Back to School: The 5.7 Fest and a 5.7x28mm Education

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It must’ve been over two years ago when I read a couple of articles concerning the 5.7x28mm round. The last article argued in favor of the 5.7×28 for self-defense purposes.

Soon afterwards, I shot a Ruger-5.7 pistol chambered in that round. The pistol’s owner handed me the loaded Ruger, and I pulled off a half dozen shots at a steel target ten yards away. Not bad, I thought, low recoil and pistol and round seemed quite accurate. I asked the Ruger owner to see an unfired round. He dropped one in the palm of my hand.

That self-defense article running through my head, my first impression was of a beefed up, bottle-necked .22 WMR and I thought: This dink would save my life? Man…

An Invitation to the 5.7 Fest

Have to admit, I pretty much ignored future coverage of the round. Fun to shoot, I figured, but another solution in search of a problem that didn’t exist.

Ignored, that is, until Jahred Gamez sent me an email. The Digital Marketing Manager at firearms importer SDS Arms, Gamez invited me to be his company’s guest at something called the 5.7 Fest for two days in May 2024. The event was at Range Ready Studios in Robert, Louisiana, home of Gun Talk Media. 

In these two days, I was assured, I’d learn a great deal about the 5.7x28mm round, including history, ballistics and applications. Plus, I’d get spend a whole lot of quality time shooting firearms chambered in 5.7.

Sponsors included what seemed about half the shooting sports industry, from EOTech and Federal Ammunition and Caldwell Shooting Supplies, to Fiocchi USA, SDS Arms, Ruger and Smith and Wesson.

Thank you and yes, I replied to Gamez’s email, thinking, why the hell not…

What I Knew

Pre-5.7 Fest, I knew a few things about the round in addition to its dink profile.

I knew, for example, that the round was developed by FN Herstal in the 1980’s and was marketed as a possible replacement for the 9mm Parabellum. It didn’t replace the 9mm. Also, I knew FN designed their Star-Wars-looking FN P90 for this round.

Obviously, it was becoming more popular given the many articles on the round appearing, and a small but increasing number of firearms kept popping up in this caliber. The very fact of the 5.7 Fest suggested the round was trending up.

So, time for Brian to get some education.

5.7 Ammo Options

One 5.7 Fest reality which stood out immediately was there are more 5.7 ammunition options than I realized.  

The ammunition I used included:

Federal Ammunition American Eagle, 40 grain, full metal jacket (FMJ).

Fiocchi USA and three different rounds. Hyperformance 35 grain jacketed frangible, Hyperformance 40 grain tipped hollow point, and Range Dynamics Subsonic 62 grain FMJ for suppressed firearms.

Hornady Critical Defense 40 grain FTX poly tipped.

Speer Ammunition Personal Protection 40 grain Gold Dot hollow point.  

I guesstimate I shot over 450 rounds of 5.7 in my time at Range Ready, most of it through pistols. There were Ruger LC Carbines in the round, too. I pulled off just under 100 rounds through these carbines.

Ballistics At the 5.7 Fest

Ballistically, the 5.7×28 is a much stouter round than its size suggested to me.

Take the Speer Personal Protection self-defense load. Speer rates the bullet leaving a 5-inch pistol barrel at 1,800 feet per second (fps), and down to 1,651 fps at 25 yards. Given the load’s 40 grain bullet, that translates to 288 foot-pounds (ft-lbs.) of energy at the muzzle and 242 ft-lbs. at 25 yards.

Or the Hornady Critical Defense 5.7. Its 40 grain FTX bullet leaves a 5-inch barrel at 1,810 fps for 291 ft-lbs., so at about par with the Speer load at 25 yards for fps and ft-lbs.   

Comparisons

Both Hornady Critical Defense and Speer Personal Protection offer a .22 WMR self-defense option. 

In .22 WMR, the Hornady 45 grain FTX bullet pops out of the muzzle at 1,000 fps for 100 ft-lbs. of energy. The 40-grain Speer hollow point is a bit faster at 1,050 fps at the muzzle and hits a little softer at 98 ft-lbs.

So, despite a somewhat similar size, the 5.7×28 is much more powerful than these two .22 WMR’s. Turns  out, the 5.7 also offers considerably more thump than the 380 AUTO even though 380 AUTO bullets weigh approximately twice as much as the 5.7s.

The Hornady Critical Defense 380 AUTO launches a 90 grain FTX bullet at 1,000 fps muzzle velocity and 200 ft-lbs., and Speer Personal Defense Gold Dot 90 grain bullet exists the barrel at 1,040 fps and 216 ft-lbs.

Making the 380 AUTO slower and possessing less energy than 5.7s rounds loaded with bullets half the weight.  

We chronographed some 5.7 rounds through a Ruger LC Carbine using Caldwell Shooting Supplies’ new VelociRadar chrono. The LC’s longer, 16-inch barrel juiced up the rounds into the vicinity of 2,100 fps. That translated to approximately 390 ft-lbs. of energy.

Round Counts

Thanks to the round’s smaller case diameter, the pistols I used at the 5.7 Fest carried large numbers of 5.7×28 rounds. Large.

The Ruger-5.7s I fired had 20+1 ammo capacity, the Smith and Wesson M&P 5.7s 22+1, and the Tisas PX-5.7 imported by SDS Arms 20+1.

For the home defense and concealed carry, a 5.7×28 pistol provides a good deal of firepower in a platform that recoils much less than a 9mm or 45 AUTO pistol.

Quirks

The 5.7×26 is a quirky little round.

For example, the cartridge case of the 5.7 doesn’t have a lot of taper, so it needs a slicker surface than other cases to feed and extract properly. To slick it up, most 5.7 ammo makers apply a thin coating of lacquer to the cases.

It works. Yet, the lacquer case coating also means that reloading is difficult and generally not recommended.

Firearms in the round operate well with suppressors. But Ryan Harkema, the Silencer Central representative who attended the Fest, noted that given the high pressure of the rounds (Maximum Average Pressure at 48,500 PSI, according to SAAMI, versus 35,000 PSI for the 9mm) and the bullet design, first round “pops” and similar “hiccups” are common with suppressed 5.7 firearms.

The 5.7 round hasn’t gained much traction as a bolt action, yet.

Savage Arms debuted the Savage Model 25 in 5.7 in 2011 but pulled that chambering at some point. Savage currently offers no firearms in 5.7.

Dark Mountain Arms manufactures the Stowaway, a take-down bolt in 5.7×28.

There appears to be some technical problems in making bolt actions in this chambering.  During 5.7 Fest, Christian Hogg, vice president of marketing for Fiocchi USA, noted that Fiocchi and Ruger are collaborating to design a 5.7 bullet that will work well in a bolt-action platform.

Accuracy

I shot ten rounds through an EOTech scoped Ruger LC Carbine in 5.7 at 50 yards in about 24 seconds during a Fest contest. My group was no larger than a quarter. And I lost that contest as two other guys at the event shot tighter groups!

Pistol groups at ten yards offhand were easily way more than self-defense accurate. I couldn’t measure groups because of all the shooting going on. But I made a 2.0-inch group easy enough. Some Fest participants shot tighter groups, too. 

Tisas PX-5.7 Pistol

I used the Tisas PX-5.7 pistol extensively at the event, imported from Turkey by SDS Arms, and it was a solid workhorse of a full sized handgun. I put at least 150 rounds through the various PX-5.7’s at the SDS Arms shooting station.

On Day Two of the 5.7 Fest, I watched as two shooters ran a single PX-5.7 through 500 rounds of American Eagle, and Fiocchi ammunition, emptying a fully loaded magazine,  immediately replacing it and then firing off the new mag.

In just under seven minutes, the pair blasted through 500 rounds of different 5.7 brands with zero failures to feed or eject. They also drilled the hell out of a silhouette target’s center mass area at ten yards. Yes, the pistol was super hot by the end of the display. But it still worked fine!

I have the newer Optics Ready version of the PX-5.7 on hand and will soon post a full review here at GunsAmerica. 

Self Defense With the 5.7?

Day Two of the Fest also saw us shooting into clear ballistic gel. For the self-defense 5.7 rounds, 12- to 14-inches of penetration was about the average.

Then, we shot the same rounds through a quarter-inch sheet of plexiglass covering a gel-shaped  torso. All the rounds punched through the plexiglass and then drove approximately six inches to seven inches into torso.  

I didn’t have the chance to retrieve bullets and measure for expansion and weight retention. But the penetration alone suggested a much better self-defense option than the “dink” round I had initially dismissed a couple of years previous.

Still, the smaller diameter of the 5.7 bullet means less damage and trauma than a larger diameter 9mm or 45 AUTO. True, your basic 5.7 pistol will likely have 20+1 rounds of self-d firepower, so multiple shots could make us for the smaller wound channels. Of course, that assumes one will have time to make multiple shots.

Conclusions From the 5.7 Fest

I will do my own testing with 5.7x28mm self defense rounds to determine what actually happens when these bullets impact bone and tough muscle, and how those factors affect expansion and weight retention and depth of penetration. 

READ MORE: Ruger LCR .32 H&R Magnum – A Gun & Caliber Whose Time Has Come

Given what I saw and experienced first-hand at the 5.7 Fest, it’s clear the 5.7 round is superior to both the .22 WMR and 380 AUTO for self-defense purposes, both of which are popular self-d choices. I don’t think the round is superior to the 9mm, but I am going to determine just how close the 5.7 might be to its parabellum big brother.

Still, I have to admit the “dink” turned out to be a harder hitter, was more accurate and a lot more fun to shoot than I knew before the 5.7 Fest. Now, the 5.7 round and its related firearms are definitely on my radar.   

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