooting anyone. Just letting criminals run amuck!
Good example of the poor planing that too many government agencies have. Civilians knew ammo was getting short many months ago.. jarhead has it right
Gun control by default. Thank goodness there are already countless millions of rounds in the possession of patriotic gun owners
Unfortunately for some of us, its NOT ENOUGH…