In TTAG’s four-star SW22 Victory review, RF revealed the sort of accuracy a decent shooter can produce using the standard sights and ammo. Our Armed Intelligentsia weren’t satisfied. It’s a target pistol, for Pete’s sake! What kind of groups can the S&W Victory achieve shooting match-grade ammo from a rest? Good question!
First, a quick cleaning. The little flanges on the back of the receiver kept snagging my bore snake. Otherwise she cleaned up just fine and was good as new.
Off to The Range at Austin, on St. Patrick’s Day no less. I mounted a Primary Arms 1-8x ACSS scope to the Victory’s Pic rail and plopped it on a sandbag.
Sure, okay, it isn’t a Ransom Rest. But I crammed the Victory into the heavy bag and got it as still as Hillary Clinton’s love life.
At 8x zoom, the horseshoe in the ACSS reticle wrapped precisely around the black outer bullseye on my targets, set out to 25 yards. Repeatable alignment was dead nuts easy.
I fired ten or so fouling shots and established a rough zero.
Federal’s Hunter Match was good for a 0.990″, 5-shot group at 25 yards.
Federal Gold Medal UltraMatch, which has provided me with the tightest groups from a handful of .22 LR rifles and pistols (like this 50-yard group from my CZ 455), turned in a 1.017″ group.
A couple clicks further away from the scope’s AR-15 zero and the UltraMatch turned in a 0.969″ group, which was the best for the day.
I’d call this solid accuracy for plinking or for pest control — but short of what it takes to be called a “proper” target gun. A handful of other reviews saw notably tighter groups from their SW22 testers and a couple saw slightly larger groups.
I finally picked up my match-grade .22 LR loads from Norma, Lapua, SK, RWS, etc. We’ll do a follow-up to this follow-up after installing the majority of the TANDEMKROSS SW22 upgrade catalog. I’ll remove and reinstall the barrel just to be sure.
I went into this test expecting cloverleafs, and not just because it was St. Patrick’s Day. What I got was more-or-less less than I expected. We’ll see how much more accuracy a little money can buy.