AMMUNITION
Last-Call Loads
The end is nigh for some old cartridges. Is one of your favorites on the death watch?
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Ever since I passed life's half-century mark, I've found myself becoming a regular reader of the obituaries in the daily newspaper. As much as I like to see my name in print, that's the last place I'd want to find it--and now that I think about it, that's the last place it will probably be. But more and more, I'm seeing the names of people I've known, some of them younger than I (in which case I think, "He went ahead of his time) and some of them older (wherein I philosophize, "Well, he had a full life"). But in either case, we all hate to lose a friend.
It's that way with cartridges. Some of them have died a natural death, some have lingered well beyond their time, and some of them...well, we just know they aren't long for this world.
In most cases, we hate to lose a cartridge, even though its usefulness has long since passed. On the other hand, it could be argued that we have way too many cartridges already, so we might as well get rid of the excess baggage, or as Ebenezer Scrooge said in Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," "...and decrease the surplus population."
So with that in mind, here are some of what I call "Boot Hill bullets," cartridges that, in my opinion, have outlived their usefulness. I suspect I will hit upon a few of your favorites, but in the interest of objectivity, I've also put a few of my own favorites on the death list as well. So don't burn up your keyboard sending me vitriolic e-mails. This is just one gun writer's opinion. Besides, one cannot stop the inevitable.
Starting with the smallest ones first, what's with the .22 Hornet? In fact, why is this thing still around? Surprisingly, Federal lists two loadings for it, as does Hornady. Remington has three, and Winchester has two. But why? The .223 Remington is far superior, as is the .22-250 in terms of trajectory and velocity.
And Hornady's new .204 Ruger, with its muzzle velocity of 3,900 fps and a drop of less than four inches at 300 yards (compared to the .22 Hornet's 3,100 fps and a 300-yard drop of more than 16 inches), really puts this archaic cartridge to shame. Don't get me wrong; the .22 Hornet was fine when Col. Townsend Whelen and his cronies began playing around with it in the 1920s, and it was a great long-distance rat-catcher in Martini and Stevens single-shots (and even the Winchester bolt-action Model 54 back in the 1930s), but its time has passed.
Likewise, I predict the curtain will soon fall on the .218 Bee. It was developed in 1938 for the extinct Winchester Model 65 lever action, a pistol-gripped, half-magazine version of the older Model 92. Aside from a few guns such as the Marlin 1894C of a few years ago and the Taurus Tracker, Thompson/Center's Contender and Browning's limited reissue of the Model 65 back in 1989, not much has been produced for this once-popular varmint-buster, which is basically a .32-20 case necked down to .22 caliber.
For that matter, why is the .22 Long still hanging around? There is nothing that the .22 Long Rifle can't do better or that the .22 Short can't do with less cost and noise. Originally a black-powder cartridge developed in 1871, the Long didn't quite make the jump ballistically when smokeless powder came along in the 1890s. Yet it keeps hanging around, initially because there were some rifles, such as the Model 1890 Winchester pump, that were chambered specifically for it. But no more. Today, only a few companies such as CCI and Remington still catalog the .22 Long, and I don't know why.
By the same token, much as I have nostalgic feelings for it, I don't understand why the .32 Winchester Special is still with us. It's like the guest who came for dinner and just wouldn't leave. It's been hanging around for 104 years, having been introduced in 1902. Perhaps it's because of all those Winchester Model 94s and Marlin 336 lever actions that have been chambered for it over the years. I remember when growing up in Arizona that the conventional wisdom held that if you were going deer hunting, you took a "thutty-thutty," but if you were trekking through the Coconino National Forest after black bear, you'd better be carrying a saddle gun chambered for the .32 Special, as that was a much more potent bruin-buster.
In actual fact, the two cartridges are practically identical ballistically. So why was the .32 Special even conceived? It was simply a product of its time. Although smokeless-powder rifles and cartridges were on the market by 1895, the newfangled propellant was slow to catch on in a shooting world that had known nothing but black powder since Sir Francis Bacon's time. In fact, it wasn't until 1900 that Colt finally warranted its Single Action Army for smokeless.
