For Self Protection -- Don't Overlook the 22

Here in Alabama we have the castle law about your home. If someone breaks in and you have good reason to believe they are there to commit a serious crime (forced entry, robbery.....doesn't have to be life threatening to you) you can shoot. My wife is often here alone with here mother while I am away on business. We have never had a problem at our house, but the time to be prepared is before, not after.

I tried to show here how to shoot a handgun, but without practice you know that is not much protection. A shotgun she would get one shot and it would floor her. The answer is my old 22 lr Marlin. I put a simple laser on it and at close range the bullets go right where the laser points. She is very comfortable with it as it takes next to no skill, and has virtually zero recoil. What good is a 22 you might say?

Well I got some Aguila (sp?) Interceptors which leave the barrel at about 1470 fps. To test them I took a solid 2x4 plank and cut loose from about 25 yards. They put little holes on the one side, and bigger ones on the backside as they came out. Well I was sold just with that, but for clicks and bricks Saturday I got another 2X6 and screwed a piece of fence planking (little more than 1/2 inch) to the face of it, and repeated the test. Small holes on the front, big holes on the back! I was amazed....that was well over 2" of solid wood that those little 22's blasted straight through. One actually bored through a knot in the 2X6.

Next chance I'll add 2 fence planks and try again.....

Point being modern 22 lr's are not your fathers rounds. If you or a loved one is most comfortable defending your castle with them, they are a viable alternative.

 

22 is a good option, even small women can shoot a 20 ga though.

 

A .22 can get deep penetration and be lethal. It's way better than throwing rocks, but I don't think it will stop a BG fast enough. The BG will eventually pass out from a .22 wound, but not before he can get to your wife unless you hit him in the head, heart, or spine. If that's all she can shoot and she is comfortable with a .22, go for it.

 

Well it hold 16 rounds and I told her to keep the laser on his head and keep shooting until he stops moving......

If it is a woman alone in a house, here in Al. they don't ask questions. A deputy sheriff once told a female friend who lived alone, "if he dies outside, just drag him in and THEN call us....."

 

Then there is the .22 mag. The only difference between a 22 round and larger rounds is what they mushroom to. The mushroom gives marginally greater chance of hitting a vital area. People have been shot with handguns and don't even know it until they wake up in ER. You can see many vids of people walking around after being shot and don't even know it. Penetration of a .22 is pretty good.

I prefer a 22 over something like a .32 which has a larger front plate area and is pretty underpowered so has greater trouble penetrating.

One thing that won't happen if you defend yourself with a .22. No prosecutor in court can claim you just wanted to kill someone with a Dirty Harry handgun round.

 

Its all about shot placement. If she's got 16 rounds and puts all or most of them center of mass he's going down pretty quick anyway. Lungs for starters, diaphragm, lots and lots of very major blood vessels, maybe even the heart if she gets lucky, he's not standing around for long. Even a couple of rounds from a .45 or .357 doesn't always stop a guy immediately so I'd say she'll do fine with the .22

 

[video=youtube_share;xAkOzr6cDx0]http://youtu.be/xAkOzr6cDx0[/video]

[video=youtube_share;OUM1r_444CY]http://youtu.be/OUM1r_444CY[/video]

 

BIG problem with the more powerful loads in the Marlin, to include CCI Velocitors, and a new one out from Winchester in the same category. They are more powerful, and that additional back thrust on the recoil spring and internals certainly will cause premature wear and failure. Especially in the Marlin, which has a lot of cast and plastic parts. A gun that breaks is of no use to anyone.
I've done a lot of testing with the Aguila Interceptor, in my trio of Ruger 10/.22's. With one of them, I left the stock steel bolt stop pin in, and fired about 200 rounds of the Interceptor. It caused the holes in the receiver that hold the bolt stop pin to egg. That shock of the bolt slamming the stop pin transferred to the pins that retain the trigger group, and they egged also.
So, I put recoil buffers in all 3 rifles. Shooting regular high velocity ammo, those buffers will last for the life of the rifle. Shooting Interceptors, the bolt cuts through them within 800 rounds.
I've chronographed the Interceptor in all 3 rifles. With my 22" match barrel, they go the advertised 1,470 fps. Average for 10 rounds was actually 1,465.
In my 20" barrel, they go more like 1,390.
In my 16" barrel, they go only 1,280.
That still makes all 3 rifles more powerful than they would be with CCI Mini Mags.
It's worth noting that .22 Long Rifle is renowned for being unreliable. Some companies are worse than others. The best for reliability are Eley, Aguila, and CCI. Eley invented their own process for priming rimfire cartridges. With that process, a very precisely measured amount of powder is applied to each cartridge case. That is followed by a precisely measured water droplet. The water saturates the powder, and the resulting "mud" flows evenly into the space within the rim. When Eley changed their production process from analog to digital, Aguila bought their old equipment, along with the rights to the Eley priming process. No-one else has it.
CCI also uses a proprietary process. I don't know what they call it, or what makes it different, but I dare you to find anyone who has EVER had a failure to fire with CCI ammo.
With that in mind, one is well advised to use ONLY Aguila or CCI ammo for self defense. I exclude Eley because they don't make anything but match ammo, most of which is sub-sonic and therefore very weak.
A big "trick" with a .22 for defense is to practice "double pops". Aim the first round, and as fast as possible, fire again. In my own impromptu testing, I fired into wet phone books, using the Remington 36 gr. hollow point. From a distance of about 30 feet, the entrance holes from my 20" barreled 10/.22 were about an inch apart. After 3~4 inches of penetration, the "wound channels" converged, and produced a single channel close to an inch wide for 3 more inches. This path of destruction, as it were, is very similar to my 9mm load, using the Remington 124 gr. Golden Saber.
Where Elmer tells his wife to aim for the head, and keep firing, that's "good enough". Center of Mass is what I'd suggest. Understand that a .22 LR bullet is the same diameter as #4 buckshot, but a little heavier. A 12 ga. 3" Magnum load of #4 Buck carries 41 pellets. Trouble is that it also produces the same recoil as a .338 Win. Mag. That's enough to seriously injure his wife. If she can get 6 rounds of those .22 bullets into the bad guy, he's probably done. If she shoots them 2 at a time, that's almost the same as 3 shots of good defensive ammo from a 9mm.

 

Truth, and for even less recoil than a 20 gauge, a 12 gauge with reduced recoil rounds.

 

Most women can also handle a .410. Light weight and with a shorter barrel, easier to swing (Not cut down below legal length) I have a .20 ga. with a 25 in barrel. Man, that sucker is nice for hunting in heavy brush.

 

.22LR is fine if you have nothing, however there are a multitude of calibers that would work much better.

Such as.... 9mm... in a rifle...

Or 5.56.

.22LR has some 136ftlbs of energy, 5.56 is 10x that.

 

Better than nothing, but I wouldn't trust my wife's life with them. In your shoes, I'd try to buy a 9mm carbine--about the same size as the Marlin, easy to shoot, but effective and reliable. My main concern about the .22 is reliability of the ammo. I've had more .22s fail to fire than any other caliber. In fact, I can't recall ever having a centerfire cartridge ever not going off. It would happen at least every other shooting occasion with the .22 (and not just one .22, but one of 4 or 5 we used to shoot). Not a big deal while target shooting....

 

All true (well my fail to fire experience with 22 has been very rare, but no matter).
I have a 9mm carbine, she won't use it. Gotta go with what will work.

 

I have a 20 ga double barrel, with buckshot it kick a LOT. Not going to use birdshot.

Hadn't thought of the 410 though- good idea, compared to a 12 what would you say the felt recoil is? 1/2...1/4?? I have never shot one.

 

I've taught my daughter and grandson to shoot with a .410. I'd say about 1/2 or less on recoil as compared to a 20 ga.

 

Why do I even bother explaining things to you guys? In my post on page 1, I explained the .22LR FTF issue, and why you should ONLY use ammo from Aguila or CCI.
Am I casting Pearls before Swine?

 

A .22LR round will kill at 400 yards without issue - if you can hit the target. It's a formidable cartridge. Next to no recoil, very little ear damage, not as much chance for over-penetration as AR-15s and the such - an all round brilliant choice.

I still feel nothing beats a 12ga pump action for home defense - if you know how to use it and don't use slugs (lol).

 

We are seriously considering a firearm for the missus.
I think we may have found this one for about $300.

She has already fired one and is comfortable with it. She's actually a much better pistol shot than I am. But I'm good with a rifle.

http://www.ruger.com/products/sr22Pistol/models.html

 

First, I don't read through all the responses before I post. I generally respond post by post.
Second, I still don't buy the reliability of .22 rimfire over any centerfire. It may be good enough for your wife's safety, but it's not for mine.

 

I went to pretty great lengths to find out for myself about .22LR in any way I could. One part of that was to gather up 10 rounds of each type of ammo that I considered using. I pulled the bullets, and weighed the charges. I looked closely to see how the priming compound had been applied, and how well it filled the critical space inside the rim.
Part of this was interesting/amusing. For example, the original load for .22 LR was 5.0 gr. of FFG black powder. Long Rifle was developed to hold that amount of powder. In weighing the charges, I was surprised to find these numbers:
Federal bulk: 1.2 gr.
Aguila Interceptor: 2.3 gr.
BVAC (relabeled Armscor, from the Philippines): 2.1 gr.
Remington Golden Bullet: 2.0 gr.
Composition of each powder varies, but I was amused to see that the most powerful .22LR ammo in the world only fills the case about 1/2 way.
Looking at the priming compound, the Aguila was the most uniform, as it uses the Eley method.
With the Rem. ammo, I found that my 2% FTF rate was due to the fact that those 2% had no priming compound at all.
Just by looking, it wasn't possible to discern any difference between CCI, Federal and Win., although in practice, I find that CCI is the ONLY non-Eley brand that is 100% reliable for me.
Mini-mag first came into production in 1963. I first started using it around 1965, and I've probably fired 25,000 rounds of it since then. Never a misfire in the dozen or so guns I've used it with.

 

St.James! While that little Ruger is cute, it's still "just a .22". In keeping with this thread, it is indeed better to have a .22 than nothing at all. Further, we know that more often than not, the mere presence of a firearm sends that bad guys running.
Howevah!!!
If your wife is comfortable with the SR22, I would try hard to sell her on the Glock 42, in .380. It's very close to the same size, and recoil is soft, due to the design, but .380 is much more powerful. If it comes down to her having to fire, the .380 is much more likely to actually have the desired effect.
The trouble with the 42 is that you'll probably want one as well.

 

Failure to fire may not appear as a matter serious enough to consider. What of failure of extract? The rimmed cartridge design is not exactly the most reliable when it comes to the autoloading platform. That is regarded as one of the primary reasons for why so-called "Saturday Night Specials" are commonly chambered for the semi-rimmed .25 ACP instead of the more affordable .22LR.

 

Growing up, we mainly fired CCI mini-mags (my dad liked the orange plastic boxes they were in), and we had misfires in the four or five .22s we had.

Stats question: How did you compute a 2% lack of primer rate in Remington ammo using 10 rounds? To get a 2% rate, logically speaking you'd need to have a sample size of at least 50. With a sample size of 10, the failure rate would have been in multiples of 10%........

 

Fair question. A few years ago, I got back to the Ruger 10/.22. Having grown up with that carbine, there were several things I was looking for. In order to fulfill all of my ideas about what a 10/.22 is supposed to be and do, I ended up with 3 of them, with each one configured a bit differently.
I went through all of the bulk pack brands of ammo, looking for which one works best for me, and based on per round cost. All things considered, I landed on the Rem. 36 gr. Golden bullet as my standard fare.
Before the current .22 drought hit, I was able to keep the cost to 3.7 cents per round, for those that did fire. In the process of breaking in and seasoning 2 aftermarket barrels, and working out all of my accuracy development, I burned through about 23,000 rounds of that ammo in about 5 years. That's a pretty good sample base!
Remington claims to have cured the inconsistent priming problem, but I haven't been able to find any of the ammo produced at their new plant. As I understand it, the original "kleenbore" priming method involves the insertion of a small jet into each cartridge. This thing sprays a very precisely metered amount of priming compound as it rotates. I don't think the shell is spun after that, as is standard practice with Fed., Win, CCI, and most others. If you disassemble a Rem. rimfire cartridge, you see that the center of the case is clean, with the priming compound only in the area of the rim.
With the other brands, you normally see that the whole bottom surface of the cartridge is covered in priming mixture, and there's usually a bit of it continuing up the inner wall of the case. That method is less precise, but more reliable. I've described the Eley method in previous posts in this thread, and I've noted that Aguila is the only other brand that uses it. I've tested every type of Aguila .22LR ammo I could get, for accuracy and reliability, with a total of 6 or 7,000 rounds fired. Zero FTF, but average cost at the time was about 6 cents each.
I disagree with the comment about failure to extract above.
By design, a semi-auto .22 is a blow back action. This means that the force of the back pressure on the bolt is what causes the bolt to move rearward, thus cycling the next round.
With match barrels, it's common to have a failure to extract unfired rounds, because the dimensions of the chamber and extractor groove don't allow the extractor to engage the rim, some times. Upon firing, the rim is forced completely under the extractor claw, and the process completes very handily.
The only reason why a garbage little cheapo pistol would fail to extract would be due entirely to the fact that the pistol is cheapo garbage.

 

I like the Golden Bullet and the Thunderbolt. I have not had trouble cycling either or had failure to fire. That said, I just got a full sized Western 22/22mag. No problems with FTF or FTE.