S&W 15-22 issue

Hope this is a good forum to post this problem in. My buddy I took shooting his first time a few years ago picked up the S&W MP15-22 about a month ago. It lasted less than a hundred rounds and was on its way back to S&W broken. Just got it back, and another hundred rounds, and its broken again. He says the extracting pin and spring are toast and that's what happened last time. Here's a pic of what just happened.

http://public.bay.livefilestore.com/.../1522shell.jpg



Ouch. He was shooting Winchester hollow points.

He's taking it back to the gun shop tomorrow and replacing it. Should he try another one, thinking this one is purely a lemon, or spend some more $$ and get the Colt Umarex M4 in 22.

A quick update: He took the returned from S&W rifle back to the shop he got it from, and came home with a new one.

That completely new rifle... failed in exactly the same way after less than 100 rounds.

He took it back again to the gun shop, they gave him a third. So far, it's behaving, but he's shooting different ammo now.

It's one thing to get failure to feeds or double feeds when the particular gun doesn't like a certain ammo. Then you can try different ammo in it until you get what it likes.

But for a certain make of gun to catastrophically fail consistently with factory ammunition is just wrong.

Sounds like he may have got a bad rifle-a few other members and myself have these rifles and have had no problems.

That's bad rifleS though... he's on his third one. The first two blew in exactly the same way.

2 different rifles have the exact problem with the same ammo....change in ammo fixed the problem with 3rd rifle= DON"T use that particualr ammo with it. What kind of Winchester ammo was it?

He said it's the hollowpoint ammo from Winchester. But maybe its just the engineer in me, but I have a hard time believing that you "try out different factory ammo" by destroying the rifle. Especially since we're talking 22lr and not something like 45/70.

I'm having a difficult time seeing what exactly happened from the picture. Can you explain what happened?