Interesting comment from Sherrif's deputy

[GRIZ22]

I have heard for years that the .22 is the weapon of choice for professional assassins.

I've heard the same. The OSS and CIA used suppressed Colt Woodsman pistols. I've read the Mosaad uses the Beretta Model 70. Not so much that they are the most effective weapon but even without a surpressor the noise may be dismissed as a car backfiring.

 

[easyg]

had a .22 and shot at the noise, the round hit her collar bone and bounced around insider her torso hitting every vital organ.

Let's see...
It hit her collar bone and then hit her heart, spinal cord, liver, both kidneys, and both lungs?


Seriously, the .22 does not bounce around inside humans.
And it is not a good self-defense round nor a good "killing round".

 

[NOLAEMT]

I was leaning against the wall at the local hospital doing paperwork last night, when they brought in a GSW from the waiting room. I watched the trauma team assess him (this is a level 1 trauma facility with a team dedicated to serious trauma standing by 24-7).
He had been shot 6 times with what was agreed upon to be a .22. He was still alive, but probably wouldn't be doing anything for a while. One leg was paralyzed, and he had 1 round through his scrotum in addition to 4 other various wounds to his arms and abdomen.

Even after all that, he was able to sit himself up in a wheel chair and talk to the hospital staff on the way back to the trauma bay. (his friends brought him in, and put him in a wheel chair, so they brought him right back like that. the hospital didn't put him in a wheelchair with a gun shot wound, don't worry)

 

[Officers'Wife]

It hit her collar bone and then hit her heart, spinal cord, liver, both kidneys, and both lungs?

You can't predict some projectiles. I remember one case a patient came with a GSW. The ball had been a hollow point (I don't remember the caliber) and had broken into three pieces. One piece perforated the left lungs missing the heart by less than a millimeter. The second they found in the patient's neck and the third was resting on the pelvis. In the process the lung was damaged, seven holes in the stomach, several feet of small intestine perforated and a small hole in the liver.

 

[Manco]

I have to say that I'm utterly perplexed by the notion of a .22 LR somehow doing more damage, in general, because of its relatively high probability of ricocheting off bone in comparison to larger calibers. A bullet only has so much momentum and will only penetrate a certain maximum distance through flesh whether it is deflected or not, and one would think that deflections would rob some of its momentum, thereby reducing penetration overall. Whether it penetrates in a straight line or a zigzagging path, the real harm it does depends on what happens to get hit. Also, while a tumbling .22 LR bullet will cause more damage to the depth at which it penetrates, that depth will necessarily be reduced because it will lose momentum more quickly. This is all based on physics--there is no magical way for the .22 LR to do more damage than its limited energy will allow. All you can do with bullets in general, aside from aiming them accurately, is make sure that their energy is used optimally rather than wasted, hence the development of hollow-point bullets in calibers that would otherwise likely overpenetrate and thereby waste much of their wounding potential. The .22 LR is not such a caliber against human-sized targets, and while it's lethal, it's neither inherently more lethal than larger calibers, nor will it liquify one's insides by bouncing around 20 times and penetrating several meters of flesh in the process, please.

In the specific case of shooting a .22 LR bullet into somebody's head, whereupon it will, according to some, bounce around several times and thereby scramble the person's brain more than a larger-caliber bullet would, I can't say that I know all the facts but I'm skeptical because I know of a number of cases where people survived penetrating head shots from .22 LR handguns, at least for a few hours or days. There was a guy who shot himself in the head in my neighbor's front yard a number of years back, being so distraught (more like in a murderous rage) at getting dumped by my neighbor's daughter, while I watched discreetly from my front door, ready to call the police (had I known that he was armed, I would have called already, but his gun was in his car). He died two days later in the hospital, if I remember correctly. I'm not exactly sure what damage was done, but there was definitely no exploding exit wound with buckets of blood and bone fragments spraying all over my lawn. With no hearing protection and from fairly close proximity the shot sounded like a small firecracker. Now imagine somebody's head getting hit with a .40 or .45 with the muzzle pressed against it--all that energy released into the relatively inelastic tissues of the brain, and probably expelling some nice chunks of it out the other side, too. Are people still convinced that .22 LR is the most lethal caliber for head shots? As others have said, its main advantage--especially for assassins--is that it is relatively quiet, and with the latest technology can be suppressed to near silence.

 

[mljdeckard]

Like I say. All bullets are unpredictable. .22s are less predictable than others. They MAY do a lot of things. But there is less likelihood that they WILL do any particular thing than OTHER bullets.