Fear and Loathing

Several years ago, I purchased an M-1 rifle from the Army's Civilian Marksmanship Program. (It is a very nice rifle, but that's not the topic for this post.)

I've been on their e-mail newsletter list for some time, now. Overnight, I received an e-mail sales update from them. This was the first paragraph:

ORDER BACKLOG. Normally, we average receiving 2,000 - 3,000 sales orders per month and ship an order in 2-3 weeks. However, these are not normal times. Since October, 2008 we have been receiving 5,000 - 10,000 orders per month, which is several times normal. As a result, we are very backlogged and running several weeks behind on processing orders. Our staff is working up to 12 hours per day 7 days a week, and only today finished the 4,000 orders we received on 1 December alone (except for those 1 Dec orders with credit card or other problems). Customers with outstanding orders should expect orders to ship approximately 100 days from the date the order was received by CMP. We expect to recover from this surge in another 3-4 months (assuming the number of orders being received drops somewhat).

What with some morons in the Democratic party blathering about gun control and the resultant fear-mongering by the pro-gun organizations (who are only too happy to use use blatherings as a fund-raising tool), I would not count on CMP cutting through their backlog anytime soon.