Buy Cheap and Stack it Deep

Ammo is going to get a lot more expensive soon

Oh how quickly we forget. Ammo is cheap right now, with a thousand rounds of brass cased 9mm running just a bit over $200, which is a price we haven’t seen since pre-COVID days. It’s not going to last, so you should buy now.

That graph is the six month trend on copper futures, copper of course being a key component in both projectiles and cases. Industry insiders don’t think it’s going to get any better any time soon, as there’s massive international demand for copper. Sure, us gun nuts think about copper primarily as a jacket material for bullets, but copper is also a key component in anything that uses electricity, and I don’t know you’ve noticed but everything uses electricity these days. Electric vehicles, AI data centers, the phone you’re reading this on, the whole world needs copper.

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We’re also running low on gunpowder

You may not have noticed this, but there’s been a war going on in Europe for a few years now, and one of the things that war is consuming at a prodigious rate is nitrocellulose, one of the key components in gunpowder. It’s been consuming nitrocellulose at such a rate because they’re shooting artillery at each other like it’s the Battle of the Somme all over again. While artie and tank rounds don’t use the same sort of powder as pistols and rifles, all smokeless powder relies on nitrocellulose; nitrocellulose supplies are getting taxed hard to keep up with demand.

And yes, a war in Europe absolutely affects the US commercial market, because while most commercial ammo is produced in the USA, we also import something like up to 20% of the commercial ammo on the market. A lot of that ammo, like stuff from Magtech, PMC, etc fills the niche of “affordable range ammo.” If that supply gets more expensive or reduces, it adds additional pressure to domestic manufacturers like Federal, Hornady, and Winchester.

And adding pressure to those manufacturers is bad because…

There are only like five forges bro

Nearly all the smokeless powder that goes into loaded commercial ammo is manufactured in one of two places: St Marks or Alliant. That’s it. Some manufacturers will also import powder to use in their loaded ammo, but as far as US production goes, there are exactly two powder plants in operation. Due to the situation with tariffs, there’s more pressure on those two facilities to provide powder to domestic ammo manufacturers than previously.

So let’s do some bar-napkin math here. Copper, a key component in ammo, is getting more expensive. Nitrocellulose, a key component in gun powder is experiencing a global shortage. The domestic powder supply is limited to two places, both of which are under more pressure than they’ve experienced in ages. All of this adds up to ammo increasing in cost this year.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. The Kinetic Group (Federal, Speer, etc) and Winchester have all signaled price increases are coming at the distributor level by summer, which means those increases will get passed right along to you, the consumer. I don’t know how much of an increase that’s going to be at the consumer level, but no matter what, ammo is going to get more expensive again. If I were you, I’d make hay while the sun shines, you know?