Over the past several years I’ve done quite a few videos actually on the possibility and use viability of a 22 Long Rifle for concealed carry & self-defense gun. Before any of you start going for that to click on the comments tab in no way shape or form, I’m suggesting that a 22 Long Rifle is best or even ideal as a concealed carry gun. What I am suggesting, and looking into is, what is a 22 Long Rifle cartridge capable of? Is it a viable option and what can you expect from it? Are there advantages to it over the larger, more powerful calibers, 9mm, 45, etc.? Is it possible that it is actually more of an option than many of you might think? Well, there’s only one way to find out, we need to shoot some stuff, and you might be surprised what all we shoot.
We also need to shoot a lot of it because one of the biggest concerns with the 22 Long Rifle is reliability, so I’m going to do a 2000-round torture test in a couple of other videos, Ruger LCP2 2000 rounds torture test and also Kel-Tec’s P17, both I think are at least the top of my list for a 22 Long Rifle for concealed carry and self-defense. This review specifically is about the ammo, the 22 Long Rifle cartridge itself. I’m going to show what I think is the absolute hands-down best option for a 22 Long Rifle cartridge in a pistol for self-defense and concealed carry.
Why choose the 22 LR caliber?
I’m Drew Case, welcome to Beyond Seclusion where I only give you my honest opinion and it is what it is. Like I said, I did several videos in the past on the 22, specifically on the CCI Segmented round, the 40 Grain, and the Mini Mag. I truly believe that this is the best round for self-defense and hunting and I will show you why. The number 1 reason I’m looking into the 22 for concealed carry/self-defense is the incredibly small size, guys, lightweight, and the manageability of the 22 and especially concealability for concealed carry. Many would agree the most important thing is rounds on target and shot placement, other than energy and stopping power, and with the 22 LR that is actually very achievable.
For many folks, they would otherwise not carry a heavier, larger, more powerful pistol, particularly the smaller folks, like the ladies. It’s not just the ladies, it’s also when we’re in dress pants with no jacket or something, I don’t necessarily have the ability or want something larger and heavier and that prints. It’s also a great backup option because it really doesn’t take up much space or weight.
viable choice
I have found many times I don’t carry because of the weight and the bulk in shorts or in summer when I don’t have a coat or when I’m dressed up like I said with the dress pants and no jacket. Lots of folks that run and bike would like something small light and easy to carry while exercising for both four-legged and two-legged threats. Most all other guns in that particular scenario, they’re going to be too bulky and too heavy for them to want to carry them.
So, with the right ammo and gun I think the 22 Long Rifle will surprise most of you. Is it the best choice? Probably not. Is it a viable choice? I think so. Don’t take my word for it, see for yourself and you decide.
The proof is in the bobcat
As the saying goes “Proof is in the Pudding” right? So, in this case, it’s proof is in the bobcat. This big guy is a big cat, and in the middle of the night he was in my chicken coop in about 25 yards with a Ruger 10/22 with the exact same round that I’m using throughout this entire review and that I’m suggesting, one shot in the chest and he ran about 25 yards and that was it.
I shot one other cat in my life that was this big and I shot him with a .223, the exit hole was about the size of a silver dollar and he ran 75 yards. This guy ran 25 yards with a 22 Long Rifle, yeah, I don’t know, you decide.
Depth of penetration
Yeah, there you go, I think the bobcat on this one’s going to agree with me. Here’s something else to consider. Real quick, a lot of you might not be familiar with my background but I actually spent about 30 years in the medical profession, but I also taught human anatomy at the university for probably about a decade and I’ve worked with a lot of cadavers, I’ve personally dissected at least a half a dozen and then worked with about another dozen.
The point of this is the depth of the average human chest would surprise most people, it’s on average about 8 to 10 inches deep from front to back. Laterally, we get a lot wider, but most people are really unaware of just how actually thin we are from the AP or anterior to posterior.
So, when we’re talking about penetration and depths of the penetration, we’re not talking a lot of depth if something’s coming from front to back, and anyway, I think that’s just kind of relative to this particular topic when we’re talking about penetration and especially with this particular caliber.
Reviewing the .22 LR
So, what I did was I took all the past videos and the highlights and I put them all together here in one video. Now I’m gonna shoot a whole lot of stuff, I’m going to shoot into a full-size cow that was found dead of natural causes in the lot and that’s going to go through muscle, ribs, into fresh lungs, and also the heart. You’re gonna see exactly how it performs from this, the Ruger LCP II in real life.
Pay particular attention to the depth and what we’re going through when you’re considering this round. Before any of you start wanting to click on that comments button again, because in the other video shooting two to three feet away was to make sure that I put them in the exact spot that I wanted to, but it has the same ballistics, guys, is at 10 or 15 feet, chronograph it, I did, it really doesn’t slow at 10 to 15 feet and not even remotely enough to change the ballistics. So, shooting at point blank, like I did at two to three feet, you’re going to have the exact same results at 10 feet.
The following is for educational purposes only!
Real quick here, guys, I’ve got great big beef lung, probably about four inches, we’ve got a nice hunk of ribs here with probably two inches of tissue on top, I don’t have the skin on but I’ve got a bunch of denim here, two layers of denim and cotton, put all the rounds in here.
Penetration through layers
Through the T-shirt, through the denim, no problem, there are holes through the ribs, let’s take a look at the bottom side and I know we hit some ribs, oh, there’s the underside of the ribs.
That’s pretty impressive, these ribs are thick, beef ribs, and then there’s a lung, that’s the top of the lung and it doesn’t look like they started fragmenting one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Let’s take a look at the bottom side, really good penetration. I might grab another round and stack some more stuff.
22 LR – 32 Grain
With the 1640 feet a second, the 32 Grain, let’s see what we got here this time. Of course, we went through the denim, I put some extra layers of meat on here. I put a great big old hunk of muscle, we got the ribs. Wow, yeah, that shredded the ribs. I put some new lung tissue on here.
All right, and that’s kind of what I was looking for, guys. I was looking for this fragmented buckshot, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen. Let’s check out then bottom, let’s look at the back side of that, and we have lots of fragments that stayed in.
We didn’t get as deep of penetration, but we definitely got the fragmentation here, but that was a lot of tissue there, much more than it’s going to be in a chest cavity, and then here that actually penetrated through we got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, that still went through. That’s what happens when those went through the ribs, they started separating, fragmenting. Back over here, to the top of the lungs, yeah, you can see here all kinds of stuff in there, bone.
22 LR – 40 Grain
I don’t know if you guys can appreciate the size of this heart and muscle, and then looking at the back side of that and all those holes, and look at all the fragmentation that went through there, that’s the Mini Mag, the 40 Grain, that is extremely impressive. I also shot into some partially frozen melons, some dead chickens that had been euthanized, that were going to be butchered, some water, showing the depth and trajectory of the bullets and fragmentation using the underwater camera, a full-size ham and then I finished with the latest and the greatest ballistic gel.
The Melon-shooting test
The 32 Grain, that’s the entrance wound, it obviously is segmenting, and you can see at least two out of the three different segmented wound channels.
Stinger, we’ve got the entrance wound and the exit wound, you can see the entrance, really didn’t disturb the inside nearly as much as the Segmenting Round and was pretty much a through and through.
Here’s the Mini Mag Segmenting, the same thing as the other one pretty exceptional expansion uh completely messes up the inner core here, and then you have a massive exit wound, entrance wound, and exit wound. This one didn’t appear to fragment as fast as the 32 Grain.
This is the Subsonic entrance wound, it still has some good cavitation, obviously, it started fragmenting, although on the exit wound we still just had kind of one big exit wound, didn’t find multiple exits on this.
More Tests
I have about 30 roosters, I got a butcher, so what I did was is I tested all of them so I could have the exact same shot placement, so I have the four different ammos and every one of the birds had already been euthanized and I shot in the ribs behind the breast, so that I don’t mess up my breast meat, but this is where we’d be wanting to shoot anyway, so we’ll butcher these and see if that makes any difference.
CCI 22 LR – Stinger, Subsonic, Mini-Mag & Segmented
CCI Stinger, sort of a classic, here’s our entry wound, exit wound, fairly, actually fairly small exit wound. This is the 40 Grain, Subsonic Segmented, we have our entry wound down here, and then we have a pretty significant exit wound, much, much larger than the Stinger. We only have about two inches, maybe two and a half inches, so I’m guessing it just started to segment, but for a small animal, I think you’re going to have a much more lethal round with this.
Next one’s the CCI Mini Mag, this is the 40 Grain, this is very similar to the other one, this one’s just going at 12.35, very similar results, we have a small entry wound there and a pretty significant exit wound, I can easily stick my finger or thumb in there, and again we’re only going through about two inches so it’s really not getting to segment like it’s supposed to, but it is giving a large exit hole.
The 32 Grain, which is flying at 16 40 feet per second. I was actually kind of surprised a little bit by the results. The entry wound is really small, when I first examined it, all I saw was one hole and I thought well it didn’t even segment, and actually it did segment. We’ve got an exit wound there, an exit wound here, and an exit wound here. So, I’m guessing the higher speeds caused it to fragment a little faster than the other ones. Once I started butchering this is the exit underneath the meat on the 32 Grain.
Sticking to the plan – 22 LR Ammo Test
We just fired into our broilers, the first one was a Stinger, pretty much the same spot on all of them, you see its nice straight entry wound, pretty much goes all the way through, not a lot of internal damage and a single exit through the cardboard.
Then we go to the mini mag, you can see a lot of tissue damage. A little bit smaller bird as we compare, a little bit smaller, there’s probably 10-pounder, this may be eight to six, but we do have definitely two exit wounds in the cardboard.
Then we go to the Subsonic, and again pretty good tissue damage, you can see must started separating a couple inches in, and again we have two distinct exit wounds.
Then we go to the 32 Grain, that’s the fastest and good entrance and rapidly expanding, great tissue damage, no exit wounds.
So, these results are consistent with the other ones shot laterally through smaller chickens.
The End Result
So, when it’s all said and done I think we really come down to kind of two of them as far as the Stinger versus the Segmented.
If we look at three rounds fired here out of the Stinger they do mushroom, they do have good cavitation, when we look at Segmented there’s a huge difference in what we have for the end result.
I think when you compare the two, at least to me, it’s pretty obvious which of these two is going to be the more lethal, especially if you’re talking small game.
22 LR as Self-defence Ammo?
To most people, it’s going to be totally taboo and unacceptable to suggest that a 22 Long Rifle could be used as self-defense ammo, and I’m not necessarily arguing that. However, if you look at this particular round, that’s six shots, with eight to ten inches of penetration, how fast can you get 6 22 LR shots on target? And you look at that, and it does give a little pause or at least a little validity to the potential of a 22 LR. I guess that’s being better than nothing, that’s like getting hit with buckshot.
Ham-shooting – 22 LR Test
Let’s just see what this baby looks like. Cats are going to be happy, and I heard this ham has gone bad so hopefully got nothing coming out the back, let’s just try doing a slice here, oh, got some nasty… whoa I didn’t cut that… goes anyways, that’s just all turned to mush. There’s some fragment from the 22, wow, that made it almost all the way through to the other side. 22 Mag still going, here’s shrapnel, this is from the back side, so we came all the way through from the front. That’s more 22 Long Rifle fragments in there, that just made a mess in the middle of that ham.
22 LR Ballistic Gel Test
When you compare shooting through flesh and water, you’re going to see a big difference in the ballistic gel. I know ballistic gel, they always say that it’s exactly the same, and ballistic gel, don’t get me wrong, I love it, it’s great, we need it, we can see what it’s doing, we can’t see that in the flesh, but there is a difference, at least that I’ve noted. Special thanks to Clear Ballistic gel, I love this stuff, guys, because you can reuse it up to 10 times, I’ve actually already reused it, melted it back down and what you’re seeing in this review has already been used a couple of times.
Another item I want to address is I compared the 22 Long Rifle to the 22 Win Mag in short barrel pistols like my North American Arms little mini revolver, and all the popular ammos, the 22 Long Rifle was equal to or outperformed the 22 Mag.
So, even the 22 Mag design specifically for short barrels, so if you’re looking at something like this really small or the North American Arms, Sidewinder like I’ve got and I used in the review, which I really like, the 22 Mag, even specifically for short barrels, you’re going to get better performance out of the 22 Long Rifle. Chronograph it, shoot the gel, shoot the other stuff, you’ll come to the same conclusion that I did, you’re going to save a whole lot more money with the 22 Long Rifle, and you’re going to get the same or better ballistics. You go out of a longer barrel, completely different story.
I just wanted to show you something here, shooting gel and flesh one thing that I noticed something different is, I mean I’m pushing really hard on that to get that knife to go in, and if we kind of come up a little bit you can see a little bit better. Just something to keep in mind, the gel is meant to replicate flesh, but at least what I’m finding is the bullet penetration and some of that doesn’t quite match up when we’re actually going into flesh, but we can see it better this way.
22 LR Segmented in The Gel
So, with the 32-grain Segmented, we really didn’t get any deeper penetration. Not on the gel, so we’ve got about six inches, pretty much the same as before, about one and a half, one and a quarter inches before we start to separate. And then the same thing with the Stingers, we’ve got about 10 inches of penetration with minimal mushrooming. We can even just see from here that it really hasn’t mushroomed much, pretty much a straight trajectory, that’s one of the reasons why I really like the fragmenting, is with two shots we have a span of three inches. Three inches by, let’s see, top to bottom, we have three and a half inches from the very top fragment to the bottom fragment, so we’re getting about a three-inch cone versus 10-inch penetration.
So, with the Ruger LCP and this CCI, we can see there the three shots and you can see fragmenting, let’s get the ruler here, it starts fragmenting about one and a half-two inches in, and we go up to about six inches of penetration. And you can see they’re pretty symmetrical, even fragments they do a really nice star pattern. Some of you may rule it out you don’t have deep enough penetration, others, you’re going to think that that’s okay. It’s really kind of up to you to decide. I personally like that fragmentation, even though it’s only six inches in, you’ve got a lot of different channels there.
The bottom line
So what’s the bottom line, guys? I don’t think anyone’s going to just be getting hit with a 22, is going to ruin your day, let alone CCI’s fragmenting hollow point round.
Do some research and think the idea behind using a gun or anything for that matter, for self-defense is to stop the attack, stop the aggression, not necessarily instantly kill. So, in some ways that diminishes the stopping power requirement that a lot of people think we need.
Pain is an incredible deterrent and that’s caused by tissue damage. The CCI fragmenting round out of a 22 is going to cause the most tissue damage possible out of any 22 that I have seen, not to mention it triples the chances with the fragmentation of hitting something vital, and then actually having an incapacitating effect aside from the deterrent of pain and getting shot at or hit.
There you have it, guys, it is what it is, you decide what you think. I hope you enjoyed the review and found it helpful. If so, help support the channel, be sure and hit that subscribe button, this really does help the most, like and comment. Until next time, happy shooting, educate our young people to shooting and gun safety, and remember every time we’re out and we’re shooting, people are watching us, that makes us ambassadors for the Second Amendment, so be a safe and responsible gun owner.
