Pennsylvania Game News - August 2022 - 17

the wall, just to have something to sell,
because that's what I could get. And they
sold. "
FIRST-TIMERS
They bought 'em. They didn't
An NSSF survey determined 40% of
those 21 million gun buyers - about 8.4
million - were first-time firearms owners.
That partly explains the ammo crunch,
Oliva said.
" If each of those 8.4 million people
bought one 50-round box of ammunition,
that comes out to more than 420 million
rounds, " Oliva said. " If all 21 million
bought just one box of 50, that comes
out to over a billion rounds. And that's a
conservative estimate of demand.
" No one could have anticipated that. "
Sure enough, many of those new shooters
were and still are hoping to pull triggers.
Demand for range time and training
classes skyrocketed starting early in 2020
and remains high.
" Our classes, when everything shut
down that March, were full through the
end of the year, " Edmiston said. " And
we're still going strong. Our classes are
full two or three months out right now.
About 70% of that is new people who
have never really had a gun before, who
are saying, 'what do I do, how do I do
this.' "
A couple of other things also impacted
ammunition availability.
One was panic-buying, or what Oliva
calls the " toilet paper effect. " Just as
people once gobbled up bathroom tissue
always keep 'em.
In years gone by, not everyone
who purchased a new or even first
firearm - prompted by talk of gun
restriction, social unrest, safety concerns,
or something else - kept them
long term. Many sold them as their
fears waned.
That hasn't happened this time
around, not yet anyway, more than
two years into America's pandemicfueled
run on guns.
" A bunch of us in the industry
said that very thing in 2020, that you
know what, about a year from now
we're going to be swamped with used
guns, " said Todd Edmiston, owner of
A&S Indoor Pistol Range and Firearm
Store. " But yeah, that hasn't happened. "
Indeed,
prior to this surge, Grice
Gun Shop typically had about 1,000
used guns for sale at any one time, displayed
in racks on the sales floor. Now
it rarely has more than 100. Owner
Tom Grice said he's actually removed
many of those gun racks and filled the
space with " stuff we can get to sell. "
" People aren't trading them in like
they used to, " he said. " I don't know
what the mindset there is exactly, but
definitely, everybody's hanging on to
what they've got. There's no doubt
about that. "
Many new gun owners are, in fact,
doubling down and buying more guns.
According to the National Shooting
Sports Foundation's survey, nearly
23% of retailers indicated that firsttime
gun buyers in 2020 purchased
another firearm in 2021.
After record-setting gun sales in 2020
left racks in many sport shops mostly
empty, inventory, like that available at
Enck's Gun Barn in Myerstown, Lebanon
County, in June, has increased.
But available stock still isn't what
it was in the past and trends have
changed. Fewer who are buying new
guns seem to be trading in old ones.
AUGUST 2022
17
Pennsylvania Game News - August 2022

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