- California authorities found a man illegally owning 248 guns and 1 million rounds of ammo.
- The state attorney general said he also had 3,000 magazines and several grenades in his home.
- The guns included 11 machine guns, 133 handguns, and 60 assault rifles, authorities said.
What’s the dollar value of that? How do people afford their insanity?
I didn’t dig deep for the best prices, but found 9mm 100 counts on some bulk ammo website selling for $31.50. So back of the napkin math says $315,000. Realistically probably a good bit less if you’re buying large quantities, but in any case, it’s a lot of money’s worth just for the bullets.
Large quantiy ammunition buying is super economical, it’s fairly common to see groups of shooting enthusiasts all go in on a pallet of ammo and distribute the ammo amongst themselves. Buying that much alone is a bit strange, but depending on how often you shoot you can go through a loooot of amunition quicker than you realize. Not millions of rounds, but I wouldn’t think twice of someone with a few thousand rounds.
Any guess as to what a million rounds would go for if you bought em at once?
I wouldn’t know, but a pallet of 9mm is only 100k rounds, larger calibers would be less ammo per pallet and that 9mm pallet goes for 20-25k. If you bough them all at once im not sure how much more discounted it would be. Id expect not all his ammo is the same caliber so at most has probably buying 3-5 pallets at a time depending on caliber. Maybe they throw him a thousand bucks back per order? Thats just me guessing on not much though, shippings gonna be a bitch and that may be where you can secure the discounts since you’re emptying so much space and weight in one spot.
Cheap non remanufactured range 9x19mm ammo is about 18¢ a round. Or ~$180 per 1,000 rds.
But prices vary drastically by cartridge. .22LR might only cost you 10¢ per round but .50 BMG might cost $3.20 per round (both non reman cheapest prices). Without knowing what cartridges they were and how many of each we can’t really calculate the total value.
This is a good website for the actual market value of ammo:
https://ammoseek.com/ammo/9mm-luger?co=new
As someone else mentioned, it’s likely he was a black market seller.
Machine guns can go for $20k+, easy, people with the kind of cash to have a dozen and an ammo stockpile just for collection purposes are going to do it legally.
$20k+ is pretty standard for on register transferable guns. Off register illegal machineguns can go for much less than that, like Glock switches. Unless we’re talking about already very rare models of MGs.
They posted a picture with some of the seized weapons.
There’s what sure looks like a Browning M2 in there, bro. They’re 10k for the Army.
I’m not saying it’s impossible he was dumb enough to put together an illegal hoard worth more than a house, I’m saying there’s more likely answers.