7-30 Waters Ammo Prices

The 7-30 Waters is a gun writer's fever dream made into misbehaving flesh. Ken Waters necked the ancient .30-30 down to 7mm in 1976. This good man was a doomed romantic trying to drag the lever gun kicking into the modern age. Winchester made an honest cartridge of it in 1984 when chambering it for the Model 94. Then deer hunters shrugged. They stayed with the good ol' .30-30 and the rifle died on the vine by 1988. Then the twist: Thompson/Center bored Contender pistol barrels for it in 1986 and the single-shot handgun cult of silhouette shooters, steel-ram assassins and men who hunt whitetail with a 14-inch pistol adopted the orphan and never let go. Twenty-four hundred feet per second from a hand-held barrel is savage business. Factory ammo means one thing: a 120-grain flat-nose at 2,700 fps loaded in limited runs when the machines feel generous. Scarce as honest work. Handloaders tend the flame. Everyone else circles the listings like buzzards. Drunk ones.