Thrifty: you've bought into the hype without doing any homework. The bigger the flash, the bigger the recoil, the bigger the pricetag and the shinier the gun under the lights DOES NOT make it more effective at killing something no matter what the Terminator is saying in Hollywood.
What makes a firearm effective is your ability to put the bullets on target, at a variety of ranges, in a variety of lighting conditions, under a variety of stress levels (yours).
If you can snap up a gun and hit a pie plate reliably in three seconds... you're starting to get somewhere. I can do it with my .44 magnum at close range, my .38 spl a little farther out, my 12 gauge easily (even if the plate is flying through the air or rolling on the ground) and my .303 British, .308 Win or .338 win mag. a couple hundred yards out. With more time, my effective range increases.
Can you hit small targets reliably with a .22 long rifle?
How about your .45 acp?
There is a reason the U.S. Army uses the 5.56 mm & 7.62 mm Nato rounds (also known as the .223 Rem. & .308 Win.) for most rifles. Most people can hit and kill reliably with them, with open sights out to 300 meters. I hit 37 out of 40 pop up human sized targets over a variety of ranges (25 m headshots to 300 m whole torso) when I qualified with my M16-A2 (5.56) at Ft. Benning,GA. I could not have done that with a 460 handgun.
Get past the blast and start shooting some grapefruit. Start hunting small game. Start hunting large game. Learn the woods, how to sneak and maybe take a defensive course on how to move under fire, use cover effectively and return fire.
Or just buy into the hype, buy the big shiny gun, squeeze the trigger as fast as you can and play it like a musical instrument. Might work. C.B.
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