The Latest Group of SAAMI Cartridges

Shorter than standard shotgun shells, mini shells are designed to have lower recoil and be able to fit rounds in a tubular magazine while still maintaining an adequate payload of shot. These have been around for years but now they can be produced to feed more reliably in a larger number of firearms.

It seems the reason for this cartridge is to make it easy to convert the perennial .22lr firearm to one that fires non-toxic bullets with better ballistic traits than available to a 100-year-old design of the .22lr.

The Precision Rifle community have been asking for and wildcatting .25 caliber guns with high BC bullets to find that sweet stop in performance between the faster 6mm and heavier hitting 6.5 mm cartridges. It may seem small but the difference in down range performance is measurable.

While the 28-gauge shotgun has a very loyal following it has always been limited to 2.75" shells. Even in new guns. That has now changed. the 28 ga magnum has arrived.

This one surprised me. This one has been on the drawing board since the 80s and in the wild since about 1990. Originally designed for a very specific military and law enforcement Personal Defense Weapon (PDW) role, the cartridge and the couple firearms chambered for it languished for a few decades.

My how things have changed. There are more manufacturers of these guns than ever before and at least 3 major and several smaller manufacturers produce ammo. It has even been accepted and "standardized" by NATO. Why it took parent company Fabrique National (FN) this long to submit to SAAMI I don't understand.

The 7mms have always been one of the most popular "do it all" family of cartridges in North America. While some have come and gone, others have been popular for decades and have earned the title of "classic". This latest 7mm is designed to take all that shooters and manufacturers have learned from the increasing popularity of long-range shooting and modern ballistics and then apply them to the wide-open hunting fields. They did this primarily by using a new steel alloy case that allows much higher pressures than traditional hunting rounds. This allows much greater velocity and energy down range and doing it more efficiently. We'll see.

I am a fan of this cartridge, but it looks like even with SAAMI acceptance its days may be numbered. Designed specifically as a self-defense round that meets the practical use of the 9mm Parabellum but allows more rounds in the same sized magazine, the 30SC was trying to grab a tiny corner of the self-defense pistol market. Only time will tell. I think this cartridge also has some great uses afield for plinking or small game hunting. But we need a few guns designed for that before we will know for sure.

Designed as a dual-purpose target and hunting round that will fit into an AR-15 platform, the 338 ARC is the latest and largest addition to Hornady's line of Advanced Rifle Cartridge (ARC). This one is supposed to deliver adequate range and power both with and without a suppressor, ammo dependent.

This is an interesting case. SAAMI originally published a standard on this cartridge many years ago but has decided to update their C&C files. I can find no reason for this, so we are all left to our guesses. My best guess is that both .30 Super Carry and 7.62x25mm existed in very similar spaces but with very different chamber pressures (among other things.) SAAMI may have thought a little clarification was needed.