grampajack
AR Junkie
- Joined
- Mar 31, 2016
- Messages
- 1,714
Dang, you're pretty prophetic! While he did read it, he clearly cherry picked and saw only what he wanted to see. Let's see if it happens again. Here's ANOTHER article and some statistics on .22 shootings.
http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2012/06/foghorn/ask-foghorn-22l-for-self-defense/
While gramps mind is made up regardless of the facts, I hope other readers don't ever take his advise and charge someone with a knife when they have a .22 pointed at you. There's a good chance you'll die.
What a load of useless nonsense that article was!!! This is exactly what I mean by lies, damnable lies, and statistics. So a .22 is better than any caliber that starts with a 4??? Really? I don't think so...
And again, there's no distinction given to barrel length. And apparently there's not even a distinction between .22lr and .22 WMR. Hell, for all we know, 5.7mm is lumped in there too along with .223 and anything else ".22 caliber."
Then his "statistics" make the claim that it takes fewer rounds of .22 than a shotgun to incapacitate someone. Well hell, for all we know half the shotgun statistics are from a .410 loaded with birdshot.
This is exactly why statistics are next to useless in selecting a round. You can make the data say anything you want if you torture it long enough, and I would estimate this particular data has been so savaged it would admit to the Kennedy assassination if you asked it to.
The author has also totally missed the point. The problem with .22lr isn't that it doesn't do enough damage to non vital organs (that problem is inherent to all handgun rounds), but that from a short barrel it lacks enough penetration to reliably reach the vitals.
The data is also self conflicting at every turn. The shotgun is the deadliest, but it takes the most shots to take someone down, which is completely counter intuitive. Then supposedly .22 is better than .44 at killing people, and supposedly with fewer rounds, then two graphs later you have .22 as one of the most unreliable rounds in terms of incapacitation. This suggests to me that many cases involving .22lr are suicides and/or assassinations. That would explain the high fatality rate and low number of rounds needed, in conjunction with the low ability to stop an actual fight.
This last graph also gives us a little window into the many reasons this study is deeply flawed. The .22 fared better than the .25 and .32 because obviously .25 and .32 are almost always fired from ultra short barrels, whereas .22 is most often found in rifle form (not to mention .22 WMR is probably lumped in there as well). It also doesn't stand to reason that .22 should do worse than .25 since they're ballistically very similar, yet this is easily explained by the fact that much of the .22 data probably comes from rifle length barrels, whereas most if not all of the .25 data comes from 2'' barrels.
Forget statistics. You would be better served by asking an astrologer what round you should carry. Look at individual cases, look at ballistics testing, then decide based on that if you trust your life to something. There are literally THOUSANDS of cases involving .22lr where it completely failed and it's a sure bet that any real defensive caliber would not have.
Just look at this thread: https://www.thehighroad.org/index.php?threads/documented-22lr-self-defense-failures.773313/
Read some of the stories in there and tell me with a straight face that .22lr is a legitimate self defense weapon.
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