A special forces buddy of mine over the weekend convinced me to pick up the Smith and Wesson M&P 15-22, loaded with a Magpul package (sites, grip, collapsible stock). Says it’s a great training rifle, and it will allow my wife and oldest boy to get comfortable shooting long guns so that they can eventually feel confident enough to pick up a 5.56 or my SCAR-H.
I was reluctant, but I figured better to have a trained wife and kid than not. After all, somebody’s gotta go kill breakfast and clear the grounds of morning zombies, and I’ll likely still be sleeping off a whiskey eve.
Then, the magic happened. $190 for 5000 rounds of 22LR ammo?
Shit. For that, I’ll shoot you a hundred times if that’s what it takes to put you down and still come out around even, money-wise, with my bigger caliber weapons. Plus, lots more holes to plant seed corn.
Anybody have any experience with this rifle? Took it apart yesterday. Looks solid. Not much I need to add to it save maybe a cheapish scope and a fore grip.
Banzai!
Hard to beat .22LR for a SHTF gun.
The guy in “Into the Wild” killed a moose with a .22LR rifle (Remington Nylon 66, I think). Not the weapon of choice for hunting moose, but if you’re really determined. Probably also leaves more rabbit for eatin’ than a .308.
Looking to pick one up myself. From all my research, it seems like the perfect plinker. Most true to the AR platform at the best price. Great pick up, Jeff.
My new Home D handgun is a Ruger P9o in .45 ACP.
.22 LR is a great caliber for headshots.
ot
mr g. this person may be of interest for pwtv:
“A state is a contradiction in terms,” Hoppe writes, “a property protector who may expropriate the property of the protected through legislation and taxation. Predictably, a state will be interested in maximizing tax revenues and power [snip] but disinterested in protecting anything except itself. What we experience in the area of immigration is only one aspect of a general problem. States are also supposed to protect their citizen from domestic intrusions and invasions; yet [snip] they actually disarm them, encircle them, tax them, and strip them of their right to exclusion, thus rendering them helpless. Accordingly, the solution to the immigration problem is at the same time the solution to the general problem inherent in the institution of a state and public property. It involves the return to a natural order by means of secession.”
link
The 15-22’s fine. You can pimp it up with all the cool stuff that ‘real’ AR-15 people use, and it’s a blast. I would recommend using copper jacketed rounds tough – the 15-22 I fired seemed a lot happier with them, there was a lot less cleaning afterwards too, and they are only a bit more expensive that cheapy unjacketed.
There’s a limit to *just* how much like a real AR-15 it feels like, but I do know people who swear by it to develop muscle memory and get used to porting it around. And as you say, it goes a long way to familiarizing the family to having an “assault weapon” around.
Shit. For that, I’ll shoot you a hundred times if that’s what it takes to put you down…
I have seen a couple of pretty good arguments for .22 pistols as self defense guns for just this reason. Besides being able to afford a lot more practice, faster recovery due to the low recoil allows amatuer shooters more chances to hit the target in high stress situations.
That’s true, Moe. People like to talk crap about .22 pistols, but you can still drop someone like a bad habit with one. Just not from across the county.
I’ve got one. It’s a crap-load of fun to shoot, but can be picky about the ammo being used (S&W recommends a limited choice of ammo that’s not the cheapest) and the loading of the magazines. In addition, I haven’t been able to find a mag load assist tool.
As an alternative, take a look at the canonical semi-auto .22 rifle, the Ruger 10/22. You can trick it out any way you want, it shoots just about anything, you can buy any number of 25 round mags for it, and you can find mag loaders for it that make loading a non-thumb-busting pleasure.
Or, you can do as I did and buy both!
I think some of us strongly suggested something like this a while back. It’s light, excellent and cheap for training, and a .22 will take down more than you might think. Congratulations.
In other news, Todd Akin is now officially on the Missouri ballot as the Republican candiate for senator.
Well, I actually own a Ruger 10/22; one of their new takedowns.
Where to begin? Lightweight, easy to clean, yeah, you can trick it out, but it’ll never look like anything other than a workhorse rifle, so if you want to look like one of the cool kids, it might not be for you.
Ruger now make their own 25-round mags, which I’ve found to be far better than all the aftermarket ones I tried. With the takedown, once you adjust the locking mechanism on the barrel, it breaks down into the two pieces very easily, and snaps back together requiring no further adjustment. Stainless steel barrel, so I suspect it’ll be a bit more prone to wear than a normal barrel, but at the price, it’s hard to be super critical.
If there’s one thing I don’t like about it (and I think this is limited to the takedown specifically), as shipped, they give you a separate weaver mount that you can install, but it obscures the blade sight, so I’m currently planning on machining a slot down the axis of the mount – about 1/8 in deep – so I can switch between iron and a cheap red dot sight without faffing around with a screwdriver.
And as noted above, a couple of rounds from a 22 might not slow down a lunatic bombed out on speedballs and PCP, but it’s quite sufficient to ruin the day of anyone or anything you point the business end at if you’re halfway capable of accurate fire. And as you said, cost isn’t really a consideration, you could put a whole mag of 22 downrange for about $1.
Overall, I’m rather impressed at the build quality from Ruger – to the point where I’m considering getting a Mini-30 (chambered in 7.62, 20 rounds) before November. It’s not as pretty as a SCAR-17S, but here in the DPRCT, I’m pretty sure that the SCAR has too many scary features for me to have one anyway. The Mini-30 will be useful for the defense of the estancia from the enraged losing political faction, and if not it’ll come in handy for zombies.
Greetings:
I grew up in the Bronx of the last ’50s and ’60s but was fortunate to be in a family that had a summer bungalow about 60 miles north in Putnam County. Thus, I had the benefit of both an urban culture and a country culture.
??
Spending summers upstate, my friends were country boys, used to going into the woods, camping overnight, and having our days to ourselves with no threat of nearby adult supervision. ??Before long, I wanted to acquire the local accoutrements, guns and knives being my highest priorities.
My city-girl mother wasn’t having any of it; my father, born in Ireland and a WWII graduate, quickly became my only chance for a successful acquisition. Initially, I separated him from his “war-knife” and subsequently began working on him for a 22 caliber rifle.?
?
When my mother found out that my father was having me join a gun club in preparation for my new tool, he and my mother had an intensive dinner time discussion about the appropriateness of a relative youngster having his own firearm.
My mother insisted that this was no way to raise a child. My father’s conclusionary statement was “I’m not raising a child; I’m raising a man.”
A .22LR AR-15 is an outstanding way to get cheap practice, and familiarize yourself with the platform.
Muscle memory is a valuable thing, and using a .22LR AR is a great way to develop it.
“$190 for 5000 rounds of 22LR ammo?”
You’re just now figuring this out? [tsk] This is why everyone needs a good selection of .22s. Practice makes perfect and there’s no cheaper practice. A good deal of shooting — position, breathing, sight picture, trigger control, follow through, etc. — carries over from one gun platform to another. So shooting any gun a lot will improve your shooting with every gun.
Now you need a good semi-auto .22 pistol!
I just finished mounting a scope on the Savage 93 FV I picked up this evening. Heavy barrel bolt action chambered for 22 WMR. The scope is a BSA Sweet 22. I figure anything that pushes a round downrange at 2200 ft per second should be pretty cool to shoot. I’m really looking forward to this weekend.
Well, I actually own a Ruger 10/22; one of their new takedowns.
Where to begin? Lightweight, easy to clean, yeah, you can trick it out, but it’ll never look like anything other than a workhorse rifle, so if you want to look like one of the cool kids, it might not be for you.
I dunno, this looks pretty cool to me…
http://www.lg-outdoors.com/proddetail.asp?prod=GA_MWGMZ1022
Meh. Looks like there should be an orange muzzle break on that bad boy.
As soon as you fire it, everyone will KNOW it’s just a pimped out 10/22 :/
kmarchng —
Bought their recommended cartridges in bulk (mostly Federal American Eagle, which I’ve liked in 45 auto, and Aguila). Cost me about $215 shipped for 5000 rounds. I can live with that.
My SF buddy and his wife both have one, so I’ll ask about a load assist tool. I haven’t played with the mag yet because I don’t have the ammo.
But in my 308 with a 20 rd mag, loading was no problem manually. Is 22LR significantly different in the way it loads (or just smaller)?
Seconded. Great carbine for learning to shoot on.
And you can build one of these with two of ’em. For those mornings when the zombies are really thick on the ground!.
If you like the 100/22, but want the AR platform, there’s the SR-22.
It’s like the DeLorean of 22 LRs!
There is no good substitute for real trigger time, and .22 is excellent. Especially because you can build good habits and avoid developing a flinch, all for cheap.
What you need to find next is a rancher or horse owner who has some pasture land before next spring. That is when ground squirrel populations are at their peak. All you do is walk around until you find a town, then sit down about 25 meters out and wait. In no time they will be back above ground. A standing ground squirrel at 25 meters is a challenging target. A .22 round is more than sufficient, but if you want spectacular then you can also try a .223 with a varmint load.
A few weeks of that and your first shot accuracy will skyrocket.
The biggest difference is how fast you’ll go through that 5000 rounds.
Smaller is more noticable on your thumb once the magazine spring compresses enough.
Jeff G. said “But in my 308 with a 20 rd mag, loading was no problem manually. Is 22LR significantly different in the way it loads (or just smaller)?”
What I’ve found is that if you don’t hold the magazine at the right angle and get the cartridges aligned properly, it won’t feed properly. With practice this has become less of a problem, but I had a lot of mis-feeds at first. And, yes, smaller cartridges make it a little more difficult to load than a full size round like a .223 or 7.62. But being the lazy bastard that I am, I try to get loading tools for all of my magazines.
With the 10/22 and a Butler Creek Hot Lips loader, never a problem. And you can shoot the cheap stuff like Golden Bullet ammo, $15 for 525 rounds. And I got my absolutely brand new, bare-bones 10/22 with synthetic stock on sale last year for $179. (So shoot me, I’m a cheapskate!)
Nothing wrong with good clean cheap fun.
The unrelenting war for the extermination of cans must proceed apace.
.22LR is a vastly underrated round.
Speaking primarily from a theoretical self-defense perspective, and ignoring the mad Cormax McCarthy Warrior Road world I think Jeff’s comment presupposes, .22lr, while capable of bringing a life threatening situation to a resolution by stopping the threat, can’t be relied upon to do so expeditiously.
Now, if the world goes tits up on 12/21 and half of us suddenly develop a taste for gnawing on each others faces, sure, pop away until the guy goes down (and hope his “buds aren’t waiting for you to reload to start popping away at you).
But in the world we live in, it’s going to be easier to explain to Mr. district attorney one or a couple-few small to xtra large holes in the dead hobgoblin the police found in a bloody heap at the bottom of your stairs than it’s going to be to explain multiple (i.e. more than a couple-few) xtra small holes in the peaceful-in-death’s-repose looking victim of society’s indifference Mr. D.A. is going to be presenting to a jury for them to decide (if he or she is the kind of D.A. who likes to leave justice up to the jury to decide) if you were still defending yourself after shot x or if you committed murder starting with shot y.
It’s better than nothing, but if that’s the best you’ve got, your best isn’t good enough.
Ive been shopping for a .22LR upper to go on one of my polymer AR lowers. I am leaning towards the DPMS Panther Arms, A3 Flattop 22 LR Upper, 16″ Bull Barrel, Chrome Moly Steel – BA-22-16.
Jeff, they are easier to load as the follower spring is lighter. I assume you S&W will accept the excellent Black Dog magazines.:
http://blackdogmachinellc.net/
A .22 can do some damage:
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=VaROAAAAIBAJ&sjid=z_oDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6872,1351202&hl=en
My sister was one of the 3 injured, bullet missed her corotid artery by 1/2 an inch.
I fired an FN P90s over the labor day weekend. One of the most accurate weapons I’ve ever had the pleasure of firing. No kick, hardly a report and close grouping. Too bad it wasn’t fully auto.
Correction: FN PS90
I had 5 cases of 22 in my closet until it was all lost in a tragic boating accident.
It happens, Jim K.
Kim du Toit always said that having a .22 rifle in the house was about like having a frying pan: just a basic tool no house should be without ( casa SDN has 3).