A day at the range

It’s been a beautiful week at the homestead kitty, the sun shining everyday and temps hovering around 80 I finally got all my chores caught up and had a little time to kill so I decided to go shooting. Having my own range set up not over one hundred yards from my door, meant I did not need to go very far.

I used to shoot just about everyday, .22′s at least, but with the price ammo high and supply low, I have been forced to scale back on the blasting.

Being blessed with a curious personality, I like to test things to see how they work or if they work at all. I always thought of myself as a mythbuster perhaps not on scale or budget with Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman from the Discovery Chanel program but a mythbuster non the less.

I love to run tests on guns and bullets, what will they do when shot into a car door or how many pages of a phone book will a round penetrate before coming to a stop? Will brand X mushroom and retain shape and weight better than brand Y after being shot into a barrel of water; you know that sort of thing.

Buckshot from a rifled barrel

The first test of the day was buckshot from a rifled “slug barrel”. Not having a rifled barrel for testing I had to call on a friend who was more than willing to help me out.

Sure buckshot will work and function just fine with the rifled barrel but how would it affect the pattern thrown?

I fired five rounds of #4 buck at at the center of a three foot X two foot wide piece of cardboard from 30 feet. The #4 buck has 24 pellets per round so that is 120 pellets thrown at the target, but how many actually made a hole in the paper and how many went passed without effect?

Out of one hundred 20 pellets only 30 six hit the target. At this distance the shot pattern should have been center of mass, but with the rifled barrel it was all over the target and the bulk of the shot completely missed the paper.

Conclusion; the rifled barrel does indeed have a major effect on shot pattern or should I say lack of one.

The .22LR penetration test

We have all heard the stories of .22LR bullets bouncing off the skull of an attacker, is this a common occurrence when the bullets hit bone or is it a case of if, maybe or sometimes? While I did not have a human skull to fire at, I recently found the remains of a deceased whitetail deer that I could use for my test.

I set the scull on top of a large rock about 60 yards out, with the front part of the skull facing toward me and fired on shot. The skull jumped off the rock from the impact and fell to the ground. On examination, the bullet had indeed penetrated the bone and in fact blew out a large chunk at the exit point.

Granted I was using a rifle, the result could be different if a handgun or a small “pocket pistol” were used.

While the little .22LR can be deadly, I would much rather have something larger for defense. If attacked and armed with only a .22, I would shoot for the head, with such a small bullet there is not enough mass or shock to guarantee a reliable one shot stoppage with a torso hit.