The Evolution of Pistol Ammunition
It’s Sunday. Is that the proper day for confessing? I’m not Catholic. Anyway, I made biscuits again. They called out to me.
After getting my new PC set up, I moved on to a new project: 9mm reloading.
Why would anyone carry a 9mm when he has a 10mm? I started carrying it after my dad died. I had bought him a Glock 26 and a Crimson Trace sight. After he died, it was mine, and I liked carrying it because it had been his. I knew I was giving up stopping power, however. Another reason for carrying it was that I lacked faith in the Lasermax sight on the 10mm.
The other day it occurred to me that I had done nearly nothing to provide for top 9mm ammunition. I had a few magazines full of Cor-Bon hollowpoints, but that was it. I certainly did not have enough to allow practice with defensive rounds. Also, I knew that ammunition had improved a lot since I bought the pistol. If you go 5 years without reevaluating your ammunition, you may miss something important.
When I got my 10mm, 9mm and .40 S&W were not that great. Since then, things have improved to the point where .40 is so good, I almost wish I had my old Glock 22 back. Both calibers have gotten better. Maybe .40 is a better carry choice than 10mm now. Did I really type that? I’m cringing. But it might be true. Maybe the lower recoil and lighter ammunition make up for the lack of power.
A few years back, a site called Lucky Gunner opened. They sell ammunition. The owner actually sent me some ammunition for nothing. I shot it and wrote about it. I applaud this publicity tactic. I think Dan Wesson should send me some free 1911’s to review. Anyway, Lucky Gunner now has some very nice information for people evaluating ammunition. They have interactive charts featuring excellent graphic representations of gel tests. You can sort different rounds by things like expanded diameter and penetration.
I checked that out, and it sure looked like Remington 124-grain Golden Saber hollowpoints were the best choice. They opened up like crazy and penetrated a long way. Problem: it may be weeks or months before anyone can buy these things. I also considered Speer Gold Dots, which performed nearly as well.
Of course, I looked at other sources. The more I got into it, the more types of ammunition I came across. Coincidentally, during this time, I downloaded a book by the late Jim Cirillo, an NYPD officer who killed 11 men in gunfights. He is one of Massad Ayoob’s prominent sources. Ayoob, believe it or not, is not a gunfighter. He was a part-time cop in a sleepy town in New Hampshire. His work is wonderful, but he doesn’t write about shootings from experience. He could probably tell you a lot about writing parking tickets.
I’m not putting him down. He seems like a huge resource, and his house is probably a very bad place for a home invader to visit. I’m just saying he’s not an experienced gunfighter.
Cirillo was part of a stakeout squad that existed for a brief period, after which it was dismantled by liberal bureaucrats who thought too many criminals were being shot. The group was producing more than one outlaw casualty per month, and the liberals in power, being liberals, thought this was a bad thing. By extension, this means they thought it was preferable to continue to allow innocent people to be raped, shot, and killed.
The squad was critized by foggy-headed members of the public who called it an assassination team.
An assassination is a murder, and it is typically committed against an unarmed person. Cirillo’s team hid in businesses that were experiencing repeated robberies. Armed men entered and threatened employees, the police drew on them and told them to surrender, and the armed men did bright things like charging them, shooting at them, shooting employees, and grabbing employees to use as hostages.
Cirillo’s book may change the way you think about self-defense. It emphasized a number of factors most of us don’t think about enough.
One thing the book emphasized was the utter stupidity and depravity of criminals. In story after story, criminals who were confronted by armed cops in superior numbers with better positions and cover decided to shoot instead of surrendering. If you’re not a complete moron, you’re probably not going around robbing drugstores, so perhaps their behavior should not surprise anyone.
One of the dumbest things gun enthusiasts say is that if you rack a pump shotgun (a dubious defense weapon), any criminal who hears it will fill his pants and run away. It doesn’t work that way. Many criminals are very stupid, and many do their work on drugs that make them impervious to fear. Cirillo’s experiences show that criminals often ignore danger, and they also show that some are not discouraged at all by being shot multiple times.
Cirillo and his team were attacked on one occasion, and they fired multiple rounds into the face of their assailant. While they were getting it together after the event, the “body” on the floor asked them to help him up. Every single round had traveled around his head under the skin without penetrating the skull. On another occasion, he shot a man in the head, and the man wasn’t seriously injured. The round literally bounced off.
That brings me to another thing Cirillo thought was important: good ammunition in a powerful caliber.
Cirillo knew of a number of criminals who were still dangerous after taking fire, and understandably, it bothered him. He set out to create a new round that would penetrate well and do maximum damage. He wanted it to go through things like skulls and windshields.
He created a number of different rounds. He patented at least one. He tested his ammunition on car bodies in order to simulate skulls. He was always looking for something that would go through a hard object even when fired from an angle. He didn’t want his bullets bouncing off of criminal’s skulls.
You can understand why he did these things. He knew that if a well-placed shot didn’t do the job, the next shot might be from the criminal’s gun, and it might work very well.
His ammunition didn’t go anywhere, but there are companies that make similar things now, and their products are very interesting.
The round that has caught my attention is the 65-grain copper Lehigh Xtreme Defender. It’s very easy to describe. Imagine a Philips screwdriver bit made from copper. That’s not quite right, but it’s not far off.
The idea is that the flutes of the spinning round will stir up the wet stuff inside the body and create a huge permanent wound channel. Generally, handgun rounds can’t create such a channel because they’re slow. The Xtreme Defender can be pumped up to 1800 fps, which is rifle territory.
The maker says it will go through things like windshields and still do its job. Also, because it’s not a hollowpoint, it may be legal in insane jurisdictions where hollowpoints are banned. Another likely advantage: it’s less likely to fail. Hollowpoints can clog with fabric and fail to expand. That shouldn’t happen with a fluted round.
Does it work? If so, is it worth taking a chance on these instead of tried-and-true conventional ammunition?
It’s amazing that hollowpoints are banned anywhere. “We want you to be able to defend yourself. Just don’t hurt anyone.” Even in liberal states, the authorities know that in a defense situation, you always shoot to kill. They just want you to fail.
The simple truth is that you want the most effective bullet there is. That’s the only thing that makes sense. If they sold bullets that made people explode, they would be perfectly suited to self-defense. The purpose of a bullet is to hurt someone so badly they are instantly rendered unable to harm you. Any bullet that gets you closer to that goal should be legal.
I am not qualified to tell you whether the ammunition works, but Paul Harrell is. He’s a gun nut and former military instructor who does very informative Youtube videos. His strategy is to use what he calls “the meat target.” It’s an old leather jacket, some cloth, a layer of ribs, a watermelon, another layer of ribs, more cloth, more leather, and a bunch of fleece blankets to act as a backstop. He believes the watermelon simulates lung tissue, and you can figure out what the other parts do.
Harrell hates what he calls “hyper” ammunition, which means anything beyond a hollowpoint. He has various objections which you can hear about in his videos.
The Lehigh Xtreme Defense is unquestionably hyper ammunition. Nonetheless, he was very impressed by what it did to his meat target. It pretty much wiped out the watermelon.
His objection is that the ammunition is slightly less accurate than plain old hollowpoints. He fired it from 10 yards, and he got a 5-round group that appeared to be a little over an inch in diameter.
That’s not terrible accuracy. I would guess the group was around 50% bigger than his control group, fired with Remington ammunition. At 20 yards, you would expect around 2.5 inches. Can you shoot that well with match ammunition and a rest? It would be very good shooting. If, like most people, you can’t keep your rounds in a 10-inch circle at 7 yards, you will never notice any accuracy problems with Xtreme Defense.
I think you have to consider recoil if you’re going to consider accuracy. If the recoil from the light bullets is a lot lower than it would be with standard ammo, the advantage in ease of fast target reacquisition might override a small difference in inherent accuracy.
I feel like this is a battle between two philosophies: the Cirillo philosophy and the Harrell philosophy.
Harrell has never been in a gunfight. He shot a man in the head because he appeared to be trying to kill Harrell and his wife, but that’s not a gunfight. You don’t bring a truck to a gunfight.
When you talk to people about defense ammunition, the same people who talk about shotgun racking will invariably say, “If you don’t use standard ammunition, you will be charged with murder, and the fact that you used special ammunition will be used against you.”
Here is my response to that: you can’t be charged with murder…if you’re dead. Dead is what Cirillo and his partners almost were the time they shot an armed criminal in the face without killing him. If their ammunition had actually worked, after the first head shot, they and the civilians around them would have been safe.
If you’re mortally wounded because your prosecutor-pleasing ammunition failed to incapacitate your assailant, will you feel better because you know you minimized the risk of a murder trial?
You can object and say hollowpoints work fine. They really don’t. Not often enough. They do a fabulous job on ballistic gel, but ballistic gel doesn’t wear jeans, a jacket, a shirt, or a belt. When real criminals get shot with hollowpoints moving at handgun speeds, the bullets fail frequently.
There is no EDC-suitable conventional handgun round that “works fine.” Every pistol round is a weak substitute for a rifle or a 12-gauge. They’re all compromises.
Whether an idiot tries to charge you with murder after a justified shooting depends a lot on the circumstances and where you live. It’s not all about the gun or the bullet. Where I live, they would probably give me a medal for shooting a burglar. In order to get in trouble for a shooting which is clearly justified, you pretty much have to live in a liberal-dominated area, you have to shoot a black attacker who doesn’t have a gun, or you have to live in Florida and be the source of so much bigoted and uninformed public outcry that a dishonest governor persuades a disgraceful prosecutor like Angela Corey to perjure herself in order to get your case into court.
Paul Harrell was prosecuted, but appearances were not what caused his problem. He lived in a liberal state. He shot an unarmed man who was driving a truck around his campsite, which provided room for a prosecutor to ask if the shooting was necessary.
He killed his assailant with a deer rifle, so it’s not like he had a Desert Eagle with a red dot scope and leering skulls engraved all over it.
He shot a man who wasn’t using a gun, in a type of situation that probably didn’t sound too solid to jurors. I don’t think he would have been any worse off if he had used a highly modified AR-15 with “Trump Commemorative Edition” stamped on the side.
I’m sure scary-looking ammunition has caused problems for some survivors, but I think the odds of this happening are low. Life isn’t Matlock. Generally, the way things panned out is pretty obvious. The odds that a criminal who is not incapacitated will continue to attack are unacceptably high, as are the odds that a well-placed hollowpoint will fail to incapacitate.
Another thing I keep hearing: you shouldn’t use handloads for self-defense.
I’m not sure I agree. I’m thinking about it.
Factory ammunition is generally less consistent than handloads. That’s just a fact. It’s less accurate, and it sometimes fails to go off. On the other hand, if you get sloppy, it’s easy to make handloads that have the wrong amount of powder in them, that won’t chamber, or that will not extract without being pounded out.
Let’s see.
You can weigh the powder you put in every round. That solves the charge problem, and it’s something manufacturers can’t do. As for chambering issues, you can chamber every round and eject it before carrying it for defense. If it chambers once, it will chamber again.
It wouldn’t be a bad idea to test factory ammo this way. I’ve never seen anyone recommend it, but it’s obvious.
Do you want to trust yourself or a big machine in the Hornady factory, where there is zero possibility that every round will be inspected? I don’t think trusting yourself is a bad idea. Now that I think about it, Cirillo’s squad loaded ammo.
It seems obvious to me that all that matters is whether you handload carefully. If not, buy your ammo at Cabela’s. If you’re careful, why would you trust yourself less than strangers?
Companies that make ammunition charge a great deal more for defensive ammunition, and as far as I can tell, the prices are not in line with the increased price of the bullets, which are the only components that are different from those in target ammo.
Let me check.
Federal 124-grain HST in 9mm. Perfect. I found it for…seriously…$40.50 a box. If you add up the price of components for reloading with new brass, you get something like 50 cents per round. That’s $25. I’m talking about retail, so what is the wholesale cost? Maybe $15? You would think they could put the bullets together and sell them at a price that would put them on shelves for less than $40.50.
The lowest cost for Federal FMJ is around 24 cents, or $12 per box, retail.
Whether or not the markup is reasonable, you can make practice HST with used casings (free) for around $15 per box, and you can make carry rounds with new brass, if fired brass scares you, for $25.
Lower prices = more practice ammunition = better preparation.
Lehigh bullets are very expensive. There is no lead in them, so it’s all copper, and they are machined, not swaged or whatever. On the up side, unlike many brands of bullet, they are available.
I may try some. For that matter, I might try the 10mm version. Hollow points of all calibers fail.
You have to wonder if we’re headed for a future in which powerful, large-bore rounds are actually worse choices than 9mm or even .380. The Lehigh Defender in .380 appears to be pretty nasty.
I don’t know if what I wrote is correct or helpful, but it’s what I’m thinking about today. I’m sure commenters will have thoughts of their own.