T
hey call it flyover country, that great swath of heartland between the Northeastern Megalopolis and Southern California. The men and women who live here make up an important part of the fabric of our great nation. They are a hardy people with strong beliefs and admirable traits. Perhaps I am a bit biased, though, living as I do in rural Kansas. Over the years I’ve found it interesting at just how widely embraced the AR rifle has become here in the heartland. It has become the rifle of choice of the blue-collar worker. Oh, sure, they likely have a traditional bolt gun or two kicking around, but their working gun or truck rifle tends to be some flavor of AR. There are few rifles, with all its calibers,
configurations and options that are as versatile or scream ’Murica like Stoner’s black rifle does. There are indeed some great factory cartridges developed specifically for use in the AR platform beyond the standard .223/5.56. These include the 6.5mm Grendel, 6.8 Rem SPC, .300 BLK, .30 Rem. AR, .450 Bushmaster, .458 SOCOM and, of course, the .50 Beowulf. Some of these are more popular and useful than others, but they all add to the versatility of this rifle family. Unfortunately, there has been no factory offering in .22 caliber that has offered a real step up in performance compared to the .223/5.56. Hunters, recreational shooters and competitive riflemen looking for a bit more out of this bore size either had to switch to a wildcat
or a different platform. Nosler is looking to change this dynamic with the development and introduction of an entirely new cartridge: the .22 Nosler. The .22 Nosler joins the .26 Nosler (2014), .28 Nosler (2015), .30 Nosler (2016) and the recently introduced, hard-hitting .33 Nosler (2016) cartridges. Since introducing its first cartridge in 2014, Nosler has been on a bit of a roll. Starting with the .26 Nosler, this relative newcomer to ammunition has set a high bar. Nosler didn’t just want its name on the headstamp of just any cartridge. It wanted to introduce new cartridges that would grab people’s attention the oldfashioned way—with blistering performance. The .26 Nosler is a great example of this, driving a 129-grain bullet at a scorching 3,400 fps. In doing so, it kicks sand in the face of the .260 Rem., 6.5 Creedmoor, .264 Win. Mag. and even the 6.5-284 Norma (although it was slightly eclipsed by Weatherby’s 6.5-300, introduced last year). The Nosler headstamped cartridges that followed have all been equally attention getting when it comes to brute performance. The .22 Nosler is a different animal. For one thing, it wasn’t designed around the .404 Jeffery case like all the others. Nor was it developed with traditional bolt-action rifles in mind. No, the .22 Nosler was designed for one specific purpose: to be the fastest .22 caliber cartridge that is able to be easily chambered in a standard AR-15 type rifle. Its goal is to provide rifle shooters with a practical step up in performance over the hugely popular .223 Rem. and even the 5.56 NATO. By “practical” I mean the designers at Nosler wanted their new cartridge to be an easy drop-in caliber change for any standard AR-15 rifle. Rather than being an expensive custom conversion requiring hard to-find and expensive parts and pieces, the .22 Nosler was designed with the everyday shooter in mind. When conceptualizing the cartridge, the engineers had to consider the existing AR-15 magazine well dimensions and operating pressures. The magazine well dimensions dictate the maximum overall length and optimum cartridge case