Ruger is one of those gun manufacturers that people tend to look at as a market leader, and to their credit, they definitely have established themselves as one. Nobody ever looks at a Ruger and turns their nose up at it.
Now, Ruger established itself a long time ago as the market leader in .22 LR chambered plinkers. The Single Six, the 10/22, and the guns from the Mark series have been flying off shelves for decades. Today, I am going to be giving you a look at one of the most modern iterations of the Ruger Mark series, the 22/45 Tactical.
This isn’t exactly my first time handling a Ruger .22 LR, but to be honest it has been so long that it does kind of feel like it is the first time all over again. The 22/45 grip definitely reminds me of a 1911, so if that is your jam as the kids say (do they still say that?) then you will like what they have done here with this one.
The safety selector and slide stop/release are both well placed and not difficult to hit, despite having hands that don’t exactly make a bat jealous with their relatively short wingspan.
To keep compliant with some state laws, the gun comes complete with a pair of ten-round magazines. While I am not surprised that they included ten-rounders on account of the aforementioned gun laws in some states; one thing that does kind of irk me is that Ruger took such a large frame and didn’t even make anything over ten rounds an option.
The bulk of the ammo I fed through the Mark IV 22/45 Tactical came from CCI’s polymer-coated target loads, testing both high-velocity and subsonic rounds.
For the first hundred rounds, I fired the 22/45 Tactical without any kind of an optic or suppressor. Things went pretty well during this phase of my testing for the review. I wasn’t shooting in groups for accuracy but did do a lot of steel transitions at fifteen and twenty-five yards, in addition to some IQ drills through a rubber target. So far, so good.
So then I screwed on a Pilot 2 suppressor and bolted on a TD-3C red-dot. I ran off another hundred rounds. I got zeroed in and repeated the drills I went through with the first hundred rounds. I even let my thirteen-year-old son squeeze off a few rounds.
Don’t mean to spoil the ending to this story, but he absolutely loves this gun.
With so little reciprocating mass, the Mark IV 22/45 has a good bit less recoil than similar guns. This might not mean much to a fully grown adult who has been firing guns for decades, but it means a lot to my son in terms of his being able to handle it.
With CCI’s subsonic rounds and a suppressor, this might very well be the quietest gun that I have ever had the privilege to shoot. After a quick wipe-down and re-lube, I went back out to the range the next day. What happened actually kind of surprised me.
The first fifty rounds were a jam fest to rival the Grateful Dead in their prime. Every other round was unreliable and was failing to extract. So I checked the gun and saw that it was cleaned, oiled and assembled properly. After those fifty trouble-making rounds, the gun went back to running like a well-oiled machine. After that one little hiccup, the thing was as quiet as a church mouse.
I ran another five or six hundred rounds through the thing without one single issue after that. I really have no clue what happened, short of it being a bum batch of ammo or that the gun wasn’t agreeing with what I wiped it down with. After that batch of fifty that were acting screwy, I didn’t have one single problem.
Running the Mark IV 22/45 at 15 and 25 yards on a variety of targets ranging from four-inch circles to bowling pin-sized objects was ridiculously predictable. I never once missed a shot where I felt like it was the gun’s fault.
Shooting in groups, however, started out as an absolutely maddening exercise. From a standing position, I was using a rifle tripod as a base. The groups in this case were dinner plate-sized objects at around fifteen yards. It was pretty embarrassing.
That being said, I then took the suppressor off and the groups tightened back to what I was expecting from the gun. I put the suppressor back on and then the groups stayed at about the same size. And like with the other reliability issue, once the issue cleared up it stayed cleared up.
Then came the ultimate test.
I set my sights on a 1/3 scale mini E-type target sitting out at 100 yards, feeling confident enough. With each shot, I was making contact—well, let’s say I was “acquainting” myself with the target more than repainting it. Scratches? Not so much. But hey, I was hitting, even if the target was probably laughing a little at my aim. The shots were solid enough to keep me from outright embarrassment but nowhere near good enough for bragging rights.
Finally, I’d love to tell you that my favorite guns over the years have always been flawlessly reliable and pin-point accurate, right down to that very first BB gun my parents got me when I was nine years old. But, if I’m being honest, that’s just not the case.
When the Ruger Mark IV 22/45 Tactical made its way into my hands, I had high hopes. Sure, there were some frustrating hiccups in reliability and a few head-scratching moments with accuracy that left me questioning what exactly was throwing things off. The strange part was, once those issues happened, they never reappeared. So, while it wasn’t perfect, the Mark IV has kept me happy overall—and definitely earned its spot in my collection.
Everyone from my wife to my son, to my parents wanted to shoot the thing when they came over.
The Ruger Mark IV 22/45 Tactical has an MSRP of $669, and if you’ve got the money you should definitely make the time for this one. You would not regret it.