I think you’re right and I’ll add on to that. We hand loaders are actually a tiny market, but we are like the priests of this hallowed tradition that live off in a convent, unable to make quite everything they need, which the grocers, truckers and farmers near town aren’t going to let starve, out of the goodness of their hearts.
You cannot punish this industry by holding on to your dollars. You can only make it easier for some gun neutral business grad to make the case for closing down a division.
Let’s take the example of Nammo, of which Lapua is a (sporting) division, the small one. We’d have to be tone deaf to think their business model relies on our hobby. Is it not evident they are ringing the register and paying the cashier for our sporadic .04 cent purchases? Bofors and General Dynamics probably don’t want to mess with powder at all, let alone 25 different gradations of the lowest margin product they spend time on. You guys do know what one cannon on one Stryker fetches, GD rolls out these SUV’s for the cost of an Abrams. They make money on our hobby like we make money on it.
We aren’t important to the steel industry either, which shouldn’t be news. We are probably the pickiest, most troublesome, unprofitable customers of steel bar stock they deal with. Us and the knife guys.
Our problem with powder worldwide as hobbyists is that we watched this get centralized. Fellas, this stuff starts as cellulose. Chinese chemists got it working thousands of years ago. Some people can turn plant fibers and pulp into a passable $100 super note, in a garage. We seem stumped to make something that wants to burn by its very nature, useful, for the activity we care more about than eating.
Our powder producers make the most expensive objects known to man and governments alike, of every stripe and color. We don’t source our competition barrels from Remington, why rely on powder from an even bigger, less specialized source. Our powder is like using a 6 star kitchen and master chef to spend time snapping the stems off beans, boil eggs and steam rice. I’m not saying it’s easy to do as stirring stew, but it’s not harder than making an action, perfect barrels and bullets that shoot through the same hole, is it?