Why .223?

Spray-n-pray · Feb 6, 2010

In Oregon, .223 is a legal deer hunting round. In other threads on this forum, people have attested to harvesting many deer with .223.

Humpyslayer · Feb 7, 2010

in the military if you shoot your enemy with a 223 then it will bounce around and wound them, then it takes a second to tend to them. thus taking two. plus the weight is also a factor. The age old arguement. of course most countries shoot 7.62x39 back at us. dont get in the way of that. we shoot back from a long ways of with 7.62x51 nato lites out! god bless our troops

I wouldn't say .223/5.56 bounces around and wounds anyone. If you pop someone with a 62 grain ss109, it'll tend to punch a hole in someone and not cause as big of a wound channel as a 55 grain. It has it's positives and negatives. Positives are it's incredibly accurate, doesn't tend to over penetrate (which is good in urban enviroments like most of us live in), you can carry a lot of it, it's not going to break the bank to shoot,and it doesn't beat your shoulder up shooting it all day.

Negatives are it gets blown around by the wind when you get out there aways, it's not as effective of a round for long range shooting because it has so much drop at distances like 1000 yards (where as .308 still has more oomph behind it and knock down power), you can't legally hunt in a lot of places with it (Washington at least), and it doesn't penerate some media as well (walls, body armor, barricades, etc).

People seem to put down .223, but it does the job. How many people do you know that have been shot with .223/5.56 and lived? It's a lethal round. .308 is definitely one heck of a potent round and I'm not saying .223 is better, they just have different purposes for me. I personally know a guy that was overseas and him and a couple other snipers, all with .308 bolt guns, had to put 2 rounds each into a guy before he stopped moving. It's not always caliber or shot placement (but that makes a huge difference). How many of us have shot a deer with a .308 or 30-06 and had it run off with an exploded lung or heart and drop 50 or 100 yards later? Most of the guys overseas that I've talked to (soldiers and contractors) say it works good. The thing I like about it is up close it's going so dang fast that if it hit something, it instantly starts to fragment and causes a lot of tissue damage without a lot of the original projectile remaining to penetrate throught, and as you get out there a little ways, it has a good amount of penetration.

That's just my 2 cents. I love both rounds and own 2 guns per caliber. To each there own, but I say there's nothing wrong with .223 and too much goes into the stories of it not having enough knock down power.

Leif Runenritzer · Feb 10, 2010

5.56x45mm at least, should theoretically be easier to come by during lean times, because manufacturers will þeoretically give it priority for the sake of their military and LE buyers. So this would seem to make it more likely to be found on the shelf at Bi-Mart. It has also been theorized that some of this ammo owned by military and LE might fall through the cracks during desperate times.