Glen Parshall at Bargain Pawn in North Las Vegas reports "I got 20,000 (rounds of) .223 on Saturday and by Tuesday it was more than half gone. And that's only because I limit customers to a thousand rounds per day, otherwise I'd be out already."

And are the shortages just in the popular light rifle-calibers -- .223 and 7.62X39?

"No," Glen reports. "The shortage is total."

Industry newsletters report that should demand drop to normal, it would still take a full year or more to bring inventory levels up to normal in local gun stores.

The hoplophobes -- now nearing a veto-proof majority in Congress with the defection of Arlen "Magic Bullet" Specter -- don't have to "take away our guns" if they can ratify some kind of international treaty (bypassing and overruling U.S. statute) that bans ammunition reloading as "manufacturing without a license" and then drives the price of ammunition through the roof by requiring every bullet and brass cartridge to bear some kind of "unique identifying number," supposedly for the use of police in tracking "weapons used in crimes."

(Naw, no bad guy would ever simply use stolen rounds, the way they use stolen cars with stolen license plates as getaway cars.)

Larry Pratt, head of Gun Owners of America, asks "Remember candidate Barack Obama? The guy who 'wasn't going to take away our guns'? Well, guess what? ... A week ago, Obama went to Mexico, whined about the United States (and bemoaned before the whole world) the fact that he didn't have the political power to take away our semi-automatics. Nevertheless, that didn't keep him from pushing additional restrictions on American gun owners.

"It's called the Inter-American Convention Against Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms. ... This imponderable title masks a really nasty piece of work.

"First of all, when the treaty purports to ban the 'illicit manufacture of firearms,' what does that mean?" asks Pratt in a late April GOA release.

"Illicit manufacturing" of firearms is defined as "assembly of firearms [or] ammunition ... without a license ... " "Hence, reloading ammunition -- or putting together a lawful firearm from a kit -- is clearly 'illicit manufacturing.' "

Article VI of the treaty requires "appropriate markings" on firearms. "It is not inconceivable that this provision could be used to require micro-stamping of firearms and/or ammunition -- a requirement which is clearly intended to impose specifications which are not technologically possible or which are possible only at a prohibitively expensive cost," says GOA.

And Article XI of the treaty requires the maintenance of any records, for a "reasonable time," that the government determines to be necessary to trace firearms. "This provision would almost certainly repeal portions of McClure-Volkmer and could arguably be used to require a national registry or database" -- gun registration, the GOA warns.

Meantime, the Libertarian Party points out even the statistics used by Mr. Obama to supposedly justify his "emergency need" to "block the flow of arms to Mexico" are bogus.

"Is Barack Obama 'bitterly clinging to falsified numbers' in his bid to push his anti-gun treaty?" asked the Libertarian Party in an April news release.

"This war is being waged with guns purchased not here, but in the United States. More than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States," Mr. Obama said in a face-to-face April meeting with Mexican President Felipe Calderon in Mexico City.

But that claim, the LP points out, "is blatantly false. According to information supplied by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives the real number is closer to only 17 percent.

"There is a reason Obama is intentionally spreading false information about American firearm businesses," says Donny Ferguson, Libertarian National Committee Communications Director. "He ... promised anti-gun groups he would enact gun bans and is hoping to scare people into voting away their own rights. ...

"ATF Special Agent William Newell tells Fox News that between 2007 and 2008, around 11,000 guns used in Mexican crimes appeared to come from the United States and were submitted to the ATF for tracing. Of those, only 6,000 could be successfully traced. Of those, only 5,114, according to testimony in Congress by William Hoover, were found to have come from the United States.

"Obama's '90 percent' number refers, not to the percentage of 'guns recovered in Mexico,' as Obama claims, but to the 'percent of the traced firearms' according to an ATF spokeswoman.

"Mexican authorities report that in those two years, a total of 29,000 guns were recovered at 'crime scenes.' That means 68 percent of the guns recovered by Mexican police did not even appear to come from the United States. That means only 5,114 out of 29,000 guns used in Mexican crimes were found to have come from the United States," the Libertarians conclude. "That figure would be 17 percent, not the 90 percent repeated by Obama.

During his term in the Senate, Obama earned an "F" rating from Gun Owners of America, as well as from the National Rifle Association. In an April 11, 2008, campaign speech in San Francisco, Obama claimed gun owners are simply "bitter," racist people who "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them."

"Obama is 'bitterly clinging' to falsified numbers, hoping he can take away the constitutional rights of 'people who aren't like' him," The Libertarian Party concludes.

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal, and author of "Send in the Waco Killers" and the novel "The Black Arrow." See www.vinsuprynowicz.com/