No Mas!

Today and yesterday I worked on reloading .45 ACP target rounds. At them moment, I have about 250 ready to shoot. It’s a nice feeling.

I had a very weird issue with my seating die yesterday. I was having problems seating Wolf primers in old brass with primer pockets that had not been cleaned. Wolf large pistol primers are supposedly a little bigger than other brands. If this is true, it explains why I’m having seating issues.

I’m using Wolf primers because I have a lot of them. Several thousand. I bought them during the Obama panic. I was lucky to get them. My understanding is that Wolf primers are as good as anyone’s, but they have a reputation for being hard to seat and hard to fire. Some primers require a stronger firing pin whack than others. I had some problems with them the other day while shooting 10mm rounds from a Glock, so I decided to quit using them in defensive ammunition. I don’t want to wonder whether a round will go off when a burglar or a particularly surly squirrel is the target.

I’m using Wolf primers for target rounds because I don’t really care whether every single one goes off. I’m shooting them from a 1911, and it seems to like them just fine. No problems. Is this because the 1911 strikes harder? Were my earlier problems caused not by the primer but by pocket lint slowing the movement of my Glock’s firing pin? I can’t say.

Someone has suggested that tight primers sit high in their pockets and that this can cause them to be hard to fire. If that’s the case, maybe the Glock problems were caused by the tight new brass I was using. Maybe the primers were a couple of thousandths away from being completely seated. I can only guess.

I have shot a lot of Wolf ammunition, and it has always been perfectly reliable, even in Glocks. I don’t have much experience with Wolf primers in 10mm Glocks, though.

I’m thinking about my next project. I want to make defensive ammo for the .45. When I got my press, Hornady gave me 1000 free .45 ACP 230-grain XTP hollowpoints. These are not the greatest hollowpoints on earth. It sort of looks like Winchester Rangers hold that title. But they were free, and I fully intend to use them. I will probably use them up on targets, but still, I want to give them respectable defensive velocities.

I looked loads up, and I found that “fast” for this caliber is 900 fps. Whew. That’s even faster than a BB gun. Impressive.

I spent a long time researching loads. I found some info on using a powder called Power Pistol. You can get over 900 fps with it. I looked up other powders and recipes. Toward the end, I really thought I needed Power Pistol. Then I saw a load for…wait for it…Accurate No.7. I can’t seem to get away from this powder. It seems to do everything. I already use it for .38 Super and 10mm.

I have a lot of No.7, so I’ll give it a try. I still need new brass, however, and I think I’ll still get some Power Pistol. You can’t learn much if you don’t try new things.

I read some new information about using handloads for self-defense. As I have noted earlier, there is a big prejudice against using homegrown ammunition. I have taken a dim view of some of the claims, and I don’t feel bad about that, because experience has shown me that gun experts are often fakes or partial fakes, and they often promote nonsense. Yesterday, however, I saw something that seemed to make sense at first. Massad Ayoob, who is not a total idiot, cited a case in which ammunition caused a defendant some trouble. I hadn’t realized such cases existed.

Up front I’ll say that Ayoob is a non-lawyer and therefore limited in the scope of what he can say with any authority. He gives lawyers advice, and he acts as an expert witness, but he sometimes says things that reveal that he doesn’t fully understand how the legal system works. A lot of people are so awed by him that they think everything he says comes from the throne of heaven, but laymen are not lawyers. Ayoob can’t read, or read about, a case and fully understand it. That’s not a dig. It’s reality.

He doesn’t hesitate to write as though he were an attorney, and that is unfortunate, because other laymen can’t perceive his errors and are likely to believe him.

He wrote a long post on a forum, and one of the lawyers who helped him was a civil, not criminal, attorney. This guy was rude to me a number of years back, and I looked him up. It appeared that he was an insurance attorney. Here’s what my dad always said about insurance lawyers: insurers don’t hire the best or the worst. They hire the mediocre. It’s the best balance between cost and results. Look at it this way: if insurance companies had paid the rates my dad and I charged, it wouldn’t have been all that much better than settling. They need okay attorneys with low rates.

I was unfavorably impressed by the things this man wrote, and apart from that, if it’s true that he’s a civil attorney, Ayoob should have consulted with someone else.

My grandfather got rich taking on insurance attorneys, and he is far from alone. What can I say?

The other attorney doesn’t use his real name, and I have not been able to find any reference to his qualifications. For all I know, he could be handling uncontested divorces out of a trailer for $75 each. If he had impressive credentials, I think he would let everyone know. He may not even be a lawyer.

It’s funny, but for all the popularity of gun forums, you rarely see real, serious, qualified criminal attorneys speak up. In fact, I can’t recall seeing it happen even once.

What we have are a part-time New Hampshire cop from a sleepy town, a guy who appears to be the sort of person who shows up when you sue Safeway because you slipped on a banana peel, and a mystery man who does not hold himself out to be a prosecutor, defense attorney, or judge. Ayoob, in spite of his lack of experience with serious crime, is a huge figure in the 2A community. Why isn’t he choosing better collaborators?

I like his work, and it would be neat to take one of his courses (assuming he hasn’t read this), but like Harry Callahan said, a man’s got to know his limitations.

People also worshiped Jeff Cooper, but he seriously believed FMJ was the way to go, and that’s about like putting bias ply tires on a Ferrari.

I’ll describe a case Ayoob mentions. A man named Bias was married to a woman who was mentally ill. One day she was shot in the back of the head in their home. Descriptions of the case vary materially, which is a nice way of saying some are totally wrong. Bias claimed she threatened to kill herself with the gun and that she fired while he tried to disarm her. The prosecution claimed the gunshot residue evidence showed that Bias shot her from a distance. Apparently, there was no GSR on her, and if she had been holding the gun, and if she had been using typical ammunition, there should have been some.

Gunshot residue is the dirty stuff that comes out of a gun barrel along with the bullet. It flies a few feet and no more. If you shoot someone, the cops will test your skin and clothing for GSR.

Bias did not know what kind of charge was in the cartridge that killed his wife. He claimed only light loads were in the gun, but he didn’t know which of several he had made had killed her. The prosecutors supposedly used a similar, but heavier, factory load to show that a lot of GSR would have hit Mrs. Bias had she shot herself. The defense team determined that the types of loads Bias made had to be fired from a much shorter distance in order to leave GSR on the body.

Here, I must digress. To find out about the GSR, the defense must have hired “experts.” My evidence teacher, the irrepressible Mickey Graham, who awed students because he had supposedly represented the Beatles (actually just John Lennon, I think), used the following acronym to describe legal experts: W.H.O.R.E. “Witness Having Other Reasonable Explanation.”

The fact that a defense expert said something means nearly nothing. I would hope a prosecution expert would be marginally more reliable due to ethical and other reasons, but I wouldn’t put money on it.

Ayoob claims it would have been easier to get convincing information regarding GSR had Bias used factory loads. The defense could have bought ammunition and had it tested.

There are some big problems with using this case as proof that handloads cause people problems in court.

First, it’s a very, very rare case. That, all by itself, is the biggest issue. It’s huge. Ayoob has only managed to produce a few cases in which, in his mind, handloads caused problems, and there are thousands of defensive shootings in the United States every year. If cases where handloads cause issues are that rare, it must be true that handloaded ammunition causes very few legal problems for shooters.

Have you ever, in your entire life, seen a news story about someone who was in trouble for using handloads? If these cases existed, the press would bury us in them, the same way they scream that 1,000 rounds of .223 are an ARSENAL.

Second, it really does look like Mr. Bias murdered his wife. How do you shoot yourself behind the ear without getting a lot of residue on your hand, your arm, and your body? The defense said the residue wouldn’t be heavy if the shot were fired from over 24″, but her hand and arm were certainly closer than that, and how can a woman who is struggling hold a gun’s MUZZLE (not butt) over 24″ away from her head shoot herself behind the ear?

Under the defense’s own theory, the gun’s muzzle had to be at least 24″ away. How?

Side note: who commits suicide by holding a gun two feet away? Has that ever happened in the history of the world?

I just checked, and it is conceivable that if I really tried, I could aim a gun at the back of my head while holding the gun so its muzzle was a little over 20″ away, and that’s the best I can do. Maybe Mrs. Bias was a basketball player. Ayoob says the autopsy determined that she had a reach of 30″. Clearly, that was not the maximum distance from the muzzle to her head. Try and hold a gun with the muzzle 30″ from your ear. Good luck.

When people work on a case together, they tend to buy into their arguments. They start to believe in the parties they work with. It’s normal. Many just say they believe, but that’s a discussion for another time.

When gun enthusiasts talk about people who got “railroaded” by the system, they rarely give serious consideration to the possibility that the prosecutors are right. I don’t know much about the case (largely the fault of people who do a poor job of presenting it on the web), but the little I do know doesn’t make Mr. Bias sound innocent.

I saw an article in which an lawyer claimed it would be hard to get personal reloading records admitted because they were hearsay. That’s not at all certain, but actual ammunition is not hearsay, so excluding it would not be easy, and a judge who excluded it would surely fear reversal on appeal. Excluding admissible exculpatory evidence is something judges know will lead to professional embarrassment.

Third, Bias was acquitted of murder. He eventually got convicted of manslaughter. I will propose that if you have a bad marriage, and your wife gets shot in the head, and if your story is that she held the gun two feet from her head and then shot herself behind the ear, you are likely to be arrested no matter where you got the ammunition. If your defense theory is that a woman of normal height held a gun’s muzzle over two feet from her head and shot herself behind the ear, and if there is no GSR on her at all, you can expect skepticism, to put it mildly.

It looks like there was good, solid evidence against Bias, and he used handloads, and he still got acquitted once and got a hung jury the second time. I don’t know whether better GSR evidence would have helped him in the final trial or not, but he had a lot of baggage without it.

Fourth: factory ammunition probably would have made Bias look worse, because the GSR evidence against Bias would have looked much more solid. “Here are the test results, and we are certain he used this ammunition.” It appears that it could not have helped him, because the defense’s own theory said there would have been GSR at under 24″, and it is implausible that a woman could shoot herself from a distance of more than 20″.

Fifth, Ayoob has a dog in this fight. He promotes the theory that handloads will get you thrown in to prison, and when he writes about it, his language (“lightweight net ninjas”) shows he is emotionally invested in proving himself right. We all know how that works on the Internet. In a post in which he presents his cases, he makes it clear that he researched them AFTER people disagreed with him, and that suggests he didn’t really have the ability to back his arguments up before he was challenged. People called him out, and he did research to prove them wrong, and he came up with very little. What does that tell you?

Should you really call people “lightweights” when you never did police work in a city or served in combat and you have no law degree? He’s clearly a gun expert and a serious student of self-defense, but he’s not Jim Cirillo, Chris Kyle, Audie Murphy, or Vincent Bugliosi.

One of his cases is about someone who was criticized by a prosecutor for using handloads. Ayoob admits he was acquitted, and he presents no evidence that handloads were relevant to his being charged or tried.

Of another case, he writes, “The evidence was messed up in a number of ways in this case, and I do not believe the reloaded ammo (which the prosecution did not recognize to be such until during the trial) was the key problem, but it definitely was part of a problem in reconstructing the case. We were able to do that without GSR evidence, and Mr. Barnes won an acquittal.”

So in a very unusual case, factory ammunition would have been helpful, but it turned out to be unnecessary.

Of a third case, he says a cop shot an assailant at close range and used GSR evidence to show that he was telling the truth when he said the assailant was about 18″ away. I have to ask: what type of handload would have left so little GSR at 18″ that the distance would have seemed so great it made self-defense seem implausible? I’m not a forensic scientist but it sounds like there had to be a lot of GSR no matter what.

Three cases, of which only one has any impact at all. That’s it. To listen to the people who swallow the handload=conviction theory, you would think prisons were full of innocent people done in by Hornady and Dillon.

I don’t know why I’m writing this in the context of this post. I’m not planning to make hundreds of .45 ACP rounds for self-defense. I just don’t like the way people swallow legends and rumors.

Looking this stuff over, here is what I could conclude: there is a tiny, tiny chance that using handloaded ammunition will cause you to be arrested when you would otherwise be left alone, and there is an even tinier chance that it will result in you being tried, and the chance that you will go on to be convicted is tinier still. There is a pretty substantial chance that using lame ammunition will get you killed. It has happened to many, many people. Not just three.

I have zero interest in armed confrontations or being a white knight. The older I get, the more I understand how important it is to AVOID defending yourself with deadly force. I really don’t see myself using a gun to shoot anyone, but if I did, I would want every round to count. I would want the first shot to incapacitate, and I would feel horror every time a round landed without stopping my attacker. In real life self-defense situations, every failure to incapacitate raises your chance of being hurt, and the increase is great, not small.

Imagine a guy is charging you with an axe, which is something that actually happens. You manage to get your gun out and shoot him in the chest…and he keeps coming. Imagine how that feels. What if he has a gun? Imagine knowing your failure is likely to bring bullets your way in the next quarter of a second. This is why good ammunition is important, along with shot placement.

It sounds like there is a microscopic chance that you could avoid a legal problem by using factory ammunition, so why not get the most effective type you can? Because the legend choir will tell you a prosecutor will get you convicted for not using bad, run-of-the-mill cartridges. With the legend choir, you can’t win by using handloads, and you can’t win by using the best factory ammunition you can buy. You have to use whatever junk the cops use. That’s their standard line. Of course, the poor performance of LEO-endorsed ammunition is the whole reason the 10mm was originally adopted by the FBI. They chose it after the Miami shootout, in which FBI calibers failed to incapacitate quickly enough. The fact that a law enforcement agent uses something doesn’t mean it works.

Anyway, I am going to order some brass and get this stuff put together. After that, I may never have to buy .45 ACP again, unless I want something that works better than Hornady XTP’s, which are mediocre.