Top-selling cartridges

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BBroadside

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Are there any good industry-wide sources for which rifle cartridges sell the best? I've heard it said here and there that "such-and-such cartridge is no longer in the top 20" so obviously someone knows. (I'm asking this in the rifle section because I have a pretty good idea of what handgun and shotgun ammo types sell well.)

I'm mainly curious because I think it would help choosing between ballistically-similar cartridges on the basis of expected availability.

By the way, I'm interested in what sells the best in the United States; sales figures worldwide would also be interesting but I suspect they'd be less reliable.
 
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I don't know where you would find reliable info.

.22 LR is definitely first.
I would wager .223 is a distant second.
Either 7.62X39 or a very popular hunting cartridge probably follows that.
 
22 LR is definitely first.
I would wager .223 is a distant second.
Either 7.62X39 or a very popular hunting cartridge probably follows that.
Click to expand...

Yeah .22 LR is probably first. .223 is probably farther down the list, id say 30-06 is second. Then maybe .308 winchester is third.
 
.22 is numbe 1 no matter what

top produced would be
.22
7.62X39
7.62X54r

top selling wouuld be
.22
12gauge
then probibly 30-06
 
There are definitely a ton of 30-06's out there, but I don't see people shooting them very much. Sure, every time you go to the range there is likely to be someone there with an 06, but you never see those folks really blasting through the ammo either. My guess is that someone with an AR, AK or SKS probably goes through more ammo in a single visit to the range than a 30-06 shooter will fire in a year and lately I've been seeing a lot of black rifles at the range.
 
You guys are on the right track.

22lr for plinking.
223 and 762x39 also get lots of plinking
30-30, 270, 30-06, are some of the most popular but probably don't get shot as much as varmint cartridges.

If you really, really want to know. You can join the NSSF and get their annual report for a small fee. I cannot find any one else on line that has it.
 
But I wonder how they tabulate the sales. Is it just US made ammo, is surplus counted, etc...

There's really no way 25-06 outsells 7.62x39. People order the latter by the thousand round case and spray it out of 30 round mags. I even doubt that the number of rifles chambered in 25-06 is close to the number of SKS's and AK's out there.
 
Good points, elmerfudd. Looking at George Hill's data I'd have guessed those tabulated production rather than sales. Where did you get those juicy data, George? I'm hungry for a list like 20 cartridges long.

Goal: over the long term, I'd like to get a couple of rifles for various roles, and I don't want any of them to be too hard to find ammo for. E.g., .260 Rem is supposed to be unparalleled for silhouette shooting, but I don't know if it's easy to find. .218 Bee? .32-20? Nothing wrong with just visiting Wal-Mart or wherever, but I'm trying to think about bigger areas than just where I live since I don't know where I'll live in 5 years.

It probably wouldn't be too hard to find ammo for the top 50 cartridges, but I'd like to be on the safe side. There seems to be some speculation about which ammo types are hard to find, and I'd like some hard facts.
 
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