Top Deer and Varmint Cartridges of All Time

Above, the .30-30 Winchester cartridge
made the list. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

Whenever I see (or hear) the word varmint, I tend to think of Yosemite Sam or Elmer Fudd from the Looney Tunes cartoons. 

Anyway, the reason I am bringing that up is that NRA Women has posted a list of the top deer and varmint cartridges of all time. 

They begin it with:

We all love top 10 lists, but there’s a problem when it comes to determining the “best-selling” cartridges: Ammo manufacturers don’t like to share sales data, and who can blame them. When it comes to picking the top-selling cartridges, we’re forced to rely on other factors, like how long a cartridge has been around, how many rifles have been chambered for it and how popular those rifles are, inventory rankings from retailers, industry surveys, search demand data, and more.

So I asked ChatGPT to give me a list using the best data it could find, and it spit out the following list (but rest assured, the expository information is mine, not AI-generated). If I had been asked to come up with a list off the top of my head based on my best guess, it would have looked pretty much exactly like this, at least until we got to the end—a lot of these choices are obvious to hunters. That said, there’s no way to guarantee that this list is 100 percent accurate or in perfect order by volume, but it’s a good best estimate. It also lines up pretty darn well with this 2014 list of sales data from Federal.

So, without further ado, to read the list, go here.