GA,



The moral of this thread is at least three fold:

1. For game - .22lr can do the job. For game hunting all we care about is lethality. The deer or whatever is not going to shoot back at us. Our life isn't threatened if it takes a few minutes for the deer to succumb to its wound. The deer can’t take those minutes to pull a trigger in our direction. It will eventually bleed out and then we can go and harvest the meat. While it is bleeding out – we don’t have to worry about all the deer’s buddies shooting at us. We can sit there and do nothing with not a care in the world.

2. For anti-personnel use - we don't much care about lethality - we care about cessation of hostile action. During violent gun fights - 99.99999% of the time we don't have the luxury of sitting still and getting a perfect shot off under ideal (for hunting anyway) conditions. Our foe won’t be standing there grazing on grass and lazily lift his head while giving us a perfect side shot. One shot most of the time will NOT do the job – no matter what the caliber is (OK – I’ll concede the 20mm will probably do it with one round – but even the mighty .50 BMG round is not a guaranteed one shot stopper) – we will need to send some follow up rounds. We need rounds that cause the most damage to the most organs/vessels/veins/arteries as practical/possible. The .22lr ain’t that round. It is not known to be devasting when hitting game. In fact – it is used for game for the OPPOSITE reason – because it DOESN’T damage “meat”. For shooting bad guys – we want to damage as much meat as possible, in the shortest time possible. We want the bad guy to be more worried about the damage done to his body than his desire to kill us.

3. If the .22lr is used against hostile threats - it is used in VERY specialized applications. When used for "crowd control" - it is employed from rooftops or from inside apartments shooting down into the street. The shooter is isolated from violent action of the crowd - and is protected by security teams on the ground floor. So he is more like the hunter shooting a deer. The .22lr has also been used for assassination. Two operatives would walk up to the target and both would empty their .22lr handguns into the back of the targets head. Here it is a lone target - the shooters aren't worried about having to engage anyone else - so it is more like the hunter shooting a deer.

4. We need to worry about the ALL the bad guys in the area – not just the “one”. Bad guys aren’t alone. They travel in squads/gangs. We need a projectile delivery system that can rapidly shoot rounds reliably. The .22lr can’t be relied upon to do that. Since real ammo has become so expensive – along with a lot of other people I have started shooting a lot more .22lr ammo. The ammo is unreliable and so are the firearms. The .22lr ammunition is the hardest ammo to make reliable because of the design. It has a huge rim. The rim must fit in the magazine, which means there is a lot of slop for the rest of the round in the magazine. When the bolt pushes the round forward the front can veer off to either side on its way to the chamber. The chamber can’t be chamfered much or the rim will sink too far in to be hit by the firing pin. So – rimfires malfunction. A LOT. I will not take a firearm into harms way that malfuntions. I train to remediate malfunctions – but I don’t want them happening. With a .22 – you KNOW malfs will happen.

Bottom line – leave the .22lr for hunting applications.

cheers

tire iron