The funny thing is they absolutely still carry 7.62x51mm M80 ball, but .223 Remington 55 gr JSP is verboten.
I don't know, but sure wish my local WallyWorld still carried ammo. Once that Walmart CEO announced they would stop carrying the nasty handgun caliber and black rifle ammunition, it disappeared from the local WM almost overnight. I know I heard about this one night in Dec. 2019, went to WM the next day, and all handgun ammunition, .22 rimfire, and .223 and .308 ammo was gone. Over the next few months, all ammo was gone. Last I saw was a couple of lonely boxes of .350 Legend....
Knowledge, logic and common sense doesn’t really come into the decision making process, it’s all about media (mis)perception and how they think their actions will sway their customers.
Most Walmart customers don’t know guns, beyond what the media tells them. The .223 is the evil black rifle round reported by the media to have “devastating” terminal wound ballistics. Don’t get me wrong, a 55 gr FMJ arriving at 2800+ fps and consequently a tumbling and fragmenting does do a lot of damage - a lot more than say a 9mm FMJ - but really no worse than the venerable .30-30 Winchester delivering a 150 gr jacketed round nose bullet at 2300 fps. At a distance over about 150 yards, where the 55 gr FML is below 2600 fps and won’t tumble or fragment, I’d much rather get shot with it than I would pretty much any center fire hunting round from the .243 Win on up.
And of course if you are firing that same .223 55 gr FMJ out of a 10” or less barrel length pistol, it won’t tumble even at point blank range. And again, given a choice, I’d rather be shot with a 10” Contender in .223 than a 10” contender in .30-30.
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I was in South Dakota for a couple months in 2021 and I noted that Runnings had a steady stock of ammunition and primers at prices that were very close to pre pandemic shortage prices.
They had clearly made a chain wide management decision to not gouge customers, and to ensure they kept enough orders in the pipeline to maintain a steady supply of more common calibers.
The fact is that whole sale prices to retailers and local guns shops have only increased 10-15%. It’s the retailers using the shortage as pa justification to mark up their wholesale costs by around 300%.
You need to remember those retailers gouging us at the moment and shop elsewhere, not just now, but for *years* after this shortage is over.
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That uninformed media circus also does a great deal of harm.
A month or two ago NPR was interviewing an 8th grade girl who was complaining that adults didn’t understanding how it was to be afraid of going to school with the risk of school shootings. I had a few thoughts on this.
First, I went to school during the height of the Cold War and we lived in an area pockmarked with missile silos. We all carried 110 Buck knives, brought our .22 rifles to school for Show and Tell in grade school, and had rifles and shotguns in our cars on school grounds so we could go hunting right after school. We understood it wasn’t guns that went around killing people, and we all understood that nuclear war was at least a remote possibility.
Second, It occurred to me that her fear of school shootings was entirely media based. I looked at the numbers for school shootings in 2021, and found there were 15 deaths and 61 injuries nation wide in all duration settings including K-12, and post secondary institutions. That also including shootings on school grounds after hours, at school athletic events and shootings that were the result of bullets originating off school grounds (gang shootouts and drive by shootings in the neighborhood.
Again don’t take this wrong as it is indeed 15 deaths and 61 injuries too many. But that’s 15 deaths out of 48.1 million K-12 students. Broken down into school shooting deaths per 100,000 that’s just 0.031 per 100,000. That compares to a global average intentional homicide of 7.6 per 100,000 and a US intentional homicide rate of 5 per 100,000. .031 per 100,000 is 161 times less than 5 per 100,000.
Interestingly, I looked into the data on school bus deaths in the US, and it varies a bit year to year but has averaged 125 per year over the last decade. That’s a death by school bus rate of 0.260 per 100,000. That’s 8.4 times higher than deaths by school shooting.
Yet strongly, that 8th grader isn’t traumatized by riding an 8.4 times more deadly school bus, she worried about getting killed in school, when the odds of that are 15 in 48.1 million, or 1 in 3.2 million.
I have no doubt a fair percentage of the school bus deaths are related to roll over accidents and that we could probably save lives by putting seat belts on school busses, but it’s a low enough risk (no more than 1 in 384,800) that parents, legislatures and the media are not worried enough to demand installation of seat belts.
Yet they seem to think it’s imperative to ban assault weapons (the focus of the NPR segment).
Worse, they push that narrative despite the emotional harm it does to students. School boards and police departments are just complicit, convicting mass shooting drills in schools and traumatizing students in the process when the risk is decimal dust.
Getting back to Cold War students, we did duck and cover drills, but by the time I was in school, they’d figured out there was no upside to generating fear. They just tucked it into our normal severe weather drills. If there was a warning siren we all just filed out into the hall to get away from the windows. We were also told if something happened without warning (bright lighting flash, etc) just get under your desk and cover your head. Same effect, no nuclear war related trauma.
We need to stop letting the media feed off of us and our children and start demanding a little more common sense and a much more responsible approach to exercising first amendment rights, rather than further restricting second amendment rights.
