Reports: Army’s Lake City Ammunition Plant Cancels Commercial Ammunition Contracts

Original article here.

Last year we reported that Susan Rice the Biden administration, as part of its unrelenting war on guns and those who own them, was moving to cut off civilian sales of ammunition produced at the Army’s Lake City ammunition plant in Independence, Missouri. Lake City cranks out as much as 30% of the commercial .223/5.56 ammunition sold in this country.

As the NSSF remarked at the time . . .

This policy to deny the sale of excess ammunition not only would freeze over 30 percent of the 5.56 mm/.223 caliber ammunition used by law-abiding gun owners, it risks the ammunition industry’s ability to surge production capacity for national defense if the costs to maintain the present workforce isn’t recouped through sales to the civilian market.

While we couldn’t get Winchester (who operates the plant under contract with the Army) to comment on the situation, but the report was well-sourced by those with direct knowledge of what was happening at the time. We obviously were on to something because the White House issued a non-denial denial of the report.

A good measure of how real the threat by the administration was at the time might have been that 50 members of Congress issued a call to the administration to walk back the policy. The BidenBots apparently concluded at the time that the anti-gun juice wasn’t worth the political squeeze.

We’d been hearing from a number of people late this week that Lake City had moved to cancel all of its commercial contracts. We’ve also been told that distributor supplies had begun to be drained, both as a result of the move by Lake City and anticipation of higher civilian ammunition demand by the public following last week’s terrorist attacks in Israel. Then Staple Defense published this report.

Lake City typically sells off its excess capacity ammo, over and above the military’s needs, to keep its operations fully running and employees on the payroll. If, as it appears, these latest reports are accurate, the reason this time may be less due to the administration’s desire to jack up domestic ammo costs (thus sticking it to civilian gun owners) than it is to anticipation by the US military that its needs may be increasing soon.

Given our support for Ukraine, a new war breaking out in Israel, and other potential points of instability, the Lake City move may portend more bad things in the not too distant future.

Watch this space.