.22 LR: The 140-Year-Old Round That Will Never Die

This Seemingly Simple Rimfire Cartridge Is The Most Popular Chambering in the World

The .22 Long Rifle rimfire cartridge, aka .22 LR, is old. It’s about as old as anything in common usage related to firearms that you’ll run across. And that’s the key — common usage. The .22 is still used for all kinds of things. No other round has been chambered in such a broad array of firearm types and models. None. 

It’s long been a varmint and pest solution and, in a pinch, a self-defense weapon, either as a pistol or a rifle. It’s the round most kids learn to shoot with, probably with a lever action or slide action rifle. It’s what you plink with, even with today’s ammo prices. Or perhaps we should be saying, thankfully the .22 is still around with today’s ammo prices. When you can’t afford a handgun you really dig or there’s a machine gun that has captured you but you’ll never be able to own it, you buy the .22 version. 

The .22LR is, in a word, versatile and has been used for tasks few would have thought it capable of for well over a century, including bringing down huge game animals, with the appropriate range and shot placement. It’s used at the highest level of competition in the Olympic games, and all levels of competition shooting, for that matter. 

Even in countries where firearms are mostly banned and states with strict gun laws, rimfire .22 is still allowed. Today, the .22 LR is still the most popular ammunition in the world, and thanks in part to precision rimfire shooters who are pushing the cartridge out to surprising distances, the humble round is seeing a resurgence.   

The cartridge has survived everything — the switch from black powder to smokeless powder, the shift from rimfire cartridges to centerfire, the advent of revolvers and repeating rifles, and finally semi-auto and full-auto firearms and every bullet tech innovation that has come along in all that time. It’s been loaded in cylinders, box magazines, rotary magazines, drums, and ammo belts. There’s nothing the .22 hasn’t done.   

So, why the .22? Let’s take a look at where this round came from, and how it has weathered so many changes in the firearms industry and the world. 

.22 LR History

The development of the .22 LR isn’t a very remarkable story. It was a step in the gradual improvement of the .22 BB round, as ammo makers played with case length and bullet weight combinations. 

The cartridge we know today came along in 1887 from the J. Stevens Arms & Tool Company, which took the case of the .22 Long (1871) and combined it with a 40-grain bullet from a .22 Extra Long, which made it longer overall than its parent cartridge. It also had a higher muzzle velocity, around 1,000 to 1,100 fps. It was an overall more effective cartridge, especially for hunting and target shooting; it effectively made the .22 Long obsolete, which is why you’ve probably never seen one.  

The .22 Long and Extra Long were themselves lengthened versions of the .22 Short, which is still around and has its uses. 

The .22 LR has a heeled bullet, which means the base tapers and is narrower than the rest of the bullet. The mouth of the case is crimped around the heel, which leaves most of the bullet exposed. This is why the bullet on a .22 LR is flush with the outer case wall, and it’s also why the round feeds so well in so many types of firearms. The Union Metallic Cartridge company was the first to produce the round with a 40-grain bullet moving at 1,095 fps. 

As a rimfire round, the rim at the base of the cartridge contains a priming compound that is ignited when the rim is crushed by a firing pin, which in turn ignites the main charge of propellant. 

And, since it was designed for black powder loads, there was plenty of room in the case for less voluminous smokeless powders to be paired with lighter bullets in the coming years, so the rounds’ velocity could continue to be pushed as ammunition technology developed over the years. The result has been hyper-velocity .22 LR loads, like the popular CCI Stinger, which was the first in this sub-category of hyper-velocity .22 ammo. 

The Stinger’s case is a little longer than a standard .22 LR by 2.2 mm, but the hollowpoint bullets it uses are only 32 grains, so they are shorter, reaching the same overall length. This produces a blistering muzzle velocity of 1,640 fps. 

There’s a tradeoff, of course: Some firearms with tight tolerances might have trouble ejecting Stinger cases because of the added length. That and the light bullets, while fast, can ricochet pretty easily. The same goes for heavier .22 LR projectiles, too.  

Later, even lighter 30-grain bullets were used in some hyper-velocity rounds, like the Remington Viper and the discontinued Federal Spitfire. The CCI Velocitor hyper-velocity round took a different approach by using a standard length .22 LR case and a standard weight 40-grain bullet, but it’s of a proprietary hollow-point design that augments expansion and the resulting wound channel. It has a muzzle velocity of 1,435 fps and is the same length as a standard .22 LR cartridge. 

With standard and hyper-velocity rounds, most hunters keep their shots within 100 or even 50 yards on small animals. 

The .22 LR, of course, led to the creation of other rimfire rounds that are even more powerful, but not as widely used, like the .22 Magnum, .22 Hornet, and later to Hornady’s .17 HMR, which is a necked-down .22 Magnum. 

Today, many people carry some kind of .22 LR pistol for self-defense. While some denounce the practice saying the round is underpowered for defense duty, others argue that if it’s the most gun a person can either carry, shoot well, or both, it’s far better than no gun. To that end, there is a host of self-defense .22 LR ammo out there, like Federal Personal Defense Punch .22 LR ammo, topped with light, fast-moving 29-grain flat-nosed, nickel-plated bullets with a muzzle velocity of 1,070 from a 2-inch barrel, or 1,650 from a 24-inch rifle barrel.

Enduring Through Time

So why has the .22 LR been around and useful for so long? It offers a good balance of many factors. The recoil is very light and tolerable for even the most sensitive shooters. And it’s also a relatively quiet round that can be significantly muffled by a suppressor. It doesn’t often do more damage than is required if the correct type of ammunition is used, and is just a fun round to shoot. It’s the opposite of punishing. 

This is why so many kids are taught to shoot on a .22, and why good shooters still practice their fundamentals with a .22 LR rifle or pistol. Many a young person’s shooting experiences have been ruined by someone who attempted to teach them to shoot with a hard-kicking, heavy recoil rifle.  

In the field, a .22 LR rifle is light and handy — many squirrels have been dropped out of trees by such a rifle, and someone can carry a bevy of spare ammunition because it is also lightweight.  

On the practical side, through the years .22 LR ammunition has been plentiful and affordable, except perhaps during the dark days of the ammo shortage. You can still buy basic target ammo by the bucketful or by the brick and not feel guilty about blazing away at the range.  

These are factors that, despite the steady march of ammunition technology advancements and the quality of components, have not changed and have kept the .22 LR in business — and will likely continue to do so until someday firearms that use primers and gunpowder become obsolete. 

Finally, you can get almost any type of firearm you can think of in .22 LR. Just the Ruger 10/22 platform alone has been modified and slapped into a million different custom stocks, many of them created to emulate other difficult-to-attain firearms, like a Thompson submachine gun or even belt-fed machine guns from WWI and WWII. 

The .22 LR isn’t going anywhere, and that’s an extremely good thing. 

.22 LR Specifications & Details