Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Rimfires .22 longs

I think most .22 rifles made today are made for the long-rifle cartridge and there has been plenty of threads about it. There has recently been a thread about .22 shorts, but I don't remember any threads about the .22 long. I remember as a kid, that it was my favorite. I don't have a .22 that will handle the longs, but my son has a Win 62 that will. Course, it shoot lr, l, and shorts all mixed up if you want to.

Anyone shoot the .22 long these days?

I have a box of longs I bought when rimfires were scarce. no I don't want to sell them.

The only Longs I've seen since I was a kid are CB Longs, from CCI. I haven't even seen those in a long, long time. I can well remember using Longs just for the giggles, but they were never as accurate as Long Rifles in Dad's old Stevens. I haven't seen standard OR high velocity Longs for nearly 40 years.

I dragged Dad's old Stevens out yesterday, and shot some HV Shorts in it, just as a lark. Shot a few LRs, too. It reminded me why I don't shoot it much, no provision for a scope, so its iron sights make me look bad! It was fun, though.

I think Nixon was president the last time I shot a Long. No reason other than one of sloth. Got a few boxes in my rimfire ammo collection, maybe I'll take them out and blast them away. Or not.

speaking of cci cb's the longs are much more sought after than the shorts in my book. maybe the longs are a bit more accurate out of a 16 inch barrel zastava. neither will shoot all the way down the barrel of my cz 452. but i still like cb longs.

Most of the majors still list them but finding them stocked somewhere is another story. They were my favorite squirrel round back in the day. Fed better then shorts and not nearly as loud as Longrifles.

That's mostly due to the longer case length. That means you don't HAVE to clean the chamber after shooting them, like you should with Shorts in a LR chamber. If you shoot a whole bunch of Shorts in a LR chamber, it will leave some filth in the chamber that can cause extraction problems when you use the LR shells later. I've never shot that many Shorts, simply because I didn't use Dad's old Stevens after I got my Marlin 60 at age 13. The Marlin required LR only, so I never looked back. The LR case is based on the old Long case (same thing, really) so the Long doesn't muck up the chamber.
That's my theory, anyway. I might be wrong, I was wrong, once, long ago.

i've never admitted to being wrong, ever. not that i recall.

not that i wasn't wrong maybe, but i sure never admitted it if i was.

i've heard the cb shorts/shorts in general can muss up a chamber. with the choices of LR now, i go that way except for the backyard work that sometimes is needed, either cci cblongs, or aquila of the same denomination. i think i might have a few boxes of winchester cb longs. never have compared any of them. i have a tc contender i'd like to try them in, but it's 14 inch barrel, and i'm not real good at pistol shooting, in general.

Thought I made a mistake years ago, but I was wrong .

Don't have anything against longs, they were a transitional cartridge, but I never was a middle of the road kind of guy.

When I was a kid I would carry my 67-A Boy’s Rifle when I tagged along on quail hunts and my father used to have a box of “longs” in his pocket. Every now and then he’d let me shoot a couple of times. He didn’t do it very often because “we don’t want to mess up the dogs”.

I used CB longs when I was trapping coyotes every winter. They made less of a mess with a head shot on trapped coyotes and did really well on heart shot coyotes as well with almost no blood loss externally. The HV hollow points make a bloody mess on a head or heart shot, trapped coyote.

The down side is I've not found them to be very accurate.

These targets were shot at 25 yards, on with a Marlin 39 and the other a Remington 581. Accuracy was about the same with each on the CB longs.

I found some Longs at a Flea Market when I was young. I don't remember them being overly accurate. My Grandpas estate had some Longs in it too. I shot them for the novelty.

I have a Remington Model 4 rolling block that the kids like to shoot that is marked for .22 longs or shorts. I've had no trouble finding .22 long ammo (CCI) for it.

My father was a fan of Longs apparently because they were just about as long as Long Rifles (which to him meant they were just as powerful)--and were cheaper when he was growing up on a Montana homestead during the Great Depression. However, I doubt if he ever shot a group in in his life, especially with the open-sighted Winchester pump he used.

When I started shooting Long were still easily available, and a little cheaper than Long Rifles. So I tested both, and found Long Rifles out-performed them in every way, and Shorts worked great as cheaper ammo. He always thought I was nuts for paying a few cents more for Long Rifles, and I thought he was nuts for thinking Longs were just as good. But that's the way life works....

I have some Winchester "ZLongs" that I bought not that long ago - quiet but not very accurate - only for short distances.

Yeah, my Pops had the same attitude until I bought my first M52 (first rifle bought with my own money, shortly before the whole cars, girls and beer thing kicked in). He was astonished at the accuracy that thing provided when shooting our motley collection of shorts, longs, and five-and-dime LR's off the backyard picnic table benchrest. I remember like it was yesterday him saying "do you think it'll do even better with some of that expensive target ammo on sale in at the gun shop?" A couple days later he showed up with a brick of W-W Mark IV Match. After wiping the surprised look off my face (he was the guy who would drive across town to save a penny a gallon on gas) we settled in for some serious work, and I never looked back.

Sounds familiar 😊

Yeah I figured it would be familiar to shooters of a certain age!

He didn’t much understand a lot of target shooting with my 22 and especially a little later with my first “high powered rifle”, a .243 700. $3.40 for 20 rounds.

Yeah, neither did my father. But he grew up "subsistence" hunting on a Montana homestead--and also loved to go out shooting cans with the Colt Frontier Scout he purchased with the check from his first published magazine article. He published a few too, mostly about Western history, and as I recall the article was about a local U.S. Army fort established in the 1860's. He'd always wanted a Colt single-action, and I still remember accompanying him, at age 5, to the Powder Horn in Bozeman, when be bought the revolver.

Of course, I still have it, and with the right Long Rifle ammo it's very accurate. But of course, he shot Longs--which didn't matter much, since he and his older brother Larry mostly liked to keep keep cans jumping along. As I recall, Larry had a double-action Iver Johnson.