Courtesy of a mention by SNAFU Solomon, we find this tweet by Calibre Obscura:
So standard 5.56mm ball is just $0.55 a round in a street bazaar in Iraq! Don’t bother sending care packages to your buddies stationed over there. Ask them to send you ammo packages instead!
Calibre Obscura has a number of interesting tweets on his Web page and his Twitter channel. (The latter informs us, for example, that used full-auto military-issue M16’s can be had in Iraqi street markets for $1.8K to $2.1K, depending on manufacturer.) I learned quite a lot from scrolling through his timeline. Firearms enthusiasts may enjoy spending some time there.
Peter
Wouldn't mind one with a fun switch but it can get expensive to shoot them.
I suspect there can't be that many rounds over there or some enterprising businessman would be filling up containers and shipping them over here for resale. OTOH if you figure 100 million US gun owners using 50 rounds a month (OK maybe that's optimistic but let's just run with it), that's 5 billion rounds a month being expended in the US. 70 billion rounds a year. Even if it's a half or a third that, that is a lot of lead (sorry California) flying down range every year. Whatever happens to be sitting around in Iraq is a drop in the bucket.
Anyone else having trouble getting the phrase "circle back" out of their heads? It keeps popping in at the most inopportune times. Anyway, to circle back, since pricing is based on supply and demand, and since there probably isn't much of a demand in Iraq (haven't seen stats on the number of gun clubs or ranges available to the average citizen), this still seems pretty high. I'd expect less, especially since I can buy mags over here for $14 each.
One more, I wonder if tracers are more popular because it's so much fun to shoot them and watch the rounds fly downrange while yelling Allahu Akbar. For those who don't know, Allahu Akbar is basically Arabic for God is Great, Did you see that shit?, and Damn this is going to be fun, all wrapped up in one convenient package. Middle Eastern version of "Holy Shit!". Muslim arabs yell it all the time for any reason at all. Now if you hear someone yelling it over here, hit the deck because explosions are sure to follow.
Wow, prices have risen in Iraq over the years. Back in '03, I bought three PKMs with a can of linked ammo each for $800, so our company could roll out the gate with belt-fed weapons. Never got reimbursed for them, grumble whine complain.
And after no reimbursement, I guess they wouldn't let you bring them home either? 🙂
There’s a town on the India-Pakistan border that makes copies of modern weapons and will sell to anyone, but their other profit center is selling descriptions of their customers and their purchases to the police. You can buy any gun you want, but you can’t get it out of the country.
A few years ago my dad was in India for a month as part of a four or five year stretch of speaking over there. He emailed me at some point and asked if I wanted him to bring me an Enfield. I got very excited, albeit confused, cause my dad is not a gun guy. I had seen pictures of the bazaars of weapons.
Turns out he was talking about motorcycles. A friend of his who spends about half the year in India, a Harley rider in the States, had bought a Royal Enfield and spent about three months touring around India and Nepal with his wife. Honestly the motorcycle would have been as much fun as the rifle, I'm sure, but it wouldn't fit in his luggage.