.22 Defense

The Story So Far:I have my CCW class certificate in hand, along with mugshot passport photo and filled-out CCW license application. I need only to pick up $132.50 in money orders and submit to my county sheriff's office on Monday morning. After the response to a post I made last week, however, I'm having second thoughts.The point of the post was to get advice about carrying in situations of very high visibility (I have a very complicated carry situation, including teaching a university class). I received a good deal of feedback, and I really do appreciate anyone who cared enough to respond to my post. I found myself a bit frustrated by the most of the response I got, however. Primarily, I was frustrated because the overwhelming majority of the response didn't address my question at all, and secondly (and the point of this post) that off-topic discussion was focused on disparaging my choice of firearm.For the purposes of determining the best concealment scheme, I let it slip that I was planning on buying and carrying the Ruger SR22 automatic pistol, chambered in .22 LR. This elicited a collective howl of outrage that has me seriously doubting the whole endeavor. Again, I really do appreciative the responses I got (that goes double for those that stayed on-topic), and I want to have a thorough discussion about this.I want to stress, first of all, that I am new to this. Almost all of my firearms experience thus far was firing rifles in the army. I was (at least as far as their standards were concerned) an expert in that area, but the main thing I've learned from the little handgun experience I've gotten since then is that handguns require a very different skill set. I am here to learn, so even though I'll be taking the stance that a .22 pistol is an acceptable carry weapon, I am open to having my mind changed; I'm already having second thoughts, based on the response thus far.The overriding motivator for me is cost: of the ammunition, specifically. I don't feel comfortable carrying a weapon that I don't have a high degree of proficiency with. This means that I'll need a great deal of practice up front, and likely a high level of sustained practice to maintain a level of expertise that I'm comfortable with.I'll put this bluntly: I am poor. I don't want to go all, "you don't know my life!" on you, but here's a summary of the costs I've incurred over the past 4 months, in my quest to be a responsible concealed carrier:$125: Range membership. This could have been a lot cheaper, but I needed a range that rented pistols, and I went with a higher-than-base membership, to save money in the long run on range and gun rental, and so that I could bring guests to the range.$55: Ear and Eye protection. I could have gone a bit cheaper here, but I don't really know anything about good ear pro (the only ear pro I ever used was these). The Howard Leight Impact Sport seems popular, and I liked the idea of listening to music while I shoot.$100: Concealed carry class. Required if I'm to get a concealed carry permit in Kansas$48: Range and gun rental. 2 trips, plus gun rental for my CC class.$68: Ammo. Covers 100rds 9mm, 375rds .22, and 50rds .45, if I remember correctly. I had to buy ammo at the range, as I'm using their guns. I could have saved a bit here, but last minute, I decided to go with this 45 (sweet gun, btw!) for my CC range qual, instead of using my leftover .22 ammo.$132: The aforementioned permitting fees. Kansas is a constitutional-carry state, but I need a permit if I'm to be in compliance with the Gun-Free School Zones Act (section B II), and because of a Kansas bill in the works, which will mandate permits for those that want to carry on campus.$30: Gun show entry. 3 shows in 2 different cities, mostly so that I could get my hands on a lot of different weapons, but also so that I could talk face-to-face with a lot of people and get a feel for what guns are being sold for. Does not include the random shit I bought while I was there.$100: Travel and food costs for all of this. I really should pack my lunch, I know.That's ~$668(plus taxes) in expenses thus far, which, according to the formula the government uses to calculate what I have to pay for my student loans each month, constitutes roughly 50% of my discretionary income over that time period. Long story short: I've been scraping the barrel to finance this endeavor (on what I {mostly} consider necessary costs), and I have yet to even sniff buying my own gun.Ammo Cost:I know how to run a spreadsheet, however, and the cost of the gun isn't what concerns me most... it's the ammo I need to feed that gun. At the rate at which I plan to be practicing, ammo costs will easily eclipse the cost of the gun by the end of this year. Whichever gun I end up purchasing, it is the ammo (and to a lesser extent, range fees) for that gun that will ultimately dominate the cost equation.There were some numbers thrown around in that other thread, but from what I've seen of ammo costs (online and locally) .22 rounds are running 20-25% the cost of the next-cheapest reasonable-carry ammo I could use at my range (brass-cased 9mm). If any of you have the magic formula for drastically reducing this cost disparity, I'm all ears, but as it stands, it appears that training costs with a .22 pistol are in the neighborhood of 1/4 the training costs of any other caliber. Because I'm cost-limited, that means that I will necessarily have 4X's the amount of training with a .22 than I would with any other caliber.The rate I've been spending money thus far isn't sustainable in the long term for me. I like having something to save for, but being broke all the time is a real drag. $100/month is a stretch for me ($50/month is more realistic), but let's go with $100/month for now. It seems that I can reliably get .22 ammo for $0.05/rd, and a trip to the range (once I have my own gun) costs me $9 ($13 reduced to $10 for membership level + 10% veterans discount). Going once a week, then, I'd be putting ~280 rounds through my gun each week.280 rds/wk isn't what I'd hoped for, but it actually isn't too bad. Remember, though, we're being optimistic. At the $50/month level, that number drops to 50 rounds per week, which is just unacceptable: I'd have to drop my training frequency to every other week, meaning 280 rounds per trip or 140 rds/wk, which... I could live with. Doing this with 9mm gets ugly fast. Assuming I could get 9mm for $0.20/rd (which still seems optimistic to me, despite what people in that other thread have claimed), I'd only be getting in 70 rd/wk going weekly at the $100/mo rate and 35rds/wk going every other week at the $50/mo rate, and that's... just not enough for me to feel comfortable. I can improve those numbers by finding a cheaper range (and I intend to), but regardless of how much I'm paying for the range, whatever money is left over goes a lot further with a .22 than it does with anything else..22 Advantages:Besides cost, the .22 does have at least two distinct advantages over other calibers: capacity and recoil.Of the alternate handguns recommended to me in that other thread, the 9mm Glock 43 is the one that showed up the most. I've put the SR22 and the G43 side by side IRL, and they seem to me to be very similar in dimensions. According to their respective stat sheets, the [SR22]-[G43] dimension differential is: Length = +0.14"; Width = -0.05; Height = +0.65". The Glock is slightly shorter and slightly thicker than the SR22, with the biggest difference being in grip length. Is a bigger grip a bitch for concealment? Sure it is, but grip length is an area where I'm just going to have to accept some compromise, as I have (as outlined in yet another post) very large hands. The Glock 43 seems like a decent benchmark for comparison, is what I'm trying to get across, and with a magazine upgrade that doesn't increase the grip length of the SR22, it has twice the capacity of the Glock 43. 6+1 rounds of rock-n-roll vs. 13+1 rounds of smooth jazz? I don't think anyone can honestly say that the 9mm is far-and-away the winner there.I don't have much to say on the topic of recoil, because it's difficult to quantify (at least a priori). I'm a certified Big DudeTM so handling recoil of more powerful rounds isn't a challenge, but less recoil is less recoil, meaning faster follow-up splits and all that jazz. Everyone agrees (right?) that recoil on a .22 is less than for anything else in consideration. It's an advantage, for what its worth, regardless of what you're comparing it to..22 Disadvantages and MitigationAnd, finally, I come to actually addressing the concerns raised in that other post. The collective wisdom there seems to be that the 2 major limitations with the .22LR as a defensive caliber are reliability and effectiveness, which is a position I agree with.Reliability is what concerns me most. The .22 is a rimfire cartridge, after all, and brings with it all the rimfire liabilities. Primarily, those are feeding issues and misfires. Dealing with the first issue is something I'm trying to mitigate by choosing the SR22: from what I gather, it has a reputation of being more reliable than your average .22LR autoloader. The SR22, being a DA/SA pistol, also has double-strike capability, which is an (admittedly slight) advantage when dealing with misfires. I'm also considering carrying a .22LR revolver (sacrificing some of that capacity advantage), such as the Ruger LCR, which would almost eliminate the reliability issues by putting that rimmed cartridge back in its natural habitat, and of course, a misfire in a revolver is much less of a deal than a misfire in an autoloader.What I lack here is solid information on exactly how much less reliable the .22LR cartridge is, compared to centerfire cartridges. I understand that I'm asking too much for a comparison of failure to load, failure to extract, etc. rates for different cartridges, as those things are highly gun-specific (and to a lesser extent, operator-specific) as well as depending on the brand and type of round being compared. What about just misfire rates for different brands and cartridges? Has that information been compiled in any sort of a systematic way? It would give me a first-order approximation of relative failure rate, at least.What I suspect is that the malfunction rate for good-quality .22 ammo in a well-maintained modern pistol isn't drastically higher than it is for other calibers. Even if so, reliability is a measure of how often a weapon works, not how often it doesn't. If you get 1 malfunction in every 1000 rounds of 9mm, and I get 10 failures for every 1000, my gun isn't 10% as reliable as yours, it's 99.1% as reliable as yours. Even huge increases in marginal values are still marginal values. If you are satisfied having a draw that's 99% as fast, shooting split times that are 99% as short, using a safety scheme that works 99% as often, failing to carry your weapon 4 days out of the year, or hitting the target 99% as often as another set-up, you really shouldn't get your panties in a wad about having a gun that works 99% as often as another. I know we all hate the thought of dying in a pool of blood, wondering, "if only...", but I think we're better off spending our efforts where it will count the most.Again, I plan on putting a lot of rounds through this gun, so I'll have a very good idea of its failure rate, and if it's significantly different than what I expect, I'll reevaluate my decision to carry it.The effectiveness of the .22 seems to be the bigger bone of contention among those that responded to my other post. As with mechanical failures above, when we talk about the the effectiveness of the .22 (lethality, incapacitation, whatever), we're looking at the tip of a very large iceberg... or pyramid, as I like to think of it. Each successive layer on this pyramid is much smaller than the previous one: representing a much lower likelihood of being the layer of protection necessary to avert a threat.On the bottom level of this pyramid is the deterrence gained by just having concealed carriers in your society. This is the obvious answer to the riddle of why a place like the UK, that has lower rates of gun ownership and homicide than the US does, has much higher rates of violent crime. Even though I don't currently own a gun, my life is made safer because of people like you. Seriously, thank you all; the responsibility you have all chosen to place upon yourselves is a tangible benefit to me personally.The next level up is the ability to deter an agressor with a weapon you might be carrying, even if you don't actually draw it. This great post from yesterday outlines this pretty well.The next step up the pyramid are those encounters where simply drawing a weapon is sufficient to stop a threat. Here, as with most of the pyramid, caliber is irrelevant: I cannot imagine anyone who would be deterred by the sight of this, but wouldn't be deterred by the sight of this.Now we get to where the shooting starts: the next layer up is actually firing your weapon. The famed "FIBS" and "FIBSA" effects don't seem to be caliber-dependent either. Again, I can't imagine anyone who suffered a near miss or even a non-incapacitating hit that would change their mind about what they were going to do next based on the caliber of weapon that was shot at them, assuming, by some miracle, they had the wherewithal to figure that out in the first place. Can you imagine an aggressor taking one in the shoulder, turning to flee, and then saying, "waaaaaiiit a minute..."? I can't.Finally, we're at the top of the pyramid. These are the times where only a full stop will do: where you need to move that sucker up the incapacitation curve as quickly as possible. This, it seems, is where our concern over caliber really lies. First, let's take a look back down the pyramid and appreciate just how narrow the tip of this iceberg really is. Depending on which numbers you like, there are 100,000's to 1,000,000's of instances of defensive gun use in the US each year. Only 100's of them result in a justifiable homicide, most of which are by police. We're back in very marginal territory: tenths to hundredths of a percent of the times you'll need a gun to defend yourself.The gold standard in full stops are those hits that cause instant incapacitation to the entire body or at least the hands and arms on down. Pretty much anything in the cranio-spinal column above C5 will do the job here. Do people suffer fully-penetrating headshots and still remain functional? You bet your ass they do, but the thing to remember is that every tale you've heard from someone who survived a gunshot wound... was told by someone who survived a gunshot wound. The dead don't get to tell the other side of the story. I'm willing to concede that caliber plays a role here, but it seems to be a very minor one.Below the neck, things are a bit murkier. There are a lot of different bags and pipes doing a lot of different things, and hits on them have widely-varying effects. In general, what you're trying to do is poke holes through as much of this plumbing as possible. Poking holes in the heart or immediately adjacent vascular system can incapacitate in a matter of seconds, while a shot through the lungs could take minutes. When shooting through a volume target, penetration matters more than diameter, and .22LR ammo (despite ridiculous claims about bouncing off of silk shirts or whatever) of good quality out of a 3.5" barrel meets the FBI's penetration standards, at least.Caliber certainly matters when you're shooting through a bunch of meat, but by how much? It's a nearly-impossible question to answer with any degree of certainty, but I'm eager to hear your opinions on the matter. Averaged over all impact points and entry angles, how different are the typical incapacitation curves of the .22 and the 9mm?Wrap Up:I'm really looking forward to your responses. I'm going to try to limit myself to responding only where clarification is necessary: I'm more interested in the discussion between those more experienced than I.Where is the balance in the trade-off between capacity/recoil and reliability/effectiveness? How apt is that comparison is the first place? Does the advantage of a better round override concerns about cost? Would you dive a Hummer to work, even though you couldn't afford the gas, just because you might hit a deer on the way? If you've read this far, thank you, and thank you in advance, to anyone who takes the time to respond. via /r/CCW https://ift.tt/2GRcXGz