Paul Harrell tests various 22s with several different guns. A good watch.

So basically what he showed is that 22lr no matter the brand will have some bad rounds. Considering how cheap 22lr ammo is I think it is still by far the best bang for the buck. Shooting 22lr with a 6 shot revolver is a whole lot of time shooting to go through a brick. Fun at its cheapest cost. I will still buy the Thunder duds and not cry about a few duds in a brick. Out of 6 duds that get reinserted I might only have 2 that were total duds. Wow I had a $.08 loss. I have 7 guns that use 22lr and that makes for a lot of fun shooting.
I liked his explanation of why a round that failed to fire can be reinserted and then it fires off.
As usual his videos are very well done. I was surprised he had so few gun action failures especially in the semi auto handguns which can be so finicky with different brand 22lr ammo.

I think the main point is rimfire should be disqualified for self defense because its rimfire, automatically. 25 ACP vs. 22lr is settled by the point one is inherently far more reliable because its centerfire. 22 magnum vs. 32 ACP? Well, one is centerfire and more reliable. Cheap affordable pistol caliber carbines are available that even weak people of limited physical capacity can use comfortably and train with. A full barrel 410 shotgun is easy to handle, often cheap, far more effective shot for shot, and again not rimfire. If you are going to chime in on rifles and full carbines, that an AR15 in 5.56 NATO is mild enough for young, elderly, crippled, than here we are again, better killing and not rimfire.

I train with 22lr, shoot 10 rounds of rifle and 10 round through my PPK/s every day. Despite being good with that Walther I still don't consider it a self defense gun, just a trainer. Good way to keep proficiency, good to train and plink, not really good enough for self defense. It has its place, and its place is not there.

If our hollow point causes one hangup in 200 rounds in our auto loader, the whole incident might keep us up at night, we'll always remember the time it jammed us. Yet when a rimfire fails once every 200 rounds we just laugh it off and "oh, that's just rimfire" because its our old, cheap friend. Why is it OK with one and not the other, in terms of critical emergency combat use? Its not merely terminal performance I'm concerned with in 22lr or 22 magnum, its the rimfire issue first and foremost.

I have shot 10's of thousands of .22's and have had 1 misfire , I have not shot any of the bucket o bullets type .22 and my go to ammo is CCI SV. I think a lot of the problems are gun related, but what I think and 5 bucks will get you a happy meal at MCD's.

A revolver with quality .22 magnums is NOT unreliable, and their are some good fighting loads like the Hornady Critical that does about a good a job as a .32 ACP when fired from a 4 5/8” or longer barrel. Not my first choice but those that think a bad guy will just laugh as he is hit with six high-velocity hollow points in .22WMR is an idiot.

If you watch a video of how .22 cal. rimfire is manufactured, you'd be amazed that more than 1/2 even fire. Amazing process that works "most" of the time .

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John

Trouble with 22 rimfire is sometimes a case won't extract! Then you get out a pocket knife to remove it from the chamber. I've never seen center fire ammo do this except once. That gun (an old Mauser) had a cracked extractor.

Digging a 22 out of a chamber with a pocket knife is tedious.

A humorous thought - in Ohio you can use a pistol for self defense, but NOT a knife. So Joe gets accosted by a bad guy. Pulls his 22 out and fires once. Failure to eject! Pulls out his knife, extracts the case, racks another round in and shoots his attacker. Joe gets dragged into court where the DA argues that, "using a knife to fix a gun during a fight constitutes using the knife fir self defense." Just joking!

In a 500 round brick of Federal or CCI I'll usually have one that doesn't fire the first time and one with a loose bullet that doesn't feed in a semi-auto.

If you have tens of thousands of rounds with none of that, the gun gods are smiling upon you.

Of course now that I have spouted off about not having misfires with .22 ammo I will get several next time I go to the range.

I think quality control suffered a LOT during the late great unpleasantness, when the manufacturers were running at full capacity to supply the shortage. I have never had a misfire with CCI, but have with other cheaper brands occasionally. FWIW, I think the QC issues have pretty much been resolved.

Is that video really worth over an hour or my time? I appreciate the link but that is a very long video!

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Freedom is never free!!
SWCA #3437

Scattershot said:
^^^^^^^^ THIS! ^^^^^^^^

I shoot a lot of .22 ammo. Everything from the real good ammo to cheap bulk stuff. There is almost always a .22 of some kind with me on every range trip. I've noticed since the last great panic and ammo shortage that .22s aren't as reliable as they once were. Where as a dud used to be an occasional occurrence, now its almost certain there will be at least a couple in almost every box.
I believe that the ammo makers started cutting corners during the shortage to speed up production. Once everything got back up to normal, they left those shortcuts in place. Probably to save money.
Don't misunderstand. I still love my .22s and still shoot tons of .22 ammo. But I don't think its as reliable as it used to be. I would seriously think twice before recommending a .22 for self defense these days.

I think that a lot of it is mechanical, i.e. light strikes due to fouled chambers in combination with moderately adequate hammer/striker springs. Like a revolver with a dirty cylinder or semi-auto with a dirty chamber, where you think the round is fully seated but in actuality it is just a few thousandths shy but still in far enough to allow the mechanics to operate. NOW the hammer/striker has to finish seating the cartridge and then use what momentum is left to try to fire it. Case in point; a High Standard Double Nine revolver and Trophy semi auto along with a bulk box of Remington cheap stuff. I was getting regular misfires from both pistols with the remington ammo after having perfect functioning previously with Federal. I noticed that the Trophy wasn't fully closing on some of the remingtons so I started tapping the back of the slide with my hand before every shot. Misfires didnt stop completely but did improve markedly. In the revolver I started seating the rounds firmly in the chamber instead of just thumbing them in and noticed the same thing, not perfect but better. So I had about 250 rounds left so I ran them through a new to me Ruger 10/22 that I had brought along to try out. It cycled every one of the left over rounds without malfunction. I looked at some of the cases and noticed a larger striker impact area that was smashed on every case. And the light bulb began to glow...

There was a video...?

I don't need someone else to tell me about 22lr ammo.

I agree that carrying .22 rimfire--LR or Magnum--for self defense is not something I would risk for reliability reasons. In the extremely unlikely event that I ever have to use a firearm to defend myself, I'd like to do all I can to keep Murphy at a distance.

Because Murphy, as we all know, was an optimist.

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Oh well, what the hell.

my experience with both is just like yours - IIRC CCI + Federal are manufactured in the same plant -

I've shot a good bit of CCI SV. If you get one round per brick of this ammo that doesn't fire the first time, that's too many.

Maybe I am missing something here. It maybe that some feel the firearm used can affect the reliability of 22 ammo, but in 60 plus years of shooting over 21 guns (22’s in single shot, bolt action, semi-auto,lever action rifles, 22 revolvers and derringers) I have not found this to be the case!

You old timers remember the Canadian Canuck 22 ammo. Out of a box of 50 you where lucky to get 25 rounds to fire. I shot Remington 22 long rifle and magnums along with CCI Mini mags (Thousands over 60 years in the many types and brands- to many to list) with less than a dozen failures.

I purchased a box of Remington golden 22long rifle last year and had 10 failures to fire out of a box of 50. Even tried to shoot the rounds again with no luck. Ended up giving the remaining 12 rounds in the box to my LGS range.
Some good company’s quality control have gone to the dogs! There are many GOOD ammo brands out there. Just have to shoot different brands to find them! I only shoot CCI ammo now.

Be SAFE and shoot often!

I've been shooting 22LR ammo for about 70 years and there always have been an occasional dud caused by a gap in the priming compound. During the massive 22LR shortage the quality of Federal bulk ammo dropped notably with misfires and loose bullets. CCI ammo was OK until they started making CCI standard velocity in the Federal plant(50 round boxes vs CCI 100 rnd.). Suddenly my friends who swore by CCI were having failures to fire. If you're a plinker, no big deal, but for competitive speed shooters bad ammo is a BIG problem. We began buying only CCI in 100 round boxes and the problem was minimal. I save the duds for practice or plinking.

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Bob.
SWCA 1821

I shoot a lot of Thunderbolts from my 63-5. No duds in recent times, but will get some weak shots in cold temperatures. Haven't shot too many from my Browning Nomad but no duds.

CCI, Hornady 22 mag has been 100% reliable in my PMR-30. No problems with Speer Gold Dots on a very limited sample set. Winchester Wildcat, not reliable enough even for the range. 22 mag duds are expensive throw aways.

While I have no science to back up the claim, my experience from shooting .22's for almost 5 decades indicates that quality control has gone downhill in that ammo. And markedly so since the last flurry of 'ammo shortages' and panic buying.
Most will note that the bulk ammo seems far more problematic than individual boxes of higher grade ammo.
Think CCI Mini Mags and SV still is regarded as some of the most reliable.

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Ret'd LEO
SWCA #2275

Interesting. I bought some bricks of CCI SV for my S&W 41 and have been having a 3% to 5% failure rate. They usually fire and eject but the ones that fail do not get the slide back far enough to pick up the next round. I am going to add trying CCI SV in the 100 round boxes to the list of things I am going to try before I give up and use CCI Minimags, which are very reliable in that gun.

While the 41 is known for being finicky about ammo the CCI SV I am using has a similar failure rate in my M&P 22 compact, which is supposed to be as reliable as a 22 pistol can be.

I guess what I take from this interesting thread is that if one has only a 22lr for self defense, it is better if it is a revolver.