Bad ammo vanity

I tried plinking with my new Marlin 795 .22 semi auto about three months ago. Almost every round jammed, I even had to use a clothes hanger to punch some stuck rounds out of the chamber.

Tried again yesterday after a thorough cleaning. Same thing. Thought, "Oh well, send it off to Marlin for repairs". By chance, I ran a few rounds of the same .22 long through a Puma revolver.

I was using Aguila ammo, made in Mexico, bought for real cheap at a gun show. The quality control is crap. I ran some Fiocci and Federal through the 795 and everything was fine.

“Please post data from a designed experiment on the subject along with the statistical analysis. Also describe the confidence limits associated with your data. If you can’t, then please stop your nefarious efforts to mislead people with unverifiable nonsense.”

After learning the basics (courtesy of our club’s NRA Junior Shooter program) in high school, I earned a place on the rifle team at a federal service academy.

After surviving until graduation, I embarked on an active-duty career, which eventually spanned a quarter century. Never truly noticed it until Buffalo Head took such offense, but it just dawned on me that I spent most on-duty hours computing or estimating aiming errors, fire control system precision, miss distances, survivability/vulnerability, and weapon systems effectiveness. Studies and analyses were the main job, from the subsystem level all the way up to Joint and Combined projects, at every level of system aggregation and armed conflict to and including major theater. Or higher.

At odd moments, I dabbled in NRA High Power rifle competition.

Since leaving active duty, I have been employed by a major gun parts supplier. We also perform gunsmithing and repair at every level short of manufacturing complete firearms. In that line of work, it has been borne in upon me - on a day to day basis - that 22 rimfire guns are picky about ammunition. So picky, that there is little point in trying to guess in advance, what brand, bullet style, and load will work best. Generalizations rarely stand up.

So I offer apologies to BH and the forum: calculation of miss distance, circular error, and point-of-aim correction did not seem terribly taxing (just to give the sketchiest of nods to the most elementary attributes that might be addressed in an operational test). Other members of the forum are free to plan, carry out, and draw conclusions from their own tests. They are equally free to dismiss all of it as nonsense. Does BH mean to suggest they haven’t the moxie to find their own way through all this?

It’s quite likely that most rimfire gunmakers and all ammunition manufacturers have been conducting tests all along. But they hold the results pretty closely.

Testing costs money, and most of it has to be spent collecting the data - an inglorious truism, an annoying aspect of reality most mathematicians resist. But then, true mathematicians flee from reality every day. The rest of us in the profession are more prosaic, calling such limitations constraints.

No matter what test results a 22 owner can gain access to, each round loaded, each pull of the trigger, is a new event. Some element of the unknown will *always* be present: that’s why any prejudgment of results is probabilistic. No shooter can know in advance until they buy ammunition, go afield, and see for themselves just what their arm and ammunition are capable of.

Good shooting. And do it safely.

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