Re “$1000 Carry Guns: Sig Sauer, Glock, Springfield, and Smith,” January 2009 —Phillip J. Humble, MGYSGT USMC Retired Silverlake, Washington Re “Bolt-Action 22 Trio: Two Old, One New, All Good for Our Team,” December 2008 Just when I think that you guys are on the ball after reading Best Guns of 2008, I read another article that makes me wonder. How can you continue to test .22 LR guns and use crap ammo for shooting tests. Yellow Jackets? Velocitors? Federal Classic? That is not poor testing. That is a joke! Even middling CCI Mini-Mags are a far better choice than any of those others. If you don’t start using at least decent bulk ammo like Mini Mags or Dynapoints at worst and some of the excellent (yet still affordable) match/subsonic ammo like Wolf Match Target and Match Extra for the better ammo, I am going to stop reading anything rimfire related. Happy New Year anyway! —Mark Potter, Tomball, Texas
The ammunition we choose varies largely with the type of firearm being tested. We would not expect a 22 target rifle to perform its best with inexpensive ammunition, yet very often they surprise us. And we sometimes get the worst performance with the “best” ammo. We try to choose the types of ammunition the average user might grab and take to the range. We always try to use at least one “premium” brand to give the gun a chance to shine. It’s nice to know you have some good guns and can outshoot all of us and all of our guns. But 1-inch groups with iron sights at 50 yards are not really bad. For example, the test 69A fired a 0.33-inch group, five shots at 50 yards, a few years ago with RWS Rifle Match. We cannot test our guns with all the available ammunition, or we’d never get to press. —Ray Ordorica
