I got an email alert from Sportsman's Guide the other day saying that CCI Standard Velocity .22LR was in stock again, so I immediately clicked on the link in the message, hoping to buy a brick or two... and got a further message that it was all sold out. (I did end up buying a brick of GECO to test it.) When I go to my club, I rarely see anyone shooting .22; everyone there tells me they can't find any .22 except for the expensive match stuff. That's been my experience as well. The last thing I bought was two bricks of Wolfe Match .22 for my Anschutz, and that was last year.
Some say speculators are buying it up and selling at a big markup, and I'm sure that's going on, but I haven't seen much at the few swaps I've been to. I think a lot of it it just being squirreled away by buyers stockpiling more than they'd ever need. When I bought my 10/22 last month I was told by a salesman that he'd talked to three customers who, between them, had stashed away over 2 million rounds of .22LR. That's a lot. Consider: If each of those hoarders fired a brick- 500 rounds- every weekend, those 3 million rounds would last them 25.4 years- over a quarter of a century.
