Are you people serious? To each his own I guess but for me shooting a 22 is about as exciting as playing with a pellet gun and most people I know feel the same way. To be honest this advice that you have to start with a 22 and work your way up sounds like the old-school BS mentality where some of you feel that a new shooter has to "pay his dues" or earn his right to play with the big boys. To say that you'll never become a good shot unless you bore yourself silly first with some snore inducing pea-shooter is nonsense. You can become good with any gun you practice with consistently.
OP, if you want to waste your money on something you'll be bored of after an hour of shooting go for a 22 caliber handgun. If you want to be bored after 15 minutes go for a single action 22 caliber revolver. Then you can use it as an expensive paperweight after you go out and buy something that's actually fun to shoot.
If all you want to do is blast away at targets, then feel free to buy whatever you want.
I started off by buying a Ruger Blackhawk .38/.357 Magnum many moons ago, and the only thing we used to shoot at was trees and large juice bottles full of water as far as you could throw them. Had some trouble hitting anything, but I was in my early 20's, and thought that buying .38 cal rounds was for pussys.
More recently, I bought a Tokarev, an M&P 9mm, a Norc M93, and found that the only gun I could shoot with any real accuracy was the Norc. Seems I developed a lot of bad habits, that I couldn't seem to correct on my own...even after blasting a case full of Tokarev Ammo, and countless boxes of 9 mm of various types.
It wasn't until I took a two hour lesson with a certain elderly former IPSC champion that opened my eyes to all of the bad habits I developed. I found out that my grip was poor, I was left eye dominant (I shoot right handed), and I jerked the trigger causing my shots to go low and left.
It took about a half a case of .22 to break a lot of the habits with jerking and improving the shooting grip. Now, I am starting to group my shots tighter, and they are generally going where I aim them.
You might ask what is the point of this post? We, simply put, now that my aim is better, and my groupings are tighter every time I go out, I seem to get a higher level of satisfaction from my shooting. Don't get me wrong, It was fun just blasting away at targets before. It just puts a bigger grin on my face when I take a target down that has nice tight groups, rather than holes all over the place.
If you want to call that old school BS mentality, be my guest. I paid my dues by getting back to basics, and learning to shoot my .22, without any of the recoil issues. After shooting about 10k rounds of higher caliber ammo through various guns, I came to the conclusion that I was not going to get any more accurate.
Even though I own 10 different handguns now, the 2 - .22 caliber guns are still no less fun to shoot than any of the others. And sometime, I just take one of them up to the range for an hour and pop off a couple of hundred rounds just for fun.
You will not lose your man card for admitting you like to shoot .22.
very popular to find ammo, very effective round for it's size.
