Some local sport shooters say a national ammunition shortage is hitting home. After calling around the area and as far away as the cities, every store we talked to said the same thing--it's hard to avoid empty hand-gun ammo shelves.

Tom Gilbert helps his customers on a busy afternoon at the Gun Exchange in Elk Mound. He has plenty of guns, but his handgun ammunition is moved to the back of the store.

"I've been rationing ammunition," Gilbert tells us. "I'll say 'you can have a box' because I want to ammo for the customers that buy guns."

Gilbert says if he didn't ration, customers would buy whatever he had on the shelf. That's normally a good thing for a store, but not when you can't restock.

"Most of your popular pistol calibers are hard to order," Gilbert says. "From the distributor, manufacturer, all the way up the food chain, everybody's out."

The National Shooting Sports Foundation surveyed manufacturers to find out why: It says the shortage is because of a significant spike in consumer demand, law enforcement and Department of Defense demand for training and readiness, and higher prices from commodities.

Gilbert says he thinks it comes down to politics.

"Joe Biden, our current vice president, wrote the last assault weapon ban they had from 1994 to 2004," Gilbert says. "Anytime there's talk of changing things or outlawing things or increasing the price of things, people will start to buy it."

"We're buying what they're talking about making hard to get or doing away with so we'll be prepared," says Eugene St. Ruth as he shops around the Gun Exchange.

St. Ruth bought three more boxes from Gilbert during his most recent visit to Elk Mound.

"If he could not have spared it, I wouldn't be offended, but it just adds to my kitty," St. Ruth says.

"I just bought two 9mm handguns and I can't get any 9mm ammo to go test them out," says Max Hebert, another customer at Gilbert's store.

He says he's glad some store owners are setting box limits.

"It's not necessarily the way a free market economy is supposed to work, but it does allow everyone to go out and enjoy shooting--maybe not as much as they would like to -- but at least a little bit," Hebert says.

Gilbert says he thinks ammo prices will continue to go up. But, he doesn't foresee a complete ban or elimination of available ammunition.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation says it's impossible for manufacturers to predict just when the current backlog will begin to improve.