This study shows some fragmentation of the M855 in ballistic gelatin induced by yaw happening down to around 2100 FPS. It is hard to get definitive advice of what sort of bullet would perform the best terminally at what range but if the stuff hits the fan, we feel that this gun would work best with 70-77 grain bullets with a bonded OTM or bonded soft point construction and should not be considered effective past 200 yards even though it is accurate way past this. While shooting for accuracy, we found that the pistol shot surprisingly well at about 2 MOA with cheap range reload 55 grain low cost blasting ammo. We didn’t bother to try an assortment of heavier bullets which might have better suited the 1:8 twist barrel because, well it’s a pistol. Frankly, we were surprised with this pistol’s accuracy, especially considering the cheap ammo. We didn’t have any trouble hitting out to 200 yards away. We felt that if we had range room, we could have easily hit things further out! Since most experts feel that the 5.56 round fired from the short barrel probably has serious deterioration of its terminal ballistics past 200 yards, we will just say that it’s effective range is that. Even with that in mind, it’s effective range is still almost twice that of a pistol caliber carbine. If we took our time to discover what round the gun preferred, we could have probably squeezed at least another MOA out of it, which is really impressive to us. Once we tuned it in, the pistol was not picky at all, digesting all we threw at it including a few hundred rounds of inexpensive and potentially sticky Wolf steel case.
