Wonder what's going on with .22lr?

[lowandslow]

Over the last year I have rotated into primarily CCI for both 22 LR and 22 Mag. They have a LOT of different models, all shoot extremely well. The only other ammo I trust as well is Federal - believe it or not blue box Model 745 22 lr. Target ammo is not for me, just not worth the price especially given I am primarily a varminter.

In 22 mag, it is mainly CCI, Hornady Vmax also works great and Fiocchi 22 mag (also made by ATK) is a great value.

I shoot LOTS of different brands/models of rimfire ammo and have found the above to be very true. Sure, other brands shoot decently as well however these offer just that bit of extra performance worth seeking out and paying for.

22 lr CAN be found, it is just a matter of price and desired brand. Put it this way, for .08-.10 per round you can find 250,000 rounds within a month. To me that means the 22 lr shortage is OVER, it is now just getting availability and pricing to where it was 3 years ago.

[Mssr. Eleganté]

With that many made in a day how is there such a shortage.

I don't understand that either.

If you do the math it all makes sense. You will need to do multiplication and division though. Show your work.

[Frisco3Gun]

That's awesome. I'll take a pallet.

[Merc1138]

This again?

With that many made in a day how is there such a shortage.

I don't understand that either.

Because you guys aren't putting the amount of ammo in proper context. Here's your answer:

5.56 hasn't been scarce since 2013. Not all of the equipment used to manufacture centerfire is also used for manufacturing rimfire.

Yes it's an old video, but it still applies.

So before the panic if CCI was making 4 million rounds of rimfire a day, assuming it was all .22lr bulk pack at 525 rounds a box like CCI blazer is normally packed, that's only 7619 bulk packs split up among every shooter in the US a day. Walmart has 4364 US stores. At the rate CCI was going, that wouldn't have been enough to get 2 bulk packs per walmart store per day.

There are approximately 51,000 retail gun shops in the US. It would take CCI a WEEK to produce 1 bulk pack per store(assuming the same production rate, that's 53,333 bulk packs per week manufactured).

We all know that the ammo manufacturers claimed to be adding third shifts to keep up with demand, so let's assume that CCI actually ramped up production an extra 50%. That's 11428 bulk packs per day, so it'd still take almost 5 days just to get ONE bulk pack of CCI blazer to every gun shop in the US. Of course CCI isn't distributing those by the individual bulk pack, they're distributing them by the case, which is 10 packs if I remember right. Well now that's only 1142 cases of .22lr a day, meaning it'd take roughly 45 days for CCI to ship every gun retailer in the US, one case.

Even if CCI managed to double their production to 15238 bulk packs per day, that's still only 1523 cases, taking 34 days to supply every retail gun store with one case of CCI blazer bulk .22lr.

Now consider that there are tons of new shooters over the past couple of years. Do you seriously think that a shop is going to just sit on 10 bulk packs of .22lr for a month? No.

Now obviously there's Winchester, Remington, Federal(ATK), SK, Wolf, Aguila, Eley, RWS, Lapua, Fiocchi, and maybe a couple others. So with people stockpiled, being picky about which ammo they want, not wanting to pay above 1990 level prices, you get some on the shelves every once in a while.

[BillyGoatCrawler]

Yeah, it's actually very easy to understand why there is a shortage. Every swinging dick is buying up the store limit of purchase any time they see the ammo on shelf. At every single store.

[botsdots]

Was recently at an Academy store near Houston. No shortage there. Mostly Aguila, but they had some CCIs and others. Limit of 2 boxes of <100 rds, Limit 1 box of >100rds per day. But they had so much of it, I'd venture to guess the limits will be going away soon. Probably had more than 150x 50rd boxes on the shelf at the one store I went to. Prices were $3-5 depending on model, so not too shabby.

[Quinc]

midway, grafs, cabelas, all have .22l. I just picked up a couple cases of cci standard velocity.

[NickMc]

One "good" thing about the shortage. I haven't been able to maintain any sort of "brand loyalty."

The shortage has forced me to try all kinds of different types from different manufacturers. 39 variations so far! (I keep an empty box of each flavor.)

So far my favorite is CCI Mini-Mags. Reliable & precise.

The worst? Winchester Super-X.
WHAT POOP!
From one brick, I had several boxes of 50 where 4 or 5, failed to fire.
A 10% failure rate is unacceptable, and some of those were after three tries in a revolver!

[BillyGoatCrawler]

The worst? Winchester Super-X.
WHAT POOP!
From one brick, I had several boxes of 50 where 4 or 5, failed to fire.
A 10% failure rate is unacceptable, and some of those were after three tries in a revolver!

I tried a bunch of different ammo types for my .17HMR

The winchester ammo was horrid also. Didn't compare to the other ammo in accuracy and also suffered from about a 10% failure to fire rate.

After being dissatisfied with winchester rifle ammo as well, I will never buy winchester ammo again. Even if it is all that is for sale. It's just really garbage ammo. A first time reloaded could load better centerfire rounds than Winchester can.

[johnjacobschmidt]

The "shortage" has definitely subsided. I just picked up 2000 round in the past two months without much effort. I'm actually good at this point given that I only go to the range once a month these days.

Yeah here too as long as I want to pay .08-.10c per rd.

[MrSam]

Aha! I knew it, CCI is hoarding all of the CCI .22's! Darn them

[wilit]

With that many made in a day how is there such a shortage.

Exactly what I was thinking.