Extreme Long Range .22LR Shooting

It’s exciting to stretch a caliber to its limits. Personally I’ve only shot a .22LR out to 300 yards. However I stumbled upon this video with an Australian shooter making repeated hits at 720 yards.

Nearly half a mile with a .22LR is pretty impressive. Many shooters will tell you the effective range of a .223 is only 600 yards, so we are reaching even past that. But of course effective range and maximum range are different things altogether. A .22LR at 720 yards is hardly effective. In this case it’s just plain fun.

The rifle in the video was a CZ 452 that looks like it comes with a 22” barrel. Ammo used was the CCI Velocitor 40 grain that boasts of a 1,435 FPS velocity. At 720 yards my ballistics app shows the .22LR round dropping 1,078 inches (nearly 90 feet) from a 100 yard zero, and only having 28 foot pounds of energy. That’s quite a holdover and anyone who has shot .22LR for precision knows that the caliber itself varies in consistency a bit. You can even tell with some bulk ammo by the sound of the round going off that it was a different charge. So at 720 yards, you can imagine any variation at all in velocity alone would result in a miss.

The shooters had the ideal setup though. They placed the target in at the backside of a large pond that allowed easy spotting of short misses. They admitted to expending several magazines before finding the correct holdover. However at the end of the video you see several hits on target. They used ¾” pine board and it showed the bullets penetrating about 7/8 of the way through. So once again, not a practical range for .22LR, but definitely cool to show that you can accurately hit a target at nearly half a mile with one of the smallest and most popular cartridges in the world.