Hey, guys, welcome back to Beyond Seclusion! Back in February, I did a video called ‘The 22 Long Rifle for self defense”, the purpose was to see if the little 22 caliber Long Rifle was viable for self-defense. I had a CCI fragmenting round, and I had a neighbor who lost a cow, so I brought the cow over here, and I shot the cow in the chest with a 22 Long Rifle, actually I was using the Ruger LCP2, and if you watch that video…
The vast majority of people think that it’s viable. I had no idea that shooting my neighbor’s dead cow in the chest would be my most popular video, which is now rapidly approaching a half million views. Like I said I used the Ruger LCP2, I’ve got an NAA, North American Arms Sidewinder that comes in 22 and 22 Mag, and I’m doing a separate review on this, but this, in my opinion, is the ultimate concealed carry, at least as far as size and weight.
Brand:
CCI Ammunition
Caliber:
22 WMR
Series:
Maxi-Mag, Clean .22
Bullet Type:
Segmented Hollow Point
CCI 22 WMR – 46 Grain 1875 FPS
CCI just came out with the exact same round that the original video was on except in 22 Mag. So, I am super excited, I want to review that new round with this, and see if the 22 Mag is just as viable or if it is a game changer in concealed carry.
Ballistic Performance – 22 WMR & NNA Sidewinder
In that first video there was a lot of concern, doesn’t matter how many comments or whatever I put that I shot it at like a foot or two feet away. I kept commenting that, ballistically, there was no difference. So to just put that to rest we’re gonna chronograph at 2.5 feet, 5 feet, and 10 feet, and see if there’s any kind of issue there, as to when I’m shooting this, if I shoot it really up close or if I’m 10, 15, or 18 feet away.
Watermelon Test with NNA Sidewinder
That’s a done deal. No more comments about you shot at point blank. Now what I want to do is I want to see what this 22 Mag round is going to do to a watermelon. We’re going to start off with a with a watermelon, and I’ve got all kinds of stuff coming, I’ve got water, and I did a visit to my local butcher shop. Special thanks to Den’s Country Meats – they have hands down the best jerky, steaks, whatever in Southeast Nebraska. Den’s Country Meats, thank you! Anyway, let’s shoot this into a melon and see what it does.
So, that initial hole that it put in, you know, I don’t know, I was kind of excited, I’m thinking, hey, yeah, this could be a game changer, but then we opened it up and looked for fragmentation, and then when I saw the slo-mo it came out the backside unfragmented, really not what I was looking for, that was not a game changer. What I want to do here is real quickly check the speeds on this and see what it’s doing.
22 WMR VS. 22 LR – Speed Comparison
Wow! Yeah, that’s really slow. I know from chronographing, just a 22 Long Rifle that it’s usually going faster than that. Let’s just quick check exact same thing using 22 Long Rifle and see what that’s doing.
That was unexpected, the 22 Long Rifle is going faster and has more energy than the 22 Win Mag. I’m gonna guess it has something to do with the shell casing, the size, the rate of burn, and then the short barrel.
I’m not giving up on this round though, I want to see what it can do in my Kel-Tec PMR30, we’ve got a little longer barrel, let’s see what it does with that because that could be a game changer in that platform. Let’s just take a quick look here at the speeds.
22 WMR and the Kel-Tec PM30
Yeah, huge difference with the longer barrel, bad thing is it kind of takes this out, it changes everything as far as a concealed carry, like this as far as 22 Mag, at least for me. I’m going to go with the 22 Long Rifle, if you checked out that other video that’s the ammo that I would use in this, and I’m gonna do a separate review on this, but the PMR30, yeah, that’s promising looking.
Fragmentation Test
Before we waste another melon and waste my trip to the butcher I just want to fire this into some water and make sure that it’s fragmenting before we waste good food.
Yeah, bingo! That’s exactly what I was hoping it was gonna do, problem was as I was hoping it was going to do it out of this, but now let’s go ahead and take a melon again, and let’s shoot the melon, and see what it does to the melon.
Watermelon Test with 22WMR & the Kel-Tec PM30
Yeah, I don’t know about you, but I was impressed with a 22 Mag with that melon, we cut it up, it fragmented, and it did exactly what it was supposed to. In fact.
I recently did a review on the 5.7×28, and honestly, with the cost of ammo and what I saw with the water and the melon, I think I would go with the 22 Mag over the 5.7×28.
Meat Test
Let’s get down to the meat and potatoes, or actually just the meat. I’m going to take what I got from the butcher. I kind of came up with this really cool idea when I was shooting into the water because I wanted to see the fragmentation coming out.
So I took all of these organs and I put them in a box, lined it, and then I floated it on top of the same barrel that I was testing the fragmentation from. and then we’re going to shoot down on it, we’ll see the fragments come out the bottom, if they go through. We’ve got about six to eight inches of tissue there, and then we will take the pieces out of the box and we’ll see what it did.
So, I just shot through, we went through and it came out the bottom. Let’s just measure this here, we have roughly about six to seven inches of flesh before it came out the bottom. Let’s take a look and see what we’ve got.
So, it takes off kind of this first layer, which was really hard stuff. This is some fat, there’s a trachea. We can see the denim here, actually a lot of denim, try to flip it over, we’ve got pretty good fragmentation holes here. What I want to see is getting over to the lungs, I’ve got seven holes, and there’s a group of three.
So we got tree fragmentation, and that’s after going through all of this. Now we turn the lung over on the back side, and there’s our holes, eight, here it really split apart. That’s going through the lung, and then what we have left in here is a great big hunk of the liver, so here’s the liver shot and that was at the bottom, you can see the holes, they’re pretty good.
Something else must fragment it through or one of the fragments, so there are actually 11 holes after going through the lung. I’ll flip that over, and it’s not this huge devastating trauma exit wound here, here’s a little piece of bullet fragment, but what I’m looking at is the number of holes going through, and actually, there’s one over here.
Actually, I was just kind of looking here in the sack, and this is what I found right there in the bottom of the sack. In the video, you saw the remaining of these exiting the bottom of that box, and still having pretty good penetration through the water, at least another. On some of them, it looked like anywhere from five to ten inches of going through the water.
Well, there you go, totally not what I was expecting. I really was hoping and I believed that the 22 Mag Segmenting Round out of this is going to be a total game changer, and it is, but not in this little tiny concealed carry package. We’re going to have to stick with a 22 Long Rifle, unless they come up with something different, but in a longer barrel like the PMR30 it is a game changer for self defense.
