As gun sales have skyrocketed over the past 19 months, ammunition sales have also surged, with “17,850 tons” of imported ammunition being sold in the past 12 months.
That is nearly 18,000 tons of ammo in a year’s time and approximately “2,865 tons of bullets” that were imported in November alone.
CNN Money pointed to figures from research firm Panjiva, which show ammunition imports for last month were up 200% over where they were a year ago. Panjiva’s Chris Rogers said, “It’s very unusual in an import industry like this to see such a big move. It tells you that there’s a customer demand that’s not being met by U.S. manufacturers.”
Panjiva identifies the top foreign importer as “Poongsan Corp.” of South Korea. “Fiocchi Munizioni of Italy and Prvi Partizan of Serbia” are next in line, as far as foreign ammunition importers go.
Breitbart News previously reported that each of the past 19 consecutive months have been record-breaking months for background checks for firearm sales. The streak began with May 2015–when more background checks were conducted than in any previous May–and continued with more background checks performed in June 2015 than any previous June, more in July 2015 than any previous July, and more in August 2015 than any previous August. Month after month, a record has been broken through November 2016.
In fact, the number of background checks performed January 1, 2016 through November 30, 2016, was so high that by the end of November there had already been more background checks performed in 2016 than in any year in history.
According the FBI, there were 24,767,514 background checks performed between January 1 and November 30 of this year.
AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and host of “Bullets with AWR Hawkins,” a Breitbart News podcast. He is also the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.