Gun Show in San Francisco gets Crazy

Gun Show Event

Daily City (San Francisco, Jan 12th) Gun Show Report: Well, the gun and ammo buying spree continues...at full speed. I arrived 45 minutes before the doors opened to find the people effectively lined up around the block. Once we got in, I made an urgent push to Red Line Ballistics, my favorite ammo dealer at these west coast shows. Thirty minutes after the Gun Show Opens opened, RedLine Ballistics was out of 223. Handgun Ammo was pretty much gone after 2 hours. I left at 90 minutes after opening, and it was almost totally depleted. The people getting in late were pretty desperate to find any ammo.

Here is the deal, Redline Ballistics came in with a FULL GUN SHOW load of ammo. This is the normal pile they bring to every show…a Forklift Pallet for EACH major caliber, 9MM, 40S&W, 45ACP, 223, 308, etc. That's a lot of forklift pallets, but it didn't last. They were sucked dry in 2 hours or less.

This was a two-day show. From what I could tell, all the Ammo vendors came with a fully load of ammo; so I am not sure what they were showing for the rest of the event. The event promoter says that they had never seen anything like it and thought they had upwards of 10,000 on hand.

Of course, the media was there in idiot mode making some poor guy look retarded. My 13 year old son and 15 year old daughter were there riding shotgun with Dad, and I told them to avoid the media.

What does this mean? You can get ammo, but you have to show up early. The prices from RedLine Ballistics were UNCHANGED from their prices in Novemeber 2012. They may raise prices at some point, but the prices were not crazy, like $1.00 per 223 round. Their 223 prices were about 30 to 50 cents per round (at the 1,000 box level). 40S&W Prices for Professional Reload (once used brass from LAPD) were 25.9 cents per round at the 1,000 round case level.

Note: I don't live in San Francisco (barf), but I didn't want to wait for another month and a half for a local gun show. So, I traveled in from Central California to make the event. A lot of other people did too.