Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Rimfires The shooter, the firearm or the ammo?

Jim, that is a nice shooting 10-22..

Yep. I have yet to try the "good stuff". Blazer at 50 yards from a tweaked 10-22, some of the rest did pretty well. Dead reliable too.

No match ammo for the 22 Mag but this one shoots pretty well with some.

Those targets are a perfect representation of how guys need to keep track of how a rifle shoots with different ammo. That's the best way to do it.

Shooter with ammo being a very close second. I think I can shoot, but some ammo throws out some serious patterns.

Appreciate everybody's input. Reason for asking the question is I've been trying to decide on an upper-mid tier .22 bolt rifle with a great trigger that will take a modern 30mm scope. Not going to do much more than long range plinking but it's fun and a definite challenge to consistently hit a 6" or even 4" ringer at 200 to 250 yards, such endeavors really teach you how to judge wind. Also thinking of getting back into rimfire silhouette which I was pretty heavily into in the 90's, our local club runs monthly 100 and 200 yard matches for that.

Obviously this three legged stool follows the law of limiting factors or “the chain is only as strong as its weakest link”. Good rifle, good ammo, bad shooter, no bueno. Good rifle, good shooter, bad ammo = bad groups, etc. Looking at the groups posted here and in several other threads in this forum it seems the three factors shake out something like this (not listed in order of relative importance but just to comment on each).

Shooter – On a scale of 1 to 10, the shooters I’ve seen rank from -2 to 10 with a bimodal distribution. Your average guy who comes out to the range occasionally is about a -2 to maybe 6 with the mode around 4 or 5. The club members or anyone else who takes their shooting seriously runs from 6 to 10 with a mode around 8 or 9.

Firearm – Looking at group sizes in various threads here fired by everything from the bargain level rifles all the way up to the ones costing 4 figures, the scale on these seems to run from about 7 to 10. Unless a rifle has a bad crown, chamber or flat-out rusted barrel, most all .22’s will shoot from good to fantastic. Even pre-war sporting rifles in good shape are capable of some really tight groups and the older heavy barreled target rifles will still give most modern rifles a run for their money. Obviously, today’s top tier rifles can outshine the lot but given good ammo it’s hard to find a really bad shooting .22 rifle. And even then, we’re still talking differences of a few hundredths of an inch in group size.

Sights, trigger – calling this a subset of the firearm group. Given the general level of .22 rifle accuracy, I’d say the firearm/shooter combo is limited by the sights with a good trigger a definite plus. Open sights or a low power compact with small objective just won’t give you the resolution needed to get a precisely consistent sight picture like a modern 10-20x scope with AO. A good receiver sighted rifle and a matching round bullseye can turn in incredible groups but that is dependent on a well defined aiming point, you still need a good scope to distinguish small targets from similar colored backgrounds. Now, all you guys who shoot with low power scopes or even open sights, don't get too mad. My Kimber 82 mounted a 4x Compact for decades and I can do some fine shooting with an open sighted (notch and bead) 1939 Remington pump, but we're talking about going for precise hits on smaller targets at longer range.

Ammo – as everyone here seems to agree, on a scale of 1 to 10 this runs from -5 to 12 and that varies greatly with brand, lot number and isn't even that consistent from rifle to rifle. I could post pics from other .22's with the same Winchester Super-X shown above that match or beat the CCI groups. In the 1990’s I won several rimfire silhouette matches with Winchester Wildcat solids, the same brand name Wildcat ammo wouldn’t even shoot decent patterns in the mid-2000’s. Great, that makes things easy. 😉

Have rambled on long enough but again, thanks to all for the conversation. It’s cemented a choice in my mind but might have to start another thread on that.

I shoot rimfire every week and rating myself as a “good” disciplined shooter on a scale of 1-10 (1 being poor and 10 being excellent) I’d say I’m a 6-7. I play hail trying to do everything the exact same way each shot! Somehow I manage to win a few here and there I blame the wins on luck lol

I have two .22 RF sporting rifles, an original Winchester M/52 Sporter and a Springfield 1922 M2 neither are target rifles and both are 70 + years old. I shoot CCI Blue Box Standard Velocity ammo in both, these vintage rifles both group this ammo into one ragged hole for 50 shots @ 50 yds. I'm just shooting these for recreation and groups like that satisfy my needs. Most shooters that I know concur with this thought, I also shoot this ammo in my Smith & Wesson M/41 and Sig Sauer P226 with .22 conversion.

Very nice, well thought out post. I feel like you have a good handle on this Jim..

A friend of mine is sponsored by Lapua. I get some of what he calls reject ammo. I would rate ability first, ammo second and then rifle.

That must be some damn good ammo. Have you used anything other than Lapua? One thing I know is a good shooter can put great ammo into the same hole. Lower quality ammo and the same shooter can't put it in the same hole. Does that make sense? Probably not, but theres that.. What I find funny is some guys just don't get it. Hence guys don't believe in "flyers" and such. Most of those guys don't shoot competition of any kind or even shoot much for that matter.

I think the dividing line is, ammo matters when the shooter can tell the difference. Of course, the gun is either good (feeds right, shows promise) or bad.

I had similar experience to Sheis with Win PPs. When they first came out, I bought a brick on spec, seasoned the bore and spun the dials, oh my goodness. Drove straight from the range back to the LGS for the other brick from that lot. Rim gaged the whole thing. Many casualties ensued. But the next PPs skunked, even after rim-gauging. Pistol plink ammo.

Same deal with the red 42 power points. Found two boxes once, they were AWESOME right out of the box, no gaging. Then, bought the last two boxes I've ever seen -- plink ammo. $*%^#!

In general, I have found that CCI ammo, no matter what it is, tends to have the highest likelihood of shooting better than minute-of-shooter. I wish CCI would do a truncated cone 40/42 HP.