I don't buy it, this is part of gun media/jingo hype machine. This nostrum of "buying the ammo to keep it off the market" is absurd. At least at the rates posited in the
articles.
If this is the case (or was the case during obama) then where is this secret bunker theyre storing all the ammo in?
To buy enough ammo to really disrupt the market they'd have to be buying and caching it somewhere, or buying it and then destroying it, etc.
Also 700 grand on an ammo contract is basically "a handful of dog meat. " Sure its a lot of cash but not that much in an industry sense. Assuming a cost of $300 a case for bulk 9mm (reasonable assumption at big contract wholesale these days) that's basically like 2,334 cases of 9mm ammo. At a pallet rate of 64 cases a pallet, that's literally only 37 Pallets of ammo, or like a half dozen tractor trailers of 9mm, maybe less then that depending on how dense/heavy the trailers were packed. Nothing to sneeze at but in the scope of the whole market? Basically inconsequential. Back when Walmart sold ammo they were probably moving that much shit every a week out of their distribution center(s), maybe more. And Walmart was probably only 20% of the market at a feed point.
If you told me the IRS (or insert other similarly useless federal agency here) was buying 700K/mo in ammo then I'd be more likely to buy into this tinfoil funhouse theory.
Don't get me wrong this administration is shit and we likely havent seen the worst of it yet. But this "gov buying ammo" thing is so retarded its almost like its controlled opposition disinfo designed to make gun owners and pro RKBA advocates look mentally retarded.
Think about the optics of that for a minute. Layperson NPC anti goes "See? These people are so deranged they even think that the government is buying up all the ammo so they can't buy it!!!" etc and so on.
ETA: if we put it in geographic terms if this order of 9mm was to overlap with a regional supply of ammo and you coated the northeastern US (including tri state and PA) with that ammo, you're looking at like not even a month supply tops for those gun shops. That's not hugely disruptive on anything other than a short/near term scale.
Not to mention.... most of these contracts don't collect all the ammo at once. The contract is fulfilled as the ammo is received which is rarely, if ever "all at once. Might take whoever wins it a year or two to fill it (or whatever is mandated in the contract).