Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Rimfires 17 wsm. Dead?

Old thread, but this is what I've seen.

I live less than a couple of hours from the OP and 17 WSM ammo is usually on the shelf of just about every gunshop and Walmart around. Like others have said, I bought the ammo way before I bought the gun.

On a whim, I bought one of the pencil-barreled Savages on clearance at Walmart but never could stomach it enough to even take the hangtags off of it.

Sometime later, I started looking seriously for a rifle and eventually found an old stock NIB Ruger 77/17 All Weather.

Fortunately, mine is the newer 18" barreled version. I've been let down by the accuracy of nearly every Ruger 77/22 or 77/17 I've owned, so I was prepared to be let down before it ever even got here. I found a Nikon 3-15 in the safe that I don't even remember owning and mounted it up and took it to the range.

Some of my friends were there and kept telling me how dumb I was to have bought that thing because of all of the issues they'd heard of with the Savages. A couple of them work at a local gun shop where a guy brought in an original Ruger 77/17 All Weather with the 24" barrel. He'd sent it back to Ruger 3 or 4 times and was never satisfied with its accuracy, so he sold it to the gun shop along with all of his ammo.

After the 1st shot, they were all impressed enough by how loud it was that they all put on hearing protection. The second shot cut the first shot's hole at 50, and then the third did the same. I moved out to 100 and started shooting golf balls, running them past 200 before losing them in the grass.

That little rifle has impressed the heck out of me as a hunting gun, racking up coyotes, all kinds of vermin, and will be in the truck with me this spring Turkey season.

I need to pick up some more ammo and see how it shoots with other lots of ammo, but the cases I've burned through of American Eagle so far have been impressive.

Would like to see where I said that. Can't find anything here with the Campfire search function.

At the 2022 Shot Show there is a gas operated AR style rifle chambered for the 17WSM. The first gas operated rimfire. Interesting. Remember reloaders are a big minority in the Shooting world.

Maybe, but the ones still actually shooting (all they want to anyway) are by and large handloaders and/or reloaders. Just checked at Midway and they’re fresh out of .17WSM (and Hornet.) OTOH, I’ve got oodles of brass, primers, powder, and bullets for my .22 Hornet and .223, and come to think of it, everything else I shoot. Being at the mercy of supply and demand isn’t where I want to be.

Me neither. Those guys are getting bent over the barrel..

I haven't seen any 17WSM around here for a long time. None of my friends run it or have rifles that use it. Only one cocky fu ck I've seen having a rifle chambered for it that was a guest to a member of my club. Thought he was going to do well at the know your limits shoot we had, but was a dismal failure on his part. Poor bastid.

Who is making that claim?

Garrow did it with the 17HMR.

Around me I’ve been able to keep supplied pretty good with 17 WSM ammo. My rifle shoots the AE 17 grain VMax and Winchester Supreme 25 grain stuff pretty well. I’ve only shot it out to 400 yards so far but it’s really a quite accurate rifle/cartridge. Granted it’s not something that’s going to withstand the wind much but it is a lot of fun.