Ask which gun companies make their own cartridges and Armscor's .22 TCM is usually on the short list that comes back. The round looks like a 9mm case with a rifle bullet stuck in the mouth, which is close to the truth: it is a .223 Remington case cut down to pistol length so it will run through a 1911. Armscor designed it and has been its only commercial ammunition maker ever since.
Nearly every gun chambered for it comes from Armscor under its Rock Island Armory name (the exceptions are a few AR-15 uppers from small shops), every factory round comes from Armscor's own line, and the cartridge comes in two lengths that not every gun will take.
Where it came from
Fred Craig was working as a consultant to Armscor at its Marikina plant in the Philippines, training machinists, and he had built a custom 1911 on an Armscor frame and slide around a small-bore wildcat he called the .22 Micro-Mag. Martin Tuason, Armscor's president, put it into production, and the name became .22 TCM, for Tuason Craig Micromagnum.
Craig wanted small-rifle ballistics from a handgun, which no existing pistol case could give him. According to American Rifleman's history of the design, he also looked at the .30 Carbine before settling on the .223 Remington as the parent. He shortened the case from 1.760in to about 1.025in, necked it to .224, and reworked the base so the 1911 would treat it like a 9mm.
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Dimension
.22 TCM
9mm Luger
.223 Remington
Case length
about 1.025in
0.754in
1.760in
Maximum overall length
1.265in
1.169in
2.260in
Rim diameter
0.378in
0.394in
0.378in
Rim thickness
0.050in
0.050in
0.045in
Bullet diameter
0.224in
0.355in
0.224in
The rim keeps the .223's diameter but takes the 9mm's thickness, and the extractor groove was reshaped to resemble the 9mm's, so a 1911 extractor and breech face built for 9mm will run it. Loaded, it is as long as a .38 Super, not a 9mm. Factory loads run around 40,000 psi by American Rifleman's account, above 9mm +P's 38,500 psi. The cartridge has never been standardized by SAAMI, so there is no official maximum pressure.
The two lengths: TCM and TCM 9R
At roughly 3mm longer than a 9mm, the original round fits the double-stack 1911 magazine Armscor uses, a Para-Ordnance P18 pattern built for 9mm and .38 Super, and will not go into a Glock or CZ magazine.
Armscor's fix was the .22 TCM 9R, announced at the start of 2015 alongside Rock Island slide assemblies that convert a Glock 17 or 19 to the round. It uses the same case with a shorter 39-grain bullet in place of the 40-grain one, which brings the loaded round down to 9mm length.
.22 TCM
.22 TCM 9R
Bullet
40-grain JHP
39-grain JHP
Overall length
.38 Super length
9mm Luger length
Magazines
1911 double-stack, M22 rifle
Glock, CZ-pattern MAPP, 9mm 1911 combos
Works in the other gun
Too long for most 9R magazines
Yes, in a TCM gun
A 9R round will chamber and fire in a gun built for the long one, but the long round may not fit a 9R gun's magazine. Check which of the two a gun was built for before buying ammunition; the box label is where the difference shows.
The 9R also answers the commonest complaint about the original. Under a January 2025 X thread by @troy_and_an_AK calling .22 TCM "the PERFECT PCC caliber," the most-liked objection (from @YoungMOOBY) was that it failed because its creator did not make it fit 9mm magazines. The 9R had been introduced to fix exactly that, a decade earlier. Going the other way, @Cheesey_Beans posted in December 2025 that their gun ran the 9R ammunition "flawlessly" and the regular TCM "not so much."
What it does from a pistol and from a rifle
Armscor rates the round at more than 2,000 fps from a 5in 1911 barrel and more than 1,850 fps from the 4.2in mid-size guns. American Rifleman chronographed it at an average of 2,066 fps from a 5in pistol, a standard deviation of 18, for 379 ft-lb at the muzzle. From the M22 bolt rifle's barrel the same load averaged 2,752 fps and 673 ft-lb.
Gun
Barrel
Velocity
Energy
TCM 1911 pistol
5in
2,066 fps
379 ft-lb
M22 TCM rifle
22in
2,752 fps
673 ft-lb
From the pistol that energy is in 9mm territory. @MAC_Arms made the same comparison when he posted a chronograph reading of 1,971 fps and 345 ft-lb and asked whether the TCM is anything more than a novelty. The difference is in how it gets there, with a 40-grain bullet at nearly twice a 9mm's speed, much less recoil, and far more noise and flash. Armscor's own copy says the pistol "performs like a flamethrower," and American Rifleman's tester recommended doubled hearing protection.
American Rifleman's pistol groups averaged 2.77in at 25 yards and the rifle's 1.95in at 100 yards, which the author judged enough for groundhogs and coyotes out to about 200 yards and marginal on hogs.
The guns built for it
Armscor's product pages list three dedicated .22 TCM pistols, plus current and discontinued 9mm combo pistols that take a 9R barrel. These are Armscor's specifications.
Armscor SKU
Model
Chambering
Barrel
Capacity
Weight
56879
TCM Standard FS
.22 TCM
5in
17
2.5lb
56877
TCM Premium FS
.22 TCM
5in
17
2.5lb
56878
TCM Standard MS
.22 TCM
4.2in
17
2.5lb
56635
TAC Ultra FS Combo
9mm / .22 TCM 9R
5in
10
2.62lb
56632
TAC Ultra MS HC Combo
9mm / .22 TCM 9R
4.2in
17
2.5lb
56636
Rock Ultra FS Combo
9mm / .22 TCM 9R
5in
10
2.5lb
56634
Rock Ultra CCO Combo
9mm / .22 TCM 9R
4.2in
8
1.85lb
56633
Rock Ultra CS-L Combo
9mm / .22 TCM 9R
3.6in
8
1.9lb
The dedicated TCM guns are steel double-stack 1911s. The combos are 9mm 1911s with a second barrel for the 9R, and the two lightest are the aluminum-frame Rock Ultra CCO and CS-L. Armscor describes the TAC Ultra accessory barrels as drop-in and the Rock Ultra FS barrel as fitted by a gunsmith, so some combos need more than a quick swap. When American Rifleman shot a TCM TAC Ultra combo with its 9mm barrel, the 9mm hits landed 2in to 4in above the TCM group at 25 yards, so the sights need attention after a change.
The MAPP, a polymer CZ-pattern pistol, was also sold with a 9R barrel and fed from 9mm-length magazines; that version is discontinued.
The M22 rifle and the shared magazine
The M22 TCM bolt-action rifle ships with a 5-round magazine and also takes the 17-round magazines from the TCM 1911s, so a pistol and rifle pair can share magazines and ammunition. Armscor built it in two stocks: the BA with a checkered Philippine hardwood Monte Carlo stock and a 22in barrel, and the Tactical with an adjustable polymer stock, for which Armscor's specification table gives a 20in barrel and 7lb.
Armscor's website files both rifles under discontinued firearms, although the company's X account has announced the rifle's return. American Rifleman's test rifle fed reliably but extracted poorly: with the 5-round magazine, ejection failed often enough that the magazine had to come out after each shot, and the 17-round pistol magazine improved it without fixing it.
What the catalog had wrong
The listings for these guns repeated several claims that Armscor's own specifications contradict, and they have been corrected. The cartridge itself was misdescribed in three listings as derived from the 9mm case, when it is a shortened, necked-down .223 Remington case that borrows the 9mm's rim thickness. Weights of 64.96oz and 68oz, about 4lb, sat on four pistols, where every steel TCM 1911 Armscor lists weighs 2.5lb. A full-size pistol was listed at 16in overall and two others at 10.1in and 10.5in, against Armscor's 8.75in. A dual-caliber combo was described as striker-fired, which no 1911 is. The "Velocity Pro" and "Compact Pro" model names were invented, and two 1911s were filed as plain semi-autos while their siblings read single action.
The MAPP listings named the long .22 TCM when the gun was built for the 9R. The catalog also held seven pairs of listings that are the same gun under two barcode formats, which leaves 23 distinct guns behind 30 records.
Who it suits
The .22 TCM suits someone who already likes a 1911 and wants a loud, light-recoiling range gun with 17 rounds in the grip. The combos suit a buyer who wants a 9mm and is curious about the other barrel. It is a poor choice for anyone who needs ammunition from a local shop, because there is one maker and two separate rounds to find: @William12578543 replied to Armscor that he had bought a MAPP in 9R and could not find ammunition or bullets to reload.
Handloaders have more room, since Hornady, Redding and Lee make dies and Armscor sells components, though published load data is thin for a cartridge with no SAAMI standard. The closest competitor is the 5.7x28mm, another small, fast, bottlenecked round in a handgun, covered in the first link below.
Nick Sawinyh - Nick Sawinyh is a father, husband, hobby farmer, and gun enthusiast from Kentucky. He founded GunsNation and writes most of what appears on this blog.
