Are any of the shooters out there having trouble finding .22 lr ammo?
Haven’t used that ammunition since I was a kid when my dad wanted to teach me with a relatively light weapon. I’m surprised that there would be a shortage because it’s not ammunition used in the military or for hunting. Could it be that using a .22 lr weapon is out of style and there just isn’t a demand for it?
No. I just bought a 333-round box of Winchester on-line at a good price and with immediate availability.
I use it in several firearms, including a S&W 2206, a High Standard, and a Ruger 10-22.
Plenty available online.
Not as cheap as it used to be, though.
Very true. Right now, it’s about 25% of the cost of 9mm ammo for me. It used to be more like 10% to 15%, or even cheaper. The days of buying a bucket of 500 rounds of .22 LR for just a few bucks is long gone.
Are people still hoarding it? I know that at a local sporting store, they’d get a supply, put it on the shelves and it would be gone nearly immediately after. They put up signs to limit the amount that folks could purchase. I haven’t paid attention recently so not sure if that behavior continues. I know higher end bourbon seems to continue on with that tradition.
Sad. .22LR is fun for plinking.
All different types of ammo are experiencing higher prices and sporadic availability right now. The main causes seem to be tariffs and chemical shortages. The same folks who make commercial ammo also make military ammo and chemical makers also make powder for artillery shells. Many of those companies have military contracts that they need to prioritize, which means less production for commercial ammo.
Military rounds like 5.56 are also experiencing sporadic shortages.
.22LR is still very popular round, often used for plinking (as already mentioned) and more serious competition target shooting, as well as small game hunting and pest control. It’s still one of the most popular cartridges in current use.
So, we trust other countries enough to make our ammunition for us?! Faith is truly blind! 
That isn’t necessarily what’s going on. We may simply be competing for the essential constituent raw materials with other countries, some of whom seem to be at war these days.
Yep. And some folks have finally woken up and realized that maybe trusting other countries for ammo and raw materials might not be a good thing. New plants are being constructed in the U.S. as a result, but those new facilities are not up and running yet.
Nitrocellulose (a major component of smokeless powder) is the big one that everyone is competing for. There’s currently a global shortage due to war production worldwide. We’re also competing for copper and lead.
The U.S. also shipped a lot of artillery shells to Ukraine early on in their war, at a time when we really only had enough shells for our own training. This left us with a shortage that we are currently filling. We’re also still shipping artillery shells to Ukraine. so those military contracts are using up a lot of domestic production.
You might think that artillery shells shouldn’t effect .22LR production, but both use a lot of the same raw materials such as nitrocellulose and copper.
That was sure a thing a while back. It seemed to normalize, and I stocked up. Haven’t shopped for any in a while. It’s my Coyote Round. Thankfully, haven’t seen may of them around lately either.
Maintaining a large production capacity for war of a commodity for which there is little or no consumption in peacetime is very expensive. So-called ‘educational orders’ are placed with overseas suppliers as a form of insurance against the day when large quantities may be needed in a hurry.
Nope. I was in Walmart last weekend to buy a couple of boxes of 9mm for the range (they don’t carry it any longer). While I was searching the shelf I came across buckets of .22. I didn’t look to see how many rounds were in them. I assume 1400.
As far as .22, I went almost a decade from 2008 with not seeing a single bulk pack on shelves, and often times not even small packs available, just weird stuff like ratshot or .22 CB (essentially a very short .22 without powder, only primer-powered). It never came to being out out, but I felt like I had to be stingy. So when production finally caught up, I learned to buy a bunch. Mostly the Federal blue or red boxes of 440-550 rounds. I learned Remington Golden Bullet sucks.
Shortages for military use are also hitting the tungsten world. US and Canada restrictions on lead for waterfowl and WMA type places means you have 3 other options: steel (cheap but less effective), bismuth (more expensive, almost as good as lead) or tungsten (very expensive, better than lead) and like in the turkey ammo world the TSS tungsten shot became popular. Now it’s apparently dead in the water last I checked, it was already multiple dollars per round then quickly doubled.
Stuff like .22 isn’t having much military use, but shortages are because 1) raw materials, 2) employees making the stuff get moved to producing better sellers/more lucrative, and 3) it’s not like switching production is easy, rimfire production is inherently different.
I’m down to about 1,000 rounds and think it’s time to get some more.