22 or pellet?

I just mentioned pellet guns a few issues ago. I was envisioning children’s or introductory, inexpensive rifles to deal with pests. Primary given to children to learn marksmanship and stalking skills. Of course then you run into the problem about quality. A cheap rifle will not last forever and the further into a collapse scenario the more importance you must place in your grain storage and the eradication of rodents. A reader generously gave me research material and I looked a bit online to get more information. And, once again, we are confronted with the same problem as most of frugal preparedness equipment. We can’t afford the quality so we compromise and buy cheaper items. Then we have to worry about their failure. But if we try to buy all quality we end up not getting enough of the needed supplies.
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A quality pellet rifle is in the $200 to $500 range for a spring piston type. RWS-Diana is recommended. But that is more than I would spend on either a surplus bolt action thirty caliber rifle or a brand new rimfire. One solution is that if you have a good .22 just buy ammo that about matches pellet performance. If you use .22 CB longs you get very little noise, even quieter than some pellet guns. But to work the barrel needs to be 22 inches or longer. You get about an inch group at fifty yards. Unfortunately the rounds are twice the cost of .22LR. But if quiet will save your life… Or you could just build a silencer after the ATF is reduced to atomic rubble.
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The thing I dislike about the pellet guns is that ( besides the price of the gun itself ) the ammunition is less than half the cost of .22 rimfire. 1000 pellets cost $12. You can buy 1100 .22’s for twenty bucks with tax included at Wal-Mart. And the guns cost at least twice as much. I can’t see much advantage in the pellet gun except noise reduction. The range is about the same. Don’t use the .22 pellets. They are less accurate and are poorer at penetration than the .177 pellets. They are good to 40 yards compared to 65 for the .177. A rimfire .22 is good to about 100 but that usually means you need a scope. So an unscoped .22 rimfire is about as good on range as a scoped pellet gun. Something to consider if you worry about scopes breaking or failing with no replacement possible.
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If you do go with a pellet gun, and if it is a spring piston you should buy three replacement parts. A mainspring, a breech seal and a piston seal. Then your gun should last just about forever. If it is a quality gun it will last generations. Just don’t forget a repair manual. And I would think eventually, unless you have good money to really stockpile ammo, you are going to run out of pellets. I wonder if you can buy a mold? For the price, however, you could have a lot of .22 rimfire ammo. If your pellet gun cost $300 and you bought 20,000 pellets you would have spent about $550. If you bought a Marlin $99 .22 rimfire rifle ( tube fed to save on mags ) and 20,000 rounds of .22LR you would have spent fifty bucks less. Which brings us to a very good point.
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If you own a rimfire, you can kill a man easily with a hit properly placed. If you own a pellet gun you will either need to sneek up on the guy sleeping or just get really, really lucky. It will be a fluke if it happens. A rimfire will not kill them right away, so retaliation is a factor. I grant you that. But if you must defend yourself a .22LR just might do the trick whereas a pellet won’t 99 times out of a hundred. With a rimfire you can hunt below its capacity. Rodents or small game. Yes, it will destroy flesh and scare away the others unless you have a silencer. A pellet gun is suited ideally for pest control. But it will not defend you. It is like sending a .223 or a 7.62x39 to do the job of a .308 or .303 or 8mm.
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Given the high ammo cost and high gun cost I can’t recommend a pellet gun unless you are concerned past about twenty or thirty years ( or even fifty ) after your ammo starts to fail for a rimfire. The only advantages to a pellet gun are lack of noise and indestructible ammunition. But you will pay a high price for it. So what about a cheaper alternative? How about the $30 multi-pump at Wal-Mart. BB’s cost a lot less than pellets. 6,000 for about ten bucks. Not as good as a pellet and the gun is half the power. But it is one tenth the price. For pest control only, it might suffice. For small game hunting rely on your rimfire.
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If you do still want to go with a pellet gun of quality, not saying you shouldn’t just that it is pricey, go to http://www.amazon.com/ for the less expensive ones. I didn’t even look too hard and found one at $100. If nothing else you can read all the reviews, which are priceless. I bought hundreds of dollars of books from them and the reviews helped me decide which ones to get and which ones to avoid ( for the most part, enough to be a general rule of thumb ).

Original: http://bisonsurvivalblog.blogspot.com/2006/12/blog-post.html