There was a gun show today,

and it was friggin' amazing. Not a BIG show, just one of the average-size that usually sees a bunch of people looking and talking, some buying. There was a line about 100 people long when the doors opened, and when Dad and I left there was still a line. The place was packed.

Proving that there are greedy and foolish people everywhere were the dealers with 'real paratrooper SKS' rifles for- I kid you not- $1k. I almost said "You're out of your freakin' MIND!" when I saw that. One guy had an old S&W Model 10, decent condition; he wanted $425. It sold fairly quickly.

Ammo? A fair amount, and the only stuff that wasn't selling fast was the stuff that was WAY overpriced. As in $40 for a box of 20 rounds of .308, etc.

Lots of AR15 variants from different makers, what's now average prices, and they were selling. LOTS of them were selling.

President Barack Cartman The Obama and his AG 'The Cowards' Holder have managed, once again, to cause sales of firearms and ammo to go through the roof. Add that to the increased LE buying(Insty pointed to this piece on it), and... On the LE use, makes sense; if you buy crap like that silenced remote-control machine gun noted the other day, or an APC with a M2 on top(have you SEEN what .50BMG ammo sells for?!?), or a bunch of MP5 subguns for your black-suited Tac-Team to carry("Awarded Most Tactically-Equipped City, population 10,000 or less") you're going to go through a lot of ammo in training; if you don't, at some point some lawyer is going to ask "So you turned your officers loose with MACHINE GUNS and insufficient training? And (fill in the blank) is the result, and you think you should not be held responsible?" Which is apparently more important to a lot of people than trying to explain to the taxpayers why so damn much of their money went into lots of whiz-bangs for the department, etc.("But the Bugtussle PD has a Tactical Team, and we've got a bigger department than they do! We'll be laughed at if we don't have a SWAT team, and a SWAT team has to have tactical balaclavas and MP5 sub-guns!")

I've become firmly convinced that an awful lot of the SWAT & other tactical crap you see LE buying and deploying is in some part directly related to 'prestige'; and once they have it they have to use it to justify the expense, which leads to overuse/improper use, which leads to dead dogs and terrified families and "The officers were following procedure when they stuck a gun in your daughter's ear while the other officer was shooting the yorkie, so no action will be taken against them" excuses.

Which doesn't exactly make the public see you as Officer Friendly, guys; it makes them see you as "Those ninja-suited jerks who cover their faces because they're ashamed for people to know who they are."

Which is off the original subject, which was ammo and gun sales. I got a sales update from CMP this morning, look at this:
ORDER BACKLOG. Normally, we average receiving 2,000 - 3,000 sales orders per month and ship an order in 2-3 weeks. However, these are not normal times. Since October, 2008 we have been receiving 5,000 - 10,000 orders per month, which is several times normal. As a result, we are very backlogged and running several weeks behind on processing orders. Our staff is working up to 12 hours per day 7 days a week, and only today finished the 4,000 orders we received on 1 December alone....
Bold mine. Tad busy, those people are.

A few days back I went to Academy, where I've bought most of my .22 ammo for a while: the only .22 on the shelves was shorts; every other kind of .22 was gone, high-velocity, standard, everything. They had a few boxes of 9mm, a few .38 special, a few .45acp, and that was it for handgun ammo. Asked one of the guys, he said they get a shipment and within two days it's gone, and it's been that way for a couple of months now. Just to see, I went by Wally World(except for a few things that, for some reason they're the only ones who carry, I haven't bought there since the "We will suck up to Bloomberg no matter what" problem came up) and looked; they had shotgun and some rifle ammo, almost no .22 left and out of almost all handgun ammo.

Makes you wonder: does our illustrious President and his AG and their various buttmonkeys actually believe that if they say "We have decided, for the safety of our communities, that you should surrender your guns and ammunition" that everybody will just do it? For that matter, do they actually believe that all LE agencies will happily take part? Or is it just that they're quite happy to cause the level of chaos that crap would start, in the name of pushing their Socialist Paradise schemes?