Hey guys,

So I'm new to the wonderful world of guns.  I owned a 9mm in the past, but sold it years ago.  I have never shot a rifle of any kind.  I'm thinking of getting something for home defense, and I'm debating between an AR-style .22LR (like an H&K that looks pretty good or the S&W M&P15-22), an actual AR 5.56 (S&W M&P 15 Sport), or a 9mm luger handgun.

My chief concerns is over-penetration.  We live in a manufactured home with cardboard walls (more or less), with neighbors on two sides.  I realize anything strong enough to go through a bad guy will go through some walls.  However, I'm wondering what your perspective is on over-penetration of the respective rounds (.22LR vs 5.56, vs 9mm) if I were to use hollowpoints in all of them.  Depending on who you ask, some say handgun rounds blow through more walls than rifle rounds (theboxotruth.com, for example).  Others say the 5.56 is too much, that it will go through the whole place like butter, and could blow through a tree, while some say a frangible 5.56 or .223 round will blow up faster than a 9mm round and thus over-penetrate less.  Regarding .22LR's, some say they're not powerful to stop an attack, other say they are, with several shots.  The benefit of the .22 would be the controllability of the shots and less of a risk of missing in the first place and sending a round sailing into my daughter's room.  But if you don't get a heart shot, the perp will keep coming at you until you unload several rounds into him.  But then I've heard that a .22LR out of a rifle has a lot more oomph than out of a handgun, so a frangible .22LR might have decent oomph coming out of an AR (not expecting to stop someone with one .22LR round, though.)  Of course, there's also the added problem at the moment of not being able to find .22's anywhere.

Any thoughts?

Thanks for your time.

: )

Yes, and I certainly trust his experience and testing, but different people say very different things.  But a lot of it is based largely on conjecture and/or ballistics gelatin testing.  Who has actually shot a guy with a .22LR semi-auto AR and knows that it will stop him?  Maybe that study is out there as well.

Please read the FAQ's, and we have plenty of HD threads running already. Look back through a few pages.