I Look Back on Ignorance With Fondness

Oh, God. I hate it when I try to make a responsible effort to gather information, and I only succeed in learning that I don’t know anything.

I have been reading The ABCs of Handloading, in order to help me figure out how to get started making my own ammunition. I figured it would help me decide which of the free bullets I should order in the Hornady promotion.

I was leaning toward .45 bullets. Simple, right? I want good accuracy in a bullet similar in weight to typical self-defense loads. This ought to do it.

But hold the phone! I read a chapter about accuracy, in the above-mentioned book. And the accuracy guy talked about the difference changing the ammunition in a .45 can make. Now I’m wondering…do I want to fool with the free bullets, knowing that if I perfect an accurate handload, I’ll have to use expensive jacketed Hornady bullets from now on, OR shoot all the Hornadys and then start from scratch with cheaper cast bullets? I plan to use cast bullets in the future, because they’re way cheaper than jacketed. And the Hornady .45 rounds are not optimal for self-defense, according to web lore. Supposedly they don’t expand very fast. So saving them for that purpose would be pointless. Besides, who needs 1400 bullets in one pistol caliber for self-defense?

Maybe the best move is to get .308 rounds instead, for the K31. But that’s a can of worms in and of itself.

I considered getting .38 bullets, figuring they could be used for the .357 or the .38 Super. But it turns out the .38 Super requires a bizarre bullet, the diameter of which which differs from the .357 by a thousandth. Is that an important difference? Damned if I know. Do I have to slug the barrel? Overload…overload…brain melting…

I’m also bummed out because the accuracy-chapter guy posed with a couple of .45 targets he was relatively happy with, and they were not all that much better than the results I get now, with cheap ammunition. The difference was very significant, but he was still putting rounds as much as maybe eight inches apart. He was shooting at 75 feet, and on my last outing, I got similar results at 50. And unlike him, I don’t use a rest. So I’m wondering…is it worth it to try to come up with accurate 1911 loads? I should not expect to outshoot this guy; it’s what he does for a living. So presumably, if I have perfect ammunition, if I continue shooting without a rest, I will still be all over the place at 50 feet.

I always thought pistols were more accurate than that. Now I don’t know what to think. Why…it’s almost as if all those cowboy movies contained factual inaccuracies.

I’m starting to think my Glock .40, which gave me such nice results in the past, is a much better gun than I realized.

Of course, if I make handloads for that, I’ll have to get a new barrel with a support chamber. Arrgh.

Anyway, the book is wonderful. You can’t open it and follow the directions and make pistol ammunition, but there is a ton of good information in it.