laststandonzombieisland

Today we think of the humble 22LR as a round best left for slaughtering tin cans. But what you may not know is that this much loved pipsqueak has been pressed into both military and police service over the years, in a rather unique series of weapons—rimfire subguns.

Modern shooters have always held the .22 LR round (which dates back to the 19th century and is one of the cheapest and, until 2013, most readily available cartridges available) to be the perfect training round for military and law enforcement and with a lot of familiarity with the round at the target range came a lot of experimentation. It didn’t take these shooters long to discover that if you take this same practice round, put it in a low-recoil select-fire rifle capable of going full-auto and give it a huge magazine, you now have something much different than a cheap to shoot plinker.

Although the 22LR round was never designed as a man-stopper with very marginal one-shot stopping capabilities, a burst of 15-20 of these rounds could ruin what plans you had for the rest of your life. Additionally, guns built around these comparatively low-pressure rounds could use lighter materials than full-sized rifles firing high-velocity cartridges thus keeping the weight and cost down—always buzzwords in military trials. From these humble beginnings, the .22 submachine gun formula was hatched and has been repeated often, with mixed results:
Read the rest in my column at GUNS.com