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Law abiding Americans now easily qualify as the most heavily armed population in the world.
By Fredy Riehl

Free Americans Buy 10,800,000+ Guns in 2011 ~ Message Don't 'F' with USA

AmmoLand Gun News

Manasquan, NJ --(Ammoland.com)- Recent statistics released by the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) report that for nineteen straight months, and that includes all of 2011, American men & women bought over 10,800,000 plus firearms.

This number based on the FBI National Instant Criminal Background Check System, better know as NICS, and is the adjusted NICS data derived by the NSSF research division subtracting out NICS purpose code permit checks used by several states such as Kentucky, Iowa and Utah for carrying concealed weapon (CCW) permit application checks as well as checks on active CCW permit databases.

The final number, of 10,800,000, is considered conservative by experts because the this number does not account for the multiple purchase of guns at the same time or the guns bought and sold legally, person to person by US residents, which rightly so, do not require a back ground check.

Ten Million new gun owners, in just 2011, should be a wake up call to our current President who continues to play dumb that his hate of bible clinging, gun toting American Values, like hunting & owning guns will not be tolerated. His and Eric Holder’s “under the radar” plan to sell guns to evil Mexican Gun Cartels in an effort to set up the Second Amendment as the fall guy now has ten million people angry at him.

If just one current Presidential candidate (Ron Paul aside..) could prove his sworn support for the Second Amendment, and the constitution for that matter, and rally our forces behind him he would be swept into the white house on a massive wave of support. Can you, lol.. say Ted Nugent?

So what does 10,800,000 look like?
The guns purchased by American men & women in 2011 is more than one gun for every active duty military member in the worlds fourteen largest armies combined.

• Russia     Russian Federation    1,027,000
• North Korea 1,106,000
• South Korea 687,000
• Vietnam 455,000
• India 1,325,000
• China 2,285,000
• Iran 523,000
• United States 1,468,364
• Republic of China 290,000
• Brazil 327,710
• Pakistan 617,000
• Egypt 468,500
• Cuba 49,000
• Ukraine    129,925
• Above Total = 10,758,499
• *Source Wikipedia: http://tiny.cc/tl4d8

If you assume an average length of each gun as two feet that would be 4090 miles of guns.  That is fourteen times the length of the Grand Canyon and all most twice as long as the Mississippi River and 17,280 times higher than the Empire State Building.

I could not find a picture of 10,800,000 guns but here is what 10,800,000 firecrackers look like:

Hello, I am an Ammo Horder?
So let assume each new gun owner buys 2000 rounds of Ammo (a single brick of 22lr is 500 rounds and my kids can burn that up in an afternoon) , times that by our conservative estimate of 10,800,000 firearms your get 21,600,000,000…that is Billion with a “B”.

That is a lot of lead and other raw materials and you wonder why we are paying so much for Ammo these days? And I see no let up in sight because if you are like me you think to yourself that when the liberal news media reports that some guy is stopped at the airport with “1000 Rounds on him”.. that dude was almost out of ammo?

Ammunition retailer Frank Brownell of Brownells.com, predicts “[2012] will most assuredly be another year for the growth of ammunition sales. An astronomical year of ammunition sales” .

This is the one sector of our national economy that I would agree to a Federal Stimulus package, maybe each US family can get a tax credit to purchase 10,000 rounds of ammo as a part of emergency preparedness program.

Speaking of America Industry
American gun manufacturing is one of the first and last great US industries.

It was Eli Whitney, yeah the guy who made the cotton gin, who was one of the first manufacturers in the world to carry out standardization of manufactured parts.

As early as 1798, Eli Whitney had turned his talents to the manufacture of firearms. He had established his machine shops at Whitneyville, near New Haven, CT and it was there that he worked out the principle of standardization or interchangeable parts.

Standardization is the foundation of all large-scale production. Manufacturers produce separately many copies of every part of a complicated machine like firearms on an assembly line. Standardization also allowed current owners of guns to order and replace any broken or lost part, taking it for granted that the new part would fit easily and precisely into the place of the old.

In effect the manufacture of firearms is the spark that brought to life American Manufacturing and it is that same industry today that still makes almost all its products in the USA, using raw materials, machinist and labor to turn out some of the best made products on earth, namely Guns. Guns made by American workers in American factories for American consumers.

Guns and Freedom
Guns and gun ownership represent the core of elements of freedom and of the constitution. Without the Second Amendment there would be no protection for all the other god given rights we are reminded of in our Bill of Rights. Just as we teach our children the value of voting or free speech we should also be teaching them.. get ready, aim and fire, repeat.

I am glad to see so many of my fellow Americans decided to exercise their right to keep and bear arms over the last year and I hope we continue to see record growth in gun ownership in the year to come. America, Hell Yeah!

Filed under: Ammoland TV, Competitive Shooting News, Featured Articles, Gun Rights News, Shooting Industry News, Shooting Media News by Ammoland 25 Comments »

Ammo Shortage & Recession: An Ammunition Industry Insider’s Look
An inside look at how an online ammo retailer, LuckyGunner.com, successfully navigated the largest ammunition shortage and recession in recent history.

LuckyGunner.com Ammunition Sales

Lucky Gunner.com

Knoxville, TN --(Ammoland.com)- Like most industries in America from the fall of 2008 until recently, the online ammunition business has been a roller coaster ride.

LuckyGunner.com’s story is like most American success stories: a combination of hard work, overcoming adversity, entrepreneurial innovation, and a touch of good fortune.

The co-founders, all under age 30, successfully navigated the Obama-induced ammunition shortage, the Great Recession, and the normal challenges faced by all small-business owners to transform their idea into a website specializing in ammo for sale with over $3,200,000 of revenue in its first twelve months.

Obama Victory Ignites the Ammo Shortage
Leading up to the fall of 2008, the ammunition industry in America was already showing signs of strain. The recent scale-up of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, after a long period of relative peace, consumed a considerable portion of the country’s dwindling ammunition production. Police departments and other law enforcement agencies were beginning to transition from just-in-time inventory to larger stock piles in response to expanding lead-times from manufacturers, who were shipping more output to the Department of Defense and other federal agencies.

Then it happened: Barack Obama won the Presidential election in November 2008. The Obama victory unleashed a wave of public opinion reverberations that ultimately led to empty ammo shelves at almost every Wal-Mart and retail gun dealer in the country. The combination of the already strained ammunition production with the changing political winds was too much. The result: a bonafide ammunition shortage that reminded every shooter in America of the practical implications of too much demand chasing too little supply.

The Great Recession Adds Fuel to the Fire
Americans were already living in uncertain times before the election of a President who many feared would be hostile to firearms and ammunition.

The following events were making weekly headlines in the months preceding the election:

• Bear Sterns had been taken over by JP Morgan Chase in a fire sale to avoid bankruptcy.
• The FDIC was still digesting the Indymac Bank failure, the fourth-largest in US history.
• The Federal government had effectively nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
• Layoff announcements and bank failures filled the evening news.
• Merrill Lynch was absorbed by Bank of America and Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy.
• The Federal Reserve had just lent $85 billion to AIG to stave off bankruptcy.
• Congress was doling out billions of dollars in bailout funds.

In times like these, it doesn’t matter if you are a Republican or a Democrat, a conservative or a liberal, or if you live in a city or the country. There was ample cause for concern for all Americans. As these factors began to sink into the conscience of every day Americans, the demand for ammunition only increased.

From Customers to Co-Founders
While the confluence of the low ammunition production capacity, two foreign battlefronts, the Obama Victory, and the Great Recession created a perfect storm for ammunition demand, the recognition of these macro-forces weren’t the cause that prompted the co-founders of LuckyGunner.com to start a new business.

“We were already customers of other online retailers and simply realized that all our normal sources were chronically out of stock,” recalls one of the founders. This frustration was only compounded by the common industry practice of accepting orders for out-of-stock product and then notifying frustrated customers only days later that the order could not be fulfilled for several weeks or months. Like most businesses, LuckyGunner.com wasn’t the result of years of careful planning and a keen market insight; it was a practical solution to an everyday problem.

Another co-founder recalls with a smile: We decided to make three promises as the foundation of our company:

1. No matter what happens, we will always have a wide variety of ammo available to our customers.
2. Everything on our website will always be in stock and ready to ship or it won’t appear on the website.
3. We will fulfill orders immediately.

While their website has changed over the last 16 months, they still advertise these same principles.

Getting off the Ground
Apart from being customers of other online ammunition retailers, the founders had no previous experience or connections in either the ammunition industry or with e-commerce, but they were not first-time entrepreneurs or strangers to the challenges associated with launching a business.

“We also own a construction company, a software development company, and some investment property. I know it sounds weird, but we really were able to use a lot of these same skill sets at LuckyGunner.com,” says one founder.

The lessons they learned in purchasing, logistics, coding, and customer management have all been directly applied at LuckyGunner.com.

“We take our jobs seriously. Whether that means improving our systems to reduce errors and costs or broadening our supplier base for our customers, this industry is changing and we want to be the tip of the spear.”

They also recall the many 12+ hour work-days spent calling suppliers, checking in products, talking to customers, improving their website, and all the other tasks that go into launching a new venture.

“We have two primary groups of people we are accountable to: customers and suppliers. We take them both very seriously. For our customers, we try to design an easy to navigate website, update it with tools to make their lives easier, keep plenty of quality product in stock, and ship it fast. For our suppliers, we try to promote their brand value and new products to our customers, fulfill our commitments, and always pay on time.”

The End of the Beginning
Despite their age and lack of outside investors, they were able to quickly grow the company to over $3,200,000 in revenue in the first 12 months of its existence.

The company’s first challenges were finding supply and convincing customers to trust them. While these are still obvious priorities, they now have momentum on their side.

“Now that we have a trusted reputation in the industry and a solid lineup of suppliers, we have more time to focus on driving down our costs and making our operation more efficient: both of which lead directly back to solving problems for our customers, which is the reason we started the business.”

The Path Ahead
The business environment has changed since their website was launched. High unemployment and the lingering recession are clearly impacting retail sales across the country. With the ammo shortage winding down (or already over), online ammunition retailers are no longer immune. The co-founders at LuckyGunner.com intend to keep focusing on delivering more value to customers via system improvements and product selection and pricing.

“We have a fun team and have learned a lot in the last twelve months; now we are are eager to apply the lessons and continue adding to our team, which is our biggest asset.” The rest of the team at LuckyGunner.com includes Heidi and Steven in Customer Service, Jake in Purchasing, and Angela in Marketing.

The path ahead for the team at LuckyGunner.com unquestionably involves more struggles and challenges, but they also insist they have a few more surprises to unveil and the energy and enthusiasm to make the future brighter than the past.

Filed under: Ammunition News, Shooting Industry News by Ammoland 2 Comments »