My "Bama" ballistics test with CCI .22 mag shot shells

2

22lovr

New member
Yesterday, I finally bought a box of CCI's magnum shot shells for my NAA mini mag revolver with the 1 1/8" barrel. If you're not familiar with them, they're .22 WMR casings with 75 #12 shot pellets encased behind a plastic nose piece.

I got a large piece of shipping cardbard (about 3/4" thick and triple-corrugated and laid it up against the steps of my backyard deck. With Eye and ear protection in place I placed myself about five feet from the cardboard and fired off one round. BBBANNNGGG!! Man, those little suckers are LOUD. The shot made a very uniform circular pattern about 9 inches across with 75 very neat little puncture holes thereon. I inspected the back side and found the same neat little pattern and then noticed that most of the shot had imbedded itself into the 2X6" treated deck steps.

Conclusions? Hmmmmm......I think I can see why this makes such a good snake protection round-No contest: shot pellets 1 - snake 0.

Wonder what one of these rounds would do to an assailant's face at close range? Man, I'd hate to be a carjacker and absorb a face-full of magnum shot pellets at point-blank range. (braille lessons while serving time in the pen) Sounding morbid now but I'll bet this would be a stopper round under certain conditions.

I dunno, what do you think?

I do know that I now have a safe and effective snake eradicator and we have a lot of those venomous varieties here in Georgia.
 
You said YOU were five feet back. Does that mean the gun was an arm's length forward?

Put another way, what was the actual distance to target, muzzle to target?

That way, we can guesstimate "spread".

As to personal defense: at contact range to the torso, they'll probably be quite effective. Past that, forget it.

As to face...yes, you might blind 'em. You might not though. You can't rely on pain to stop anybody, especially at close range with them armed with knife or gun. I've read of one case of a fighter pilot bringing a crippled jet onto an aircraft deck safely, despite one eye completely blown out and dangling and the other perforated by craps of cockpit...he had just enough vision left in the damaged eye to watch the "meatball" indicator during landing.

So if that were my gun loaded for defense, I'd carry the CCI MaxiMag +V JHP (original, not the "TNT" variant of the same load) and try and "punch through" straight to the brain. They probably won't expand, but they'll go deep. (The "TNT" flavor has a more advanced JHP, and *might* expand. In a longer 4" or greater barrel where I could get both expansion and some "deep punch", the TNT starts looking better.)
 
I would say do NOT use them for defense.

Reason 1. Effectiveness. If your assailant has to get within five feet before you would fire then you would have a real problem. You might miss, and assuming he was running, he would be on you before you fired again, blind or not.

Reason 2. Legal. As much as I believe in self defense, if I was on a jury it would be a hard to convince me that you were scared enough to blind somebody intentionally. If they are a genuine threat to you then you are justified in shooting, but would you be tempted to shoot earlier with a non-lethal blinding shot?
 
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