Just out of curiosity, could you relate any personal experiences of catastrophic events tied to the use of NON-CCI SV Ammunition in a Smith & Wesson Model 41? I have seen this statement on this forum multiple times. I'm not picking on you, I would truly like to know if there's any veracity to the statement, or if it's just a personal ammunition preference among Model 41 owners. Thanks in advance for your reply.
Model 41s--although rimfires in general are prone to this--can be a bit picky about ammunition. Not to mention, a lot of rimfire ammo isn't very good.
When I say, "picky", I mean "pickier than my Ruger Mk III, which will digest any old garbage". There are a lot of guys that would laugh at you if you complained about your 41 only being reliable with CCI Standard, because they have guns that demand $600/case ammo.
If you don't care about match reliability, any good .22LR target ammo will be acceptable--Aguila SuperExtra, for instance.
The other side of the coin is ammo. There are people who will take a $1000 match pistol like the 41, feed it $20/bucket bulk ammo from the feed store, and complain when that pistol doesn't function reliably. Simply put, there is a big difference between ammo that costs $200/case and ammo that costs $400/case.
The other bit is Standard Velocity vs High Velocity .22. A lot of manufacturers specifically warn against using HV ammo in their pistols--even Ruger. Frankly, I think it's a warranty/service life thing. At the same time, there are a lot of guys who, if a gun doesn't work well with SV, switch to the HV, or who use HV to break in a new pistol. HV's not going to blow a pistol up.
On that note, to each their own, really. I've never had a pistol that remotely needed it, and generally was able to fix standard-velocity .22 reliability by correcting some other issue.
