.22LR Long Range

I can consistently hit clay pigeons placed at the 200yd berm when shooting from a bench and sandbags with my AR using a CMMG .22lr upper with a 16" barrel and a 9x Nikon scope. I use ONLY subsonic ammo. I find supersonic ammo to have too much of a flight variance to be consistent.

That said I'd NEVER even considered shooting out beyond 200yds with a .22lr.
 
This reminds me of a shot that Bob Munden made on Impossible Shots, last season or the one before. I think he was shooting one of those dinky NAA mini pocket revolvers. Don't remember the yardage, but it was w-a-y out there. But that was Bob Munden. And as I recall even he didn't hit it on the first shot or two.
 
I could consistantly hit the roof of a very large barn @ 400 yards with a Walther P 22 and cheap bulk remington. If this helps, I held the pistol at appx a 35-40 degree angle from the horizontal plane. Good luck and be safe.
 
Goodwrench - LOL - you must have been trained on mortars when I was - charge 1, etc. As with howitzers, I never understood the reasoning behind "halving" your error, no matter how close to the target you came, but "them was the rules."
 
I would think the .22 bullet would start to tumble before reaching its 600 yard mark.
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That's a fallacy.

The spin imparted on a bullet helps stabilize the bullet in its flight. That spin will continue to stabilize the bullet throughout its flight path. Even in a .22lr bullet that spin is going to remain fairly constant even after 600 yards. There isn't enough air friction to deplete that particular factor of kinetic energy enough to cause the bullet to stop spinning and thus tumble in flight.

Of course if you shoot a bullet out of a barrel that has the wrong rifling ratio then you could actually CAUSE a bullet to tumble after a certain distance in flight because of too fast or too slow a spin.

One case in point is the Aguila SSS bullets. They're very long and heavy bullets loaded into a .22short casing. As such they are subsonic but require a different rate of twist than your standard .22lr bullet to be as accurate as they CAN be (which by the way is VERY accurate). If you shoot them out of a standard .22lr barrel they're already tumbling by 100 yards because of the wrong rate of spin. If you shoot them out of an AR that is outfitted with a drop in conversion kit then they're already tumbling as close to you as 35 yards because of the VERY wrong rate of spin. Give it the right rate of twist and you would find the bullet hits and punches a circular hole rather than an oblong one even at extremely long ranges. This can be said for any caliber really - even with very short (bullet) pistol calibers.

I don't doubt that a .22lr could reach out and ring a metal plate at 600+ yards. What I do doubt is the ability of people to do so. When you shoot that far out your very light and small bullet is susceptible to a lot of external forces. We can compensate for gravity since that's a constant force. We cannot however compensate for wind all the time. Winds can change and that's a huge level of difficulty when shooting a light (and fairly slow) bullet at such distances.
 
I take many 200 yard plus prairie dog shots each year. Since it is usually dry and dusty here in the Rockies, ( the impact point are seen easily, especially at 12 power ) I have come to think the variability in quickly timed sandbagged shots is about 12 inches at 200, and about 20 inches at 300 yards.
 
Many years ago I would go out to Eastern Colorado and shoot prairie dogs. When the .223 barrels got too hot I'd get out my 10/22 with the big clips and shoot against the hillside. With the scope on its lowest power 2.5-4 (I can't remember which) I could watch for the splash of the dust and adjust fire. It took alot of rounds but I did manage a dozen or so kills from 300-500 yds (laser). At our home range we used to have 18" steel gongs set up at 100,200, 300 yds. Once you figured out the hold over you could hit the 300yd 100% from a bench. If your going to be doing some serious rimfire paper punching you'll want to get a rim thickness gauge, a good scale and some of the other bits to categorize your ammo. Even from the same lot of .22 production there can be some significant differences in weight and brass. If your serious you can spend quite a bit of money. If your looking to see how many times you can hit a steel plate get a 10/22, some mags and a farmers field with a nice bluff for a back stop.
 
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