The Rimfire Report: CCI Velocitor As A 22LR Self-Defense Cartridge?

Hello and welcome back to another edition of The Rimfire Report! This ongoing series is all about the rimfire firearm world and its various firearms, trends, and ammunition. Last week we took another look at Federal’s CCI 22LR Punch Personal Defense ammunition to see if it behaved the same when put up against clothing and also when fired out of a rifle. What we saw is that Federal 22LR Punch does indeed expand, but it only does it out of a much longer barrel than wouldn’t be practical to carry concealed. A number of you had requested that we try out some other types of higher velocity 22LR ammunition including CCI Stinger and CCI Velocitor. I was able to get my hands on a few boxes of CCI Velocitors and this week on The Rimfire Report we’ll be putting the CCI Velocitor to the test to see how well it performs in our gel tests.

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CCI Velocitor is mainly marketed as a varmint hunting cartridge that sports an average muzzle velocity that is about 200-fps more than your average high-velocity cartridge. CCI Velocitor achieves its 1,400-fps muzzle velocity through a 24″ barrel – not something that is really suited for self-defense but probably far more likely to be found within the varmint hunting world. However, since enough of you wanted to see how it worked as a self-defense cartridge, we’re going to be using a very similar test to the ones we did with Federal Punch and take a look at it how it stacks up. But first, the numbers:

For this series of tests, I’ve changed a few things and I am now going to include 4-layers of clothing material. I’ve also swapped out the medium-sized handguns (the MKIV and the P322) for one additional pocket-sized 22LR semi-auto (a Beretta 21A Bobcat Covert) and of course the Ruger 10/22 carbine. The handguns should give us a good idea of how a variety of concealed carry-sized 22LRs handle the ammo, and the rifle should give us the final word on how much energy any of these projectiles should need in order to expand and penetrate to a sufficient depth.

I wasn’t really expecting much to come from this test as I figured the bullets would be subsonic and the addition of a cylinder gap and the 2″ barrel of the 942 would just be too much to get these 40-grain bullets up to speed in order to induce any sort of expansion. However, I did notice that the rounds that I was able to capture either penetrated through the whole 16″ gel block or reversed direction towards the end of their path through the block. Despite two of the projectiles exiting the rear block and striking my ballistic inserts, none of them had enough energy to deform.

This time I noticed an odd trend. Not only did all of the rounds penetrate in more or less a straight line through to the back of the block, but some of them that didn’t deform from impacting the ballistic plates also had larger hollow points than they started with. I think I can safely say that these enlarged front ends are not from the impact on the ballistic inserts but probably from the initial shock of entering the gel block and clothing. Unlike the tests done with the 942, none of these rounds seemed to have wound channels that indicated that the rounds were tumbling at any point while inside the gel block.

Beretta 21A Bobcat Covert:

As with the rounds fired from the Ruger LCP II Lite Rack, the ones fired from the Beretta grouped tightly but also didn’t stop at any point in the block but instead excited the rear of the block into the ballistic inserts without deforming. What surprises me is that despite the fact that the Bobcat features a slightly longer barrel length (2.9 vs 2.75″), the average velocity was lower than that of what was seen out of the Lite Rack. I’ve also noticed that based off of the previous three tests, the standard deviation and extreme spread are much greater than that of the Federal Punch which was getting an average standard deviation of about 15-fps.

We are finally starting to see some expansion! However, it took putting the rounds inside of a rifle to get to that performance metric. We do notice that the expansion dumps a lot more energy into the target as nearly all of the rounds save for one stopped inside the gel block. What is interesting to me is that in stark contrast to the 29-grain Federal Punch which also expanded out of the 10/22, the Velocitors are also penetrating to a sufficient depth each time averaging about an inch or two beyond that of the FBI standard.

These observations are not a damnation of either of the two ammunitions, but instead a simple representation of some fundamental tradeoffs you see with all ammunition. The lighter faster Federal Punch can deliver much more energy upfront but will bleed off velocity much faster than the heavier 40-grain Velocitor projectiles which require a longer barrel to get up to speed, but once accomplished, can deliver greater expansion and greater penetration at the same time.

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However, I’d like to hear what you guys think about this set of test results. Did the results surprise you or did you figure that CCI Velocitor wouldn’t have the muzzle velocity necessary to get both expansion and penetration down? Let us know down in the comments and as always, thanks for stopping by for another edition of The Rimfire Report! See you all next week!