Are the days of cheap plinking gone forever? No. These are fired cases prepped for reloading. Later in 2017 we’ll reload .22 Magnum, too.
The .22 Long Rifle is by far the single most popular recreational shooting cartridge in history; the Ammo Encyclopedia (Mike Bussard, Blue Book Publications, Inc.) reports manufacturers churning out 5 billion rounds every year. Until the recent advent of the .17 rimfires, it stood alone as challengers like the .22 WRF and 5mm Remington Magnum failed to interest shooters and it drove the .22 Long into obsolescence. The .22 Magnum hangs in there, but it’s really a different beastie with a different kind of bullet, a slightly larger diameter case and a premium price tag that takes it out of the realm of casual plinking.
With that kind of popularity and an unbroken 130-year track record for burying contenders, it’s no wonder that gun and ammo manufacturers with mega-million-dollar stakes in the new .17 rimfires want shooters to shift focus from the .22LR to the .17s. And unquestionably, the .17s with their much higher velocity (2,500fps from the .17HMR) and expanding jacketed projectiles way outperform the .22LR and its old-tech, barely supersonic blob-of-soft-lead bullet.
In the hunting fields, certainly. But not at the bank. The major defining characteristic of a plinking round is its low cost, which likely accounts for the .22LR’s longevity. “Inexpensive,” compared to the .22LR, is not one of the .17s’ attributes. In a time of an $8 per hour minimum wage, three 50-round boxes of $2.50 .22LR cost about one hour of labor. At today’s $4 per box an hour’s labor buys only two. At $13 per box for .17 rimfire, well, you can do the math. The pocketbook reality is that the .17s are no more “plinking ammo” than are .22 Magnums – they are instead a kind of premium rimfire ammo.
From the beginning, there was no way to make .17 rimfire ammunition with their jacketed bullets price-competitive with .22LR ammo; note that instead the retail price of .22LR has doubled with the advent of the 17s. The net effect is that “plinking” is no longer synonymous with “cheap” for many blue collar shooters with children to shoe in the winter, or to curmudgeonly gun writers on military pensions who used to blow through a brick of .22s with their kids on a Saturday afternoon. Don’t be surprised to one day here see a method for reloading the .17 rimfires, too.
