Gun Nerds and Their Dubious Doctrines

I think grief is different for different people. For some, it seems to cling like tar. For me, it comes and goes. I’ll feel very bad for a time, and then later in the day, the pain will lift, and I’ll be more or less okay until the next wave. I feel good at the moment, so I want to write about trivial things instead of death.

I am still working on getting my firearms hobby back on its feet. It may seem strange that I would be interested in this right now, given that my friend just passed away after being shot, and especially considering that he had probably relayed gun recommendations from me to the young man who apparently did the shooting. In my heart, there is not much of a connection. If I gave someone driving lessons, and then they had a bad accident, I wouldn’t condemn myself for helping them learn to drive.

Owning firearms isn’t a dirty vice. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Firearms are one reason you’re free right now. I didn’t recommend a prostitute or a drug to anyone. I tried to help someone to be responsible and capable, for his sake and the sake of his future family. I’m not going to let an accident poison something I really enjoy.

I had no idea what was happening in Miami. I don’t even know the name of the young man who owned the gun. I didn’t know he had bought it. I don’t know the make or caliber. I just knew some unknown person wanted some tips regarding something he might or might not do.

I bought myself a new old stock RCBS 505 reloading scale made by the Ohaus company. I’m hoping it’s American and not Chinese. The scale is expected to arrive tomorrow. I feel like I’m stuck in place until then, because my only other scales are an old Lyman 1500 XP which drifts and a new Chinese scale which only resolves to the nearest 0.2 grains. I have worked around the new scale’s resolution by weighing two charges at once, but that’s not a terribly reliable solution.

I can make 10mm defensive ammunition right now, because my powder measure is set up perfectly for it. I used the Chinese scale to make some rounds, and the velocities were right on the money. I don’t really need to know what the charge weight is, because the only purpose of the charge weight is to get the right velocity. If the measure is giving me the right velocity, I don’t care what the charge weight is.

I can make 10mm today, but I can’t do anything else. There is no good reason to fool with different ammunition and different charge weights when a scale that actually works will be here tomorrow.

One thing I don’t have: a real set of check weights. These are precision weights used to calibrate scales.

I have a couple of weights. Each scale came with one. The Lyman came with a 20-gram weight, and the Chinese scale came with a 50-gram weight. I would guess that the Lyman weight is pretty accurate. Don’t ask me about the Chinese one. On the Chinese scale, it weighs exactly what it should, in grains, but that’s after making allowances for the scale’s large resolution. It could be a tenth off.

I suppose I should get some better weights. I would really like to be within half a tenth of a grain when I use the RCBS beam scale. I don’t want to think my powder measure is averaging 10.0 grains when it’s really averaging 10.2.

Metrology, or the science of measurement, is a very humbling field. When you start trying to measure things well, you find out just how inaccurate a lot of measures really are. Most of the time, it means nothing at all, but sometimes it matters. A grain is less than 1/15th of a gram, and a gram is less than 1/28 of an ounce, so you can see why measuring twentieths of grains takes some care.

Why did I pick a twentieth of a grain as my tolerance? Charges are measured to the nearest tenth of a grain, and to measure charges that size without completely blowing it, you really need to be within a twentieth.

When I was teaching physics to premed students, I taught a little bit of metrology. My course materials said one should always try to estimate to one-half of the smallest measuring division an instrument provides. This is often good advice. If you have a yardstick that measures down to sixteenths, you can pretty well tell whether 1-1/32″ or 1-2/32″ is closest to your actual measurement just by looking. This should be possible on a beam scale, because it has rulers on it. The beams are just rulers. When you weigh things, you’re really measuring lengths. You slide the weights up and down, and you see which graduations they settle on.

There are a lot of check weights out there, but when you calibrate reloading scales, you need weights labeled in grains. They are a lot less common. I’m going to give up looking for a deal and get a new set of weights made for reloading.

One problem with old weights is that they may not weigh what they used to. Metrology is a real pain.

I have never made .45 ACP defensive ammo, and I have never bought .45 brass. I probably have 1000 cases I picked up at gun ranges. One range officer was very impressed with my shooting, and he said he would save brass for me. Then I didn’t get around to shooting for a long time. I hope he didn’t sit around waiting beside a big bag of brass.

When I bought my press, Hornady gave me a huge number of .45 ACP XTP 230-grain hollowpoints. I have barely loaded any of them. They’re very good for defensive ammunition. Maybe I’ll buy some new casings.

I have no intention of ever using my .45 ACP 1911 for defensive purposes, but it seems wrong to own it and not have the ammunition for the purpose for which the gun was made.

I went online and asked for advice on making defensive ammunition. I was soon immersed in “proven” nonsense and mythology.

Here’s a really annoying myth: “If you use homemade ammunition to defend yourself, the cops and prosecution will say you’re a nut who is obsessed with making super killer ammunition, and you will be charged and convicted.”

Here are some threshold questions. How will the cops know you made the ammunition, and why would they care? They’ll be very interested in other matters. Was it legal for you to be where you were? Were you reasonably afraid of great harm? If you’re in a mandatory-chicken-out jurisdiction, did you try to run away? If they walk in your house and see you sitting in a recliner next to the body of a stranger and a shotgun, they are not going to confiscate your ammunition and send it to MIT for analysis. Unless they think you shouldn’t have shot the person, they won’t care if you used a howitzer. You could defend yourself legally with a flamethrower if it was all you had.

Manufacturers use a lot of the same brass and bullets as reloaders. I don’t see how a cop could tell the difference between your Starline-and-Speer cartridge and one from Underwood. You’re not going to tell them, and you don’t have to. They won’t assume it. They won’t get a warrant so they can have David Caruso’s team examine your reloading press with the Hubble telescope.

Have you ever heard of a citizen being tried because he used legal ammunition he made himself or, for that matter, ANY legal ammunition? No, and neither has anyone else. Try and find a case.

In my entire life, I have heard of one case in which ammunition made a defendant look worse to gunphobes. That person was Colin Ferguson, a deranged black racist who shot up a subway car full of non-black people. He used Black Talon ammunition, and the press had a field day with it. “Killer bullets!” “What other kind is there?”, one would ask.

When you buy defensive rounds, you’re supposed to get the most lethal type for your caliber, to make that caliber work as well as it can. If you’re going to buy weak ammunition on purpose, why not just drop down to a .22 and save your ears and your wrist? It makes no sense to buy a large bore pistol and use ammunition that does small bore damage.

Two things about Ferguson: his cartridges came from a factory, and…he shot a bunch of unarmed strangers on a train! Let’s assume he used plain old UMC FMJ. Would he have been acquitted?

Winchester quit selling Black Talon bullets to the general public. Because the bullet-haters had a point? No, because Winchester was afraid of lawyers and bad publicity.

It was pretty silly. You can buy things that work better than Black Talons. They weren’t particularly damaging, as the medical examiner in the Ferguson admitted. Winchester quit making them, and they started selling what was essentially the same thing with improvements to enhance lethality.

I read some other nonsense from a gun writer. He said you should use factory ammunition because defensive ammunition goes through all sorts of special testing, including being measured with lasers, presumably worn by sharks. He said it made the ammunition more reliable, and that it justified the exorbitant cost of defensive ammunition. He said it was treated very differently from plain old FMJ, which, hello, IS defensive ammunition. There are places where you’re not allowed to use anything else, and the military is forced to use it.

I’m not sure what planet actually has special standards like that, but I don’t think it’s Earth. On this planet, manufacturers perform quality control checks on all their ammunition. You can go to Youtube and see workers for Sellier & Bellot doing checks on FMJ. I don’t think manufacturers are okay with their target ammo blowing people’s guns up. Except maybe for PMC, but then they’re special. I would never buy their stuff again.

As to reliability, do you seriously think computerized machines that pump out ammunition at high speed can beat a human being who examines every cartridge? If that’s true, why do precision shooters, whose livelihoods depend on good ammunition, make their own?

They didn’t read the article.

It seems to me that if your ammo choice has any bearing on your case’s disposition, which was not true in Colin Ferguson’s case, it would have to mean you were already going under.

There is a case which is often cited to show that “scary looking” guns (meaning military-style semiautos) are more likely to get people prosecuted. I wonder about that. The case involved a submachine gun, which is definitely not a Bass Pro semiautomatic, and the shooter was an H&K rep named Gary Fadden. He didn’t shoot someone in his living room or off the top of his wife. He shot someone during a road rage incident.

He was in his truck with his girlfriend. The story, as traditionally related, says a biker darted in front of the truck and forced him to brake, and that soon after, a couple of bikers in a truck chased him while waving a pistol.

And I have a bridge to sell you.

A motorcycle cuts in front of you, you hit the brakes and go on with life, and then the rider’s pals try to kill you for no apparent reason. Sure. I’m positive there were no gestures and no expletives. There was no use of the horn, and there was no tailgating or brake-checking. Because bikers always show up with pistols to avenge their friends after their friends have done something moderately rude without provoking a response. This has probably happened over a hundred times this month in my neighborhood alone.

Fadden says he ran from the bikers and found himself in a position where he had to face them, so he got out and confronted them with a submachine gun, and he was not able to find the selector switch in time to use it. Okay.

He had to analyze and shoot this gun for a living, mind you.

His assailants advanced, and Fadden fired 9 warning shots in one burst. One kept advancing. Fadden, who was still unable to find the selector switch (!) fired 6 rounds in a single burst before he could stop himself. Again…okay. You can go on Youtube and see people firing one-round bursts from submachine guns with no problem, but maybe that was not possible with this model.

The assailant died.

Fadden was charged with first-degree murder, which is, admittedly, ridiculous even taking the facts in the worst possible light. You’re allowed to defend yourself even after you’ve given someone the finger in traffic. He was eventually acquitted.

The common line is that he was only charged because he used a submachine gun, and while I doubt that’s true, I’m sure the gun didn’t help him.

Here’s the thing. Cops and prosecutors don’t like road ragers, even when they can prove the other guy started it. And shooting one person six times, which was reasonable under the circumstances, doesn’t play well in Washington, DC, suburbs, where the shooting occurred. Finally, the “victim” was shot in the back, and that gave the prosecutor something to work with.

An article you can find online says Fadden, who is now afraid to carry scary guns, now keeps an M1 carbine and a 10mm pistol in his vehicle. The first is a semiautomatic military rifle, and it looks like one. The second is the ultimate overkill semiautomatic, not including freak calibers and Desert Eagles.

Scary weapons.

The story is a very poor tool for scaring gun owners, because the shooter used a type of gun almost none of them have, he shot a person 6 times, he fired 15 rounds and claimed he could not find the selector switch on a gun he was paid to analyze, he shot the biker in the back, it happened during a road rage event, and it happened, basically, in Washington, DC. Fadden had a lot of problems that had nothing to do with the choice of firearm.

Paul Harrell, known gun guru, seems to buy into the scary gun and unusual ammunition theories, although he seems concerned about weird cutting-edge ammo, not handloads. He has suggested that it may not be wise to use ammunition with a brand name like “R.I.P.”, and that seems reasonable.

Harrell was charged with murder once. He feels he was railroaded. He used a deer rifle, not a scary gun.

He says he has no faith in prosecutors or medical examiners. He says the medical examiner’s material said the deceased was shot in the head, and that the prosecutor mentioned it in court, and he says they didn’t mention the other huge wound in the chest. That speaks poorly of the medical examiner and prosecutor, but it’s not clear to me how it hurt Paul Harrell, since shooting someone in the chest looks just as bad as shooting him in the head. I would think he benefited from the omission, since shooting someone twice with a deer rifle looks worse than shooting him once.

I can certainly understand not trusting the medical examiner or the prosecutors, but anyway, he got in a lot of trouble using a non-scary gun with factory ammunition. I think his big problem was that he was on foot and the assailant was in a truck. Also, he shot a man a second time after inflicting a horrendous wound. It shouldn’t be that hard to convince a jury a person on foot can dodge a truck or that a person who has been shot once with a deer rifle by one of the nation’s top marksmen, with excellent shot placement, doesn’t need to be shot again. I think that was probably the center of the case. Just guessing.

Not saying he did anything wrong.

If scary guns were really a major problem, the hundreds or thousands of people who have successfully defended themselves with AR-15’s would generally have been arrested, and that is not what has happened. If the problem really existed, people would be afraid to buy what is supposedly America’s favorite rifle. You can’t hide thousands of AR-15 arrests. Where are they?

I am not giving you legal advice, and if legal advice is what you want, you should pay a lawyer before making decisions about guns and ammunition. I plan to use my own ammunition in whatever legal firearms I choose. Homemade ammunition is very good. No one seems to be able to dig up a scary-ammunition case, and the only scary-weapon case I know of might well have gone to court had the shooter used a Marlin 60.

When I make ammunition, I know the charges are right, and I chamber every round before putting it away, so I know it will work. I don’t have to ask myself how much I trust strangers who do semiskilled labor in factories. I also get to choose the velocity I like instead of picking the least-unsuitable factory choice.

If it’s bad to take a microscopic chance on getting in trouble for using a scary gun, what about the relatively large chance of dying because you used an inferior firearm in order to look less scary? Does that make any sense whatsoever? When you could have 31 rounds of 7.62x39mm plus a spare magazine, and you’re stuck with maybe a duck gun and a few rounds of buckshot, you have made a very poor decision.

I’m writing about stuff that will never matter, because I will never shoot anyone.

To get back to .45 ACP, I suppose I should get some new brass. My old brass will work fine, especially in a round that barely exceeds BB gun velocity and pressure, but who uses old brass in defensive ammo? It’s like putting used tires on the car your kids go to school in. Even if it makes no difference at all, it just sounds weird.

I may also get a belt holster for my .38 Super. It’s a barbecue gun, and you can’t have a barbecue gun without a leather holster.

Some day I may get wildly ambitious and make .357 ammo or even .204 Ruger, if it’s possible to reload that tiny round.

I’m glad I feel good this afternoon. I’ll ride it as long as I can.