An hour and ten minutes shooting center fire at a range is $40 to $70 dollars.
I am not going to sell my center fire pistols, I’m just not going to shoot them any more… end of story. I do carry a center fire CCW of course.
I am still shooting .22s I bought around .04 cents each, but even if you pay current prices and shoot .08 or .10 cents a round for .22s it isn’t too bad. My .22 pistols all eat any and all ammo reliably, even the cheapest LRN they sell that many say are dirty or “lead your barrel”, what they used to call just call Standard .22 LR but now some are labeled “sub-sonic, assume this is a marketing gimmick to get people to pay center-fire prices for High-Velocity” or Hyper-Velocity .22 LR.
I go to the largest indoor gun shop and range in Colorado. Three or four years ago, you couldn’t get a space at the counter to look at their firearms and they had five to eight people in there selling guns.
Now, there are only a few people and most are looking at .22s. Their business has got to be hurting. A few years ago it was fairly hard to get a lane without a wait and on weekends, there were ten or twenty people milling around waiting to get a lane.
Now, there may only be 25% or 40% lane usage. They have got to have taken a severe hit on their sales and shooting lane revenue. They haven’t lowered their range rental time costs any, even though it is half empty most of the time, still $14 and hour. Think that keeps a lot of people away by itself.
Take gas to drive to, then spend an hour and ten minutes at a local range and shoot 100 center-fire rounds, and you just spent $40 to $70 dollars in this area. And if you reload you don’t do much better and it takes a lot of time to reload. The friends I have that reload sure spend a lot of time doing it.