It's not, at all.

We saw $100 at the height of the Sandy Hook stupidity

Predicting a Hillary win, a Carolinas area NFA dealer purchased nearly a quarter of a million pmags. Four months later they're at a gun show in Florence, SC selling them for $8 each and in the final hours of the show knocked them down to $7.

An empty mag is worthless.

Not when empty mags are selling for $90!

I sold every Glock and AR mag I owned after Sandy Hook.  Went a few months with nothing but 7 round 1911 mags and then rebought all new mags at about the same price they are now.

I decided to sell about a week into the panic after the entire internet was out of stock and didn't really price my mags high at all (comparatively).  They ALL sold in like 20 minutes.

I hear you OP. With the current prices, and some specials that PSA has (buy item X + 10 Pmags, which in a lot of cases the mags end up at $5 each with the deal), its hard not to buy them.

Id say keep buying if youre good on ammo.

I've been buying Lancer colored mags when they come up for some stupid reason.
3x translucent red
3x clear
3x translucent purple
3x translucent blue
3x translucent aqua

Maybe for some kind of "fun" build. I don't know.

I would say that anyone who is interested enough in something to participate regularly in a forum on the subject has an obsessive personality to some degree, so it's not surprising that we all like to collect / accumulate things. I think magazines are a relatively cheap way to keep adding to the collection, and before we know it, we have a rifle's worth in value of magazines stored in crates or on the shelf. I find the different magazine designs interesting, so I have a variety of them even though I mostly use GI mags and PMAGs. I have some of the colored Lancers too - not sure why, but they're just "neat" and different.

The reality is that even if they were banned tomorrow, none of us, or probably even our children, would ever need a hundred 5.56 mags. We could probably get by with 20-30 even in the most dire circumstances. Unless the world ended and we accidentally ran over a couple cases of them while backing out of the garage in a rush, they are pretty durable and will last a long time if they're not abused. But we like collecting them, and we feel better about having a bunch of them as "insurance."

Happening in California all the time. It's an add on charge for when they really want to show you who's in charge.

I've stopped buying rifle mags unless it's something unusual like the red Lancers.

I'm still buying pistol mags, especially for my oddball guns.

This guy gets it.

Magazines are going to be the big focus on the "New Lefts War Against Guns"...

See "Kalifornia"...    I'm focused on being sure I have more than I think I'll need.

I remember AWB days of 30-50$ beat to shit USGI mags with Glock pistol mags near 100$.

Fuck that shit!

I have bought  a 10 pack every paycheck, twice a month for the last year, still not nearly enough.

OP, you need more mags.

Totally agree with you.

I was a poor college student then just starting out "in the real world" during the '94 awb and couldn't afford to stock up on $30 USGI mags.

My situation is much different now. I think I have over 400 mags, but I haven't done an inventory in a while.  With USGI mags at $7-$9 and pmags at $8-$9, it's easy to pick up 10 or 20 at a time.

Look at New Jersey. Mags you could have had for the past 30 years are now contraband. Anything over 10 rounds is now a class 4 felony. Nothing like waking up one day to be a felon because of some politicians pen. Maryland did the same thing with bump stocks and trigger devices. Legal on day, fellow the next.

Yes, and at some point it must stop, or not

No. Just keep on get mags.