Survival Rifle or Air Rifle

Scottman said:
Coconut.

"The short qualifies as the most quiet of useful hunting rounds, making a pop a little louder than a pellet rifle. It's small size and mild report belie its deadliness. In solid plywood tests, the high velocity solid will go through 1.5 inches at 25 yards, as compared to the high velocity long rifle at 2 inches at that distance. A penetration of .5 inch of plywood is enough to cause death in a vital area hit on a person. Documented fatalities with the 22 Short have occured at 600 yards."

-1993 gun digest
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I'll try to get my hands on a Coconut. Plywood I have. Thanks for the ideas!
 
I love the little AR-7 you can still find them.....and they store in the butt stock I will pm you sir.
 
I have a daystate PH6 in 25 caliber, I have personally killed jackrabbits with it over 60 yds lased. In a survival situation I would trade it on the spot for a good 22 and an equal amount of ammo. Chris
My Daystate

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When I was a kid in Scotland I did loads of hunting with an air rifle. Changed to a shotgun but ended up with less game. The noise was deafening, the rounds weighed a ton and the thing had less practical range than my old (and heavy) HW80.

Now, air rifles here in Merrie England (other than those on a firearms certificate) must dish out no more than 12 ftlb.... but if one were to, say, take a nice lightweight air rifle like a BSA Supersport (3 choices of barrel length - I'd go for the K) in .22 and acquire a .177 Theoben gas ram for it, one might find about double the penetration in pine. And rabbit's head accuracy to about 45 yards. Plus a silencer - nice and quiet.

I'd also go for a .22 since you generally get not only more energy but a lot more momentum and wound cavity than a .177.

Archery was mentioned earlier. Learn bowyery as well and you'll never be unarmed. Check out www.slinghotforum.com - folk hunt with those things. Nothing to prevent you having a range of kit - for firearms how about a TC Contender with .22lr and .223 tubes?
 
I had an archery class one semester, which made me realise that I wasn't going to get good enough with a fancy commercial bow to hunt, anytime soon.

If you have ammo concerns with your .22 rimfire, buy 10,000 rounds and stick 'em in the closet. Problem solved.

If you are wondering whether a .22LR or the bow is better for you, try to shoot field targets with each one. The results will be very enlightening.

Bottom Line: For the average guy, a .22LR is way more certain than a bow.
 
I think there's a good argument for the Benjamin 392 as the best survival air rifle:

http://www.pyramydair.com/blog/2005/10/airgun-for-survival.html

http://www.pyramydair.com/blog/2010/04/my-survival-gun.html

Simple maintenance will give you a rifle that'll last more than 30 years. Weighs in at five and a half pounds - not the lightest choice, but not heavy by any means. I've got mine outfitted with peep sights and it's a lot of fun to shoot.

There's a good argument for how much ammo an air rifle will allow you to carry - 1000 rounds of pellets can be carried in your pockets whereas a 1000 rounds of .22lr weighs a considerable amount.

Still, as others have said, a .22lr is WAY more versatile and capable of taking larger game at far greater ranges. Ideally you have both - an air rifle so you don't burn through your .22lr ammo taking small game and a .22lr for everything else. Or, perhaps an air rifle and a bow.
 
Iboschi said:
If anyone has a reasonable test to test penetration power I am game. I don't know if the pellet could penetrate a human (sized) skull, but would be interested to know WITHOUT trying.
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Yeah, pick up some roadkill and practice on it. I hunted with pellet guns and have two Benj. .22 pellet guns. They do better than .177, rodents are hard to kill IMO
 
The one place where a .22 firearm will be inferior to an air rifle is in an urban survival situation. Noise is your enemy.

With an air rifle, pidgeons can be shot on roof tops without anyone down in the street being the wiser of your being there. Same for squirrels in a woodlot.

Out in the country, a .22 has it all over the airgun, sometimes. But sometimes quiet is a good thing, and worth working within the limitations.
 
jackknife said:
The one place where a .22 firearm will be inferior to an air rifle is in an urban survival situation. Noise is your enemy.

With an air rifle, pidgeons can be shot on roof tops without anyone down in the street being the wiser of your being there. Same for squirrels in a woodlot.

Out in the country, a .22 has it all over the airgun, sometimes. But sometimes quiet is a good thing, and worth working within the limitations.
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It really depends on the airgun for the reasons I have given. Thus I disagree.

crosman 760 and 2100: decently quiet.
benjamin .20: loud
22 rimfire with 22 plus inch barrel (the longer cubic barrel volume better to match the gas volume): very quiet with cb shorts, or aguilla super colibri.
Break barrel you have a higher volume of moving air-noise under higher pressure for increased velocity, and you have mechanical noise from the kinetic energy of the spring which is converted into sound energy.

the blowgun is very quiet.

A 22 rimfire can go from scary quiet 500 fps to 1700 fps.

traps are quiet also.
 
A PCP (3000 PSI) air rifle is the only one that would come close, but you need a 3k PSI charge source, so dragging a SCUBA tank around with you wouldn't be very practical.
 
My .22 Benjamin can't hold a candle to my Chinese .22 boltaction rifle, in the hunting fields. Air rifles are specialist weapons for zapping smallish animals quietly at closer ranges.

The .22LR is WAY more gun. I've hunted with both. If I was dead serious in a survival situation, there is simply no question that I would take the powder burner. Hey, just give in to the urge to have one of each kind, and hunt with each kind. What matters is not whether some guy on the internet says he does OK with one of them, what really matters is whether you yourself can successfully hunt with either one. In your research, you will need to create a small mountain of dead bodies, which you will then eat. If this is too icky, then I suppose just give up surviving and let the zombies eat you :)
 
KennyB said:
If you want to bring pure physics into this I'm sure people here could help to compare the average mass and velocity of a .22 round versus a .177 round at the peak of their respective velocities. I would suspect that a .22 would only have moderately higher energy, but range would still wind up being a bit higher.
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By ".22" you meen a .22 LR rimfire, not a .22 caliber air rifle?

Then you are very wrong. By an order of magnitude. An average decent quality .177 air rifle produces a muzzle energy between 10 and 15 foot pounds at the muzzle. A cheap pump up Daisy of Crosman would be much less.

A .22 CB cap produces about 30. A subsonic .22lr about 90. Past that point most air rifles can't even keep up with the velocity, never mind the kinetic energy.

A standard .22 long rifle high velocity load, like a CCI Minimag, is up at about 120 to 130 FPE. Hot loaded .22 lr rounds like the Velocitor are edging up toward 200 fpe.

Basically, the rimfire rounds are 3-4 times heavier and are going significantly faster. Energy increases with the square of velocity.

In very practical terms this meens that even the lowly .22 long rifle will blast right through things that will stop 90% of air rifle projectiles cold.
 
The M6 Scout is a cool little collapsing over and under rifle. It breaks down to fit in a case that's not much bigger than a pistol case and fires .22LR and .410 shells also. They had one at a local gun store a couple of years ago and I wanted to buy it but it was on hold for someone else and he ended up getting it. Bummer. I'm sure I could find one if I looked hard enough. I read a thread recently about pellet velocities and someone with experience said that 1200fps was actually too fast and you want to keep it under 1000fps for some reason but I forget why that was. Anyone?
 
The bullet must pass through the trans sonic barrier or something like that, it's been a long day I can't remember the specific name. It looses accuracy. That's why match ammo starts below the speed of sound.
 
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