Am I the only one?

[Zaydok Allen]

Honestly rimfire never really did much for me. I no longer have any rimfire handguns. I wouldn't mind picking up a 17-3, but that's a really expensive "I wouldn't mind having....." purchase.

I keep about 1500 rounds on hand to feed my Remington Nylon 66 in case of a rodent issues or some other need.

Guess I'm a recoil junky.

 

[Labguy47]

I shot .22lr through the entire drought. Even supported a Boy Scout troop qualification weekend. Sometimes it’s not about dime sized holes, but memories and smiles.
My favorite was helping veterans with PTSD to be able to work through some emotional barriers.
.22s are perfect for every occasion from family bbqs to wet work. It’s no wonder it has been around for a very long time.

 

[Drail]

Thank you for helping our troubled Veterans. We need more people like you. I have given up on the V.A. What a joke.

 

[George Dickel]

Not at all. There are a few recently-started threads going on about .22LR, at least one of which was actually about shooting it (the others included contributions about shooting it.)

I love .22LR shooting. An all-day activity after which you barely feel anything except pleasure and relaxation, and you didn't spend much. What I get bored with, though, is paper-target shooting, and that's all I can do around here.

Go to steelchickens.com and look in the "Club House" forum, I asked a question on silhouette shooting in Florida as the wife and I are moving to the Okala area. There are 3 ranges that shoot silhouette in that part of Florida and a couple more in the southern part of the state. I don't know if you are familiar with metallic silhouette but you can google it and read up on it. Simply, it is off hand shooting at small steel animal silhouette at various distances up to 100 meters. Bang,clang and it falls over if you hit the silhouette. There is rimfire bolt gun, rimfire lever action, pistol cartridge lever gun class, lever gun centerfire class and long range silhouette at 500 yds. You don't need an expensive custom rifle to shoot in rimfire, a Ruger American Rimfire works well and a Henry "Frontier" model for the rimfire lever gun class. For the bolt gun class you do need a scope that has target knobs as you shoot 4 different distances so you don't have to guess elevation. The draw back of silhouette shooting, it is very difficult and many people's egos won't allow them to do poorly until they get in enough experience to improve on their scores. You'll not find a more accommodating bunch of people to shoot with.

 

[George P]

Go to steelchickens.com and look in the "Club House" forum, I asked a question on silhouette shooting in Florida as the wife and I are moving to the Okala area. There are 3 ranges that shoot silhouette in that part of Florida and a couple more in the southern part of the state. I don't know if you are familiar with metallic silhouette but you can google it and read up on it. Simply, it is off hand shooting at small steel animal silhouette at various distances up to 100 meters. Bang,clang and it falls over if you hit the silhouette. There is rimfire bolt gun, rimfire lever action, pistol cartridge lever gun class, lever gun centerfire class and long range silhouette at 500 yds. You don't need an expensive custom rifle to shoot in rimfire, a Ruger American Rimfire works well and a Henry "Frontier" model for the rimfire lever gun class. For the bolt gun class you do need a scope that has target knobs as you shoot 4 different distances so you don't have to guess elevation. The draw back of silhouette shooting, it is very difficult and many people's egos won't allow them to do poorly until they get in enough experience to improve on their scores. You'll not find a more accommodating bunch of people to shoot with.

I just moved from the Ocala area. Where are the three ranges? There is Hernando down US19, but where are the other two?

 

[George Dickel]

I just moved from the Ocala area. Where are the three ranges? There is Hernando down US19, but where are the other two?

http://chuluotasportsmensclub.com/

https://www.scgaa.org/

http://www.grpc-jax.com/

The range in Jacksonville is around 150 miles but that is what I have to drive here in Tennessee to shoot in an NRA sanctioned match.

 

[George P]

You might see if Bradford will let you set up some silhouette targets; they're a lot closer; same for Hernando Sportsmen in Hernando County (where they also have machinegun shoots and cannon shoots)

 

[loose noose]

During the .22LR hiatus I had a small stock of ammo that I wasn't even aware of under my reloading bench that I had when I was shooting steel silhouette back in the mid 80's. Happened to find it while cleaning out my reloading area, that was in steel .30 Caliber ammo cans. To the best of my recollection there was about 1500 rounds of quality ammo. Mostly CCI Green Target, and some Remington Target, and Federal Gold Target. Not to mention I found some .22WMR in one other can with about 500 rounds or so.

Anyway I usually shoot the center fire ammo that I reload, so for the most part the 8 years of Obummer didn't really bother me as far as being able to shoot and I would take my grand kids out shooting the venerable .22LR when ever they came out to visit.

 

[George Dickel]

You might see if Bradford will let you set up some silhouette targets; they're a lot closer; same for Hernando Sportsmen in Hernando County (where they also have machinegun shoots and cannon shoots)

Thanks

Just checked out their website, the machine gun shoot and cannons would be really interesting to see. Wish I could do the Appleseed match but I had to give up shooting F Class because my lower back said enough is enough.

 

[375supermag]

Hi...
I wasn't really affected very much by the Great Rimfire Ammunition shortage.
I had quite a few thousand rounds stockpiled and never really changed my shooting habits.
I mostly shot handguns... I have two .22 revolvers and two rifles. I didn't shoot the rifles very much but the revolvers were shot a lot. The two .22Mags I have were shot much less than the .22LR models.
My son has an HK semiauto .22LR rifle that we shot extensively.
We were also able to (through diligent searching) find regular supplies of rimfire ammunition at various LGS for reasonable prices.
I still have several thousand rounds of rimfire ammunition but I am starting to think a couple more of those Remington 1400rd Bullet Buckets that my son's HK shoots so well need to be acquired soon.

 

[bassjam]

Like a few others, the shortage didn’t really change my rimfire shooting. I didn’t have a large stash, but it was enough to last me about 3 years going into the shortage. I do remember at one point I was down to my last 1,000 rounds of bulk ammo, but I still had a considerable backup of mini mags and random target ammo if needed. I admit, I also bought .22 lr at $0.08/round when I could just in case things didn’t improve soon, and I’m glad I did. During the shortage is when I happened to meet my wife who had a daughter. When she turned 5 I let her shoot a .22 for the first time and she was hooked. Overpaying to keep some rimfire ammo on hand was a small price to pay to continue shooting with my now stepdaughter.

I’ve also been saying the shortage was over for at least a couple years since I could always buy what I wanted online or at my local Cabelas. The exception was Walmart, where I never say any .22 on the shelves until this past June. I guess those same guys that showed up and bought all the stock every delivery must have continued to do so for long after the shortage ended. Walmart really shot themselves in the foot for letting that happen too. That used to be my go-to place to buy affordable ammo, but now I pretty much exclusively order online.

 

[SwampWolf]

Not long ago, I went to the sporting goods section of a Wal Mart store to kill some time while my wife was shopping for groceries. I struck up a conversation with a young clerk at the gun counter and reminisced about the time of the .22 rimfire ammunition shortage. The clerk advised that even if you couldn't buy them, you could at least reuse the cartridge cases you already had to reload them if you had the "equipment". I laughed because I thought he was joking-until he asked me, "What's so funny, some people really do reload their ammunition"...

 

[somethingbenign]

Not long ago, I went to the sporting goods section of a Wal Mart store to kill some time while my wife was shopping for groceries. I struck up a conversation with a young clerk at the gun counter and reminisced about the time of the .22 rimfire ammunition shortage. The clerk advised that even if you couldn't buy them, you could at least reuse the cartridge cases you already had to reload them if you had the "equipment". I laughed because I thought he was joking-until he asked me, "What's so funny, some people really do reload their ammunition"...

I'll take that bit of misinformation over most of the other stuff I hear. Did you explain rimfire vs center fire?

 

[SwampWolf]

No, I didn't let him off that easy. I thanked him for the information and said that I was lucky because I'd been saving up my rimfire brass for a long time. I then asked him where in the store could I buy the equipment I would need and he said I'd probably have to go to a real gun store; that he didn't think Wal Mart carried that kind of stuff. I told him I'd go look around in the hardware department to see what I could find and headed off to locate my wife.
I did feel kind of bad afterwards. Kind of...

 

[GunnyUSMC]

No, I didn't let him off that easy. I thanked him for the information and said that I was lucky because I'd been saving up my rimfire brass for a long time. I then asked him where in the store could I buy the equipment I would need and he said I'd probably have to go to a real gun store; that he didn't think Wal Mart carried that kind of stuff. I told him I'd go look around in the hardware department to see what I could find and headed off to locate my wife.
I did feel kind of bad afterwards. Kind of...

Just because you’re not familiar with something, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.
http://22lrreloader.com/

 

[TomJ]

This has been the perfect storm for 22's for us. My oldest son likes to shoot, his fiancé came with us to our gun club a couple of weeks ago and loves it and my youngest son now has the addiction. He was asking me today if we can go again this weekend. I reload, but an injury keeps my from doing so for now so we've been shooting a lot of 22 lately because of the cost. With 4 of us shooting, we can go through a lot of ammo quickly so I've stocked up. We have a Ruger 10/22 and a Mark IV. I may pick up another handgun so more than 2 of us can shoot at a time. And yes, I did forget how much fun they are. We're having a ball with them.

 

[coloradokevin]

Admittedly I haven't looked at .22LR prices in the past couple of months, but I wasn't really inclined to buy any when it finally did make it back to store shelves after the great .22 famine. The prices were just ridiculously inflated over where they used to be (pre shortage). Granted, ammo prices always go up over the long run, and the days of paying $7 for 500 rounds of bulk .22LR are probably long gone. But, I don't feel like those packages of Remington golden bullets are worth the $35-40 I've seen them going for lately, particularly when I was buying them for around $19 right before the shortage.

I've got a lot of .22LR on hand, so I'll only buy more if the prices are fair.

In this age of politically motivated panic buying, it never hurts to keep a decent supply of ammunition on hand.

 

[Captains1911]

The drought didn’t start until early 2013, shortly after the Sandy Hook massacre. I was lucky enough to buy some 22 in bulk just before that, and it lasted me through. Now that it’s so cheap, no reason not to stock up.

 

[mdThanatos]

Up until about six months ago I only had my first rifle, an old single shot .22 Remington and my dad's (now mine) Marlin 60 and I hadn't shot them in years. This year I bought a Ruger American in .22 and a Savage Mark II in .22 as well as a S&W Victory. Planning on shooting all three tomorrow as I have also picked up a few cases of .22lr. It definitely affected me and now I plan to keep a good amount of ammo stashed away just in case.

 

[Scooter22]

I've always like .22s and had a good collection of them right along with a large stock of ammo. It's cheap and you can't reload it. Then came the milsurp imports of the 90s and I got a bunch of them cheap along with all the surplus ammo. Lots of fun and big bangs, Then I tore my left rotator cuff and a couple years later my right. Both work related accidents. That put a hold on my heavy recoiling rifles. So I shot my .22s and had more fun. When the economy crashed in 2008 I found all kinds of nice used rifles cheap and picked up more classic .22s. Now I have a very large collection of them. It's more fun to me to bring 5 or so different models and a couple bricks to shoot out to 100yds at different targets without getting pounded by recoil and muzzle blast. I love my .22s

 

[theotherwaldo]

I've still got a 20mm ammo can of .22rf that I got from a 93-year-old neighbor just before he passed away. Some of it dates back to the 1930s or earlier. He was apparently partial to .22 longs and CB caps - that, or he wound up with a bunch of boxes of the stuff and never found a use for it. There was even s bucket of loose rounds that included black powder rounds - at least what I figure from the smoke and the smell.
Most of the loose rounds fired well but I cleaned the guns very carefully after use.

 

[Sniper66]

The Drought didn't affect me much. I always kept a small stash so I can hunt squirrels with one of my .22s so I never missed a hunting trip for lack of ammo. I plink at floating wood chips with bulk ammo and always had plenty. I don't tend to burn boxes of ammo at the range like some of you pistol enthusiasts....since I'm a lousy pistol shot I get tired of missing! Also have brother who has lots of extra ammo that he will sell to me if I ever run low.

 

[kimberkid]

When the drought hit I had about 8k in 22 but I still bought it at Walmart when I was lucky enough to happen across some ... I paid something like $7.88 for 100 rounds of Mini-mags which was almost $40/500 and about 1/2 way through the drought they limited you to 3 boxes. I didn't get too excited about much else altho I did get there when the had 4-1000rnd boxes for $63 each ... I bought 3 as that was the limit.

Sometimes I'd go through quite a bit in a weekend ... Grandkids and an M16 with a CMMG PDW upper will do that