Are There "Too Many" NFA Collectors

Yes, there are.

No, not really.

Whenever the prices skyrocket on anything it's just supply and demand.

Too much demand chasing too little supply.

Thus, "too many" collectors.

But it's not even really NFA, it's specifically machine guns.  Transferrable machine guns in particular.

Thanks to the Hughes Amendment to the Firearm Owners Protection Act, there aren't any new transferrable machine guns made after May of 1986.

The supply is fixed.

Demand, on the other hand, is far less static and is balanced against the money people are willing to spend to get them.

By this same logic there are too many Luger collectors out there as well.  [shakes fist!]  The same supply / demand thing happened with normal AR's during The Panic™ if you'll recall, but unlike transferrable machine guns and Lugers, they're still making normal AR's so the prices dropped back down.

Related: there are too many .22 LR collectors out there too!

The huge price spike for transferrable machine guns didn't happen to the other NFA categories.

A short barreled AR-15 is substantially the same price as a Title I AR-15.

As are short barreled shotguns, and destructive devices.

They've all marched relatively closely in value with inflation.

Prices on suppressors have gone up a bit because there's been a substantial increase in demand relatively recently that the manufacturers are just now coming to grips with.  But those aren't collectors...

By the way, one does not need to own a single NFA item (or Luger) to observe and analyze these trends.