Review Hornady Critical Defense 22 Wmr 45 Gr Ftx
U.Due south.A. –-(Ammoland.com)- I am a fan of the 22 Winchester Magnum cartridge. It is a truthful chameleon cartridge. Like that underrated predator, the 22 Magnum comes in many forms and is surprisingly efficient at what it does. Designed equally a rimfire rifle cartridge and an improvement over the venerable 22 LR cartridge for use against varmints.
As soon as this new hot round hit shelves in 1959, companies began putting the round into handguns despite the fact that the armament was designed to perform all-time out of rifle-length barrels. This has continued, even with the need for pocket-size framed handguns chambered in the zippy little circular as the 22 Magnum takes on an unlikely part of defensive handgun cartridge.
22 Magnum handguns are valued for their lightweight and their full lack of recoil or "kickback" while still being far more strong than the much-maligned 22 LR. I ever thought of the 22 Magnum every bit being the 380 of the revolver world. Those of us who spend whatsoever time at the gun store or the online forums will inevitably hear that the "380 with the right ammo is more than than acceptable". The same applies to the 22 Magnum.
What is meant by the right ammo? I accept information technology to mean today'south new accent on defensive hollow-point engineering.
I actively carry a 22 Magnum handgun at times and if firearm catalogs are to be believed, I am not the only one. Merely in that location is need to meliorate on the performance of the 22 Mag out of curt-barreled handguns, a need that has been capitalized upon. Defensive loadings are out in that location.
Given my vested involvement in 22 Mag, I have tested quite a few 22 Mag rifle rounds out of pocket-sized handguns, but these new defence force loads–Hornady Disquisitional Defense and Speer Gold Dot 45 grain hollow-bespeak loads–left me cold. Designed for optimum velocity and expansion, even out of short barrels, these rounds promise not bad functioning but I worried about such well-designed ammunition expanding too much at the cost of not penetrating deeply enough to impair major organs needed to physically stop an attacker. Finally, curiosity got the ameliorate of me and I picked up both rounds for testing.
Hornady's Critical Defense .22 WMR 45 gr FTX
Hornady is no stranger to ammo innovation. Their Critical Defense line features an FTX projectile. In English, the FTX is a copper-jacketed hollow bespeak bullet with a rubber-like plug in the crenel. This plug serves two purposes: to wedge the bullet, promoting expansion and to foreclose clothing and debris from bottleneck the hollow-point cavity, retarding expansion. I found in testing 380 ACP ammunition that defensive-hollow points are mostly a waste of time with either no expansion at all or expansion that is too aggressive without penetration. One of the few exceptions is Hornady's Critical Defense. With that personal history, I was confident in their 45 grain 22 Magnum load.
The Examination
That conviction was muted somewhat when I shot a few 3-shot strings over my Caldwell Chronograph. At a distance of ten feet using my Northward American Arms Sidewinder with a two.5-inch barrel, the average velocity came in at well-nigh the 1,050 feet per second mark with the on-camera string showing an average of 1,058. This is high velocity by handgun standards, but it is lower compared to the previous testing with standard off-the-shelf burglarize loads.
This weaker-than-expected showing over the chrono translated into my ballistic gel test. I used iv layers of denim to simulate clothing. The gelatin I used is made by Clear Ballistics and is synthetic in nature. This product is like shooting fish in a barrel for me to use and transport for field use, but as I exercise with other tests, I melted the production, recast it, and calibrated information technology so I can verify personally that information technology is a fair medium and simulate of human tissue. Even with this extra endeavor, these tests shouldn't exist construed as scientific but merely a point of comparison against other rounds fired under similar conditions–thus is the purpose of ballistic gelatin testing.
I fired five rounds out of my revolver into the block from a distance of three feet. One round nicked the block only the projectile escaped never to exist constitute. The other 4 rounds were captured, having traversed the denim bulwark and washed moderate damage to my commencement gelatin cake. Still, 3 of the 4 projectiles stopped at the nine-inch marking. The concluding shot traveled to the x.v-inch mark where it stopped.
These numbers are lite compared to the FBI's standard of measurement in this manner of the test medium, 12-18 inches of penetration to be acceptable as a self-defense round. The Hornady Critical Defense may wait impressive in its shop packaging and even in the hand, simply that is where it stops. There was no expansion and very niggling deformation of the recovered projectiles to explicate the lack of penetration.
Taken together, the Critical Defense underperforms on every level despite information technology existence one of theammunition to buy specifically for self-defense force in 22 Magnum. I left the range disappointed. I expected amend and I had wanted to put the CDs though some meat and os, but why carp when it failed even this primitive test? Needless to say, I won't be trading in my CCI Maxi-Magazine FMJ loads anytime before long.
About Terril Hebert:
Terril Hebert is a firearm writer native to southward Louisiana. Under his motto-Guns, Never Politics-he tackles firearm and reloading topics both in print and on his Mark3smle YouTube channel, where he got his start. Terril has a soft spot for ballistics testing, pocket pistols, and French rifles. When he is not called-for ammo, he is indulging his unhealthy wildlife photography obsession or working on his latest novel. Scourge of God, published in 2017. See more from Terril on youtube under Mark3smle
Source: https://www.ammoland.com/2018/12/ammo-test-hornady-critical-defense-22-magnum/
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