Kick Him, Honey

I’ve got a couple of posts now on why you should never talk to the police. One comes from a commenter who proposes a sixth rule of concealed carry, and one is video of a lecture by a law professor.

Another commenter, 1st Lt L diablo, also proposes the following:

And never let them in your casa. Even if they have a warrant; make them break the door down (a former LEO told me that; I’m not kidding).

Seriously. Never even open the door for them; they can use any excuse to invent PC (Probable Cause) from sights, smells, noises they have access to once the door is open. Make them break it down.

I’ve never heard that one, but it also makes sense. The fact of the matter is that if they’re at your door, they’re looking for a reason to arrest somebody. And since it’s your house, it’ll probably be you. Not to be paranoid, but the less you give them to work with, the better.

When I started this firearms and self defense project I made a commitment to living by the four rules of gun safety and the five rules of concealed carry. Well, over the weekend, a commenter, Pat, offered this addition to the five rules of concealed carry, and I thought it needed posting.

#6: As soon as you encounter police, regardless of whether you used your firearm or not, exercise your right to silence, and request a lawyer. Immediately.

No exceptions.

I think that’s great advice. As this law professor puts it: never talk to the police.

Like the rest of the Bill of Rights, there’s a reason the Fifth Amendment exists. You can never, ever help yourself by talking to the police. You can only hurt yourself.

So, I went up to my shooting spot a couple of days ago for my bi-weekly practice. It’s not a range, it’s pretty much just a pull-off in the Arapaho National Forest, and I usually go during the week, as it gets pretty crowded on the weekend. As usual, I was shooting reloads from Denver Bullets. I’ve been getting most of my practice ammunition from them, as I can’t consistently find what I need to practice on the store shelves.

I’ve also been having some problems with reliability in my 1911. Specifically, its not been going fully into battery the last couple of trips. Pretty much all other problems have disappeared as I’ve passed the break-in period.

But then, this last trip, it started happening with my Glock as well.

I’d been chalking the problems up to horror stories about 1911 reliability, but I’ve never had problems with the Glock. So, I began to pay more careful attention to the individual rounds that were getting stuck. I started to notice a pattern. And then I found the following round, which was impossible to miss.

None of the other rounds were quite that extreme, but every one that caused a problem was shorter. Though I’m through with buying reloads, especially from Denver Bullets, it is nice to know that my 1911 is probably pretty reliable. I still want to put at least 500 rounds through it without a failure before I even think about carrying it, and that’ll take awhile on my budget, but I’m a lot more confident now.

Thanks to James Rummel, who was kind enough to link to my thoughts about hollow points and to rephrase the question about what to use on his own site, I got all kinds of great hollow point recommendations for 9mm carry ammunition. They are:

• Black Hills, 124 grain +p
• Cor-Bon, 115 grain +p
• Cor-Bon DPX
• Cor-Bon Powrball
• Federal 9BPLE
• Federal Hydra-Shok, 135 grain
• Remington Golden Sabre
• Speer Gold Dots, 124 grain or heavier
• Ranger Lawman
• Winchester Silvertips

I also got this advice, from Firehand:

I seem to remember that Ayoob did a bunch of research, and in 9mm the most consistent one-shot stops came with 115-grain +p hollowpoints, brand didn’t seem to matter much as long as it was a premium-grade bullet like Gold Dot, Golden Sabre, Winchester Ranger, etc.

And this, from James himself, who points out that you have to shoot what you carry to be effective. And he recommends shooting at least fifty rounds a month of the ammunition you’re carrying, every month for a year.

What are the most significant factors of using a firearm for self defense? Reliability and shot placement.

The gun has to go bang. Do you have enough money to shoot off at least 50 of your chosen self defense load at the range to make sure that the gun likes it? One jam during the test and it probably isn’t the best load for your gun.

Shot placement. How do you place your bullets where they will do the most good? Practice! Regular practice!

I usually told my students that they should shoot at least fifty of their defensive rounds at the range, and then do it again every month for a year until they know where the point of aim will be with the chosen loads.

How much does premium hollowpoints cost, anyway? Average is a little bit more than $1.00 per bang, but some of them are more than $3.00 a round!

What do I recommend?

Winchester Silvertips. They work, but are distinctly unremarkable. Lots and lots of more effective choices available. But the cost is reasonable.

Being new to this, I hadn’t even considered the difference in point of aim. My thinking was that I’d just rotate my carry ammunition every three months and do all my practice with cheap hardball. Obviously, I can’t do that. So, I’ll be following James’ advice to the letter, and shooting at least fifty rounds a month of what I’m carrying.

Which means I have to find affordable ammunition.

So, I did a quick cruise of the local big-box stores that sell ammunition and are close enough to my house to be convenient — since whatever I choose has to be available and in stock for awhile. I stopped by Outdoor World, Gander Mountain, Gart Sports, and Sportsman’s Warehouse.

The selection for all of them was still spotty, at best. And what was available ran at least two dollars a round, which is well out of my price range.

Luckily, another commenter, Ludwig, left a link to the invaluable AmmoEngine, where you can price ammunition from multiple sources. So, I cruised through that, and then headed over to Cheaper Than Dirt. I found Federal 9BPLE, one of the choices recommended, for an incredible fifty cents a round (actually, a little less). That’s almost half the price of Winchester Silvertips.

I’m gonna poke around some to see if there’s something I’m missing about this particular brand of ammunition. If not, I think I’ve found what I’ll be shooting. At twenty dollars for a box of fifty, I can shoot a hundred rounds of this a month, on top of Winchester hardball.

This is another post based on Massad Ayoob’s In the Gravest Extreme. It’s also one that I’m pretty sure others have written about far better than I, so I’ll scout around the internet in the immediate future for other writings on the subject and post them.

Pretty much all my life I’ve heard about the self defense courses provided by universities to college-age women. They’re often touted as a kind of feminist activism in and of themselves, or, at least, as a means of empowerment. The reasoning behind that line of thinking is sound, I think. Being able to defend one’s self is and should be empowering. The problem I have, however, especially after reading Ayoob, is that most of what is taught in these classes is useless or worse because women are taught to rely on a series of suggestions that are ridiculous on their face, and told to avoid the one thing that could actually be used to effectively provide self defense.

For instance, women are often told to carry an alert whistle, or other noise-making device. However, as Ayoob points out, the only effect loud noises usually have is to cause folks to shut their windows. I know when my neighbor’s car alarm goes off I just kind of get annoyed until it shuts up. Also, and perhaps more importantly, there is almost no chance that anyone who actually might have the means to help a victim will hear the whistle. Even if someone takes action, it will probably only be to call 911, and, as we all know, there will be plenty of lag time between the phone call and a police presence. Meaning that even if someone hears the whistle/siren and calls the police instead of sensibly ignoring it, that just means the police will find a fresh body and be better able to solve the victim’s murder. This will not be particularly helpful to said victim. Even worse advice comes when women are told to scream like hell. Most any person prone to violently assaulting others is not going to be scared by screaming. In fact, they’re going to expect it, and they’ll probably have some way of dealing with it, like punching the victim in the throat.

The real damage that these classes do, however, is to teach relatively peaceful folks that they can effectively stop a threat from a person twice their size, hellbent on doing them damage or killing them, without weapons. I’ve got nothing against martial arts at all. If you like it, do it. But the fact of the matter is that if a one-hundred-pound person trained in martial arts goes up against a two-hundred-pound person with no training, outside of the movies, that one-hundred pound person is likely to get their head handed to them.

I’ve never been much of a fighter, never boxed nor taken up martial arts of any kind, but I’ve known my share of pretty good fighters. And I’ve known several untrained street fighters who couldn’t count on their fingers and toes the number of serious martial artists they stomped into a puddle for fun. The fact of the matter is that folks who are inclined to visiting violence on other folks for shits and grins are often very good at it. And there’s nothing to say that they couldn’t also be just as trained in boxing or some other martial art as anyone else.

And, with that in mind, it’s worth remembering that what one gets out of college self defense courses is not anything that could be remotely described as serious martial arts training.  One of the primary self defense training enterprises offered at colleges, Rape Aggression Defense (RAD) Systems, describes themselves as providing “the basics of hands-on defense training,” and I’d say that’s even pushing credibility. Here’s a promotional video:

I love the instructor’s line that “we’re teaching them that if they’re in a parking lot by theirselves they know they can hold their head high and they can walk and not have to worry about anything because they can defend theirselves.” That’s borderline criminally negligent, if not just delusional. Obviously, you should fight like hell if attacked, and there’s nothing wrong with practicing that, but to suggest that a couple of minutes of wrestling with somebody in a padded suit — followed by a whole bunch of time watching others wrestle with a guy in a padded suit — is remotely adequate to deal with a violent attack is absurd.

The fact is, in Ayoob’s words, “guns are the only weapons that put a physically small or weak person at parity with a powerful, very possibly armed, criminal.” And many women’s self defense organizations outside of universities include firearms as part of the overall package. The Women’s Self-Defense Institute actually recommends reading the exact Ayoob book on which I’m basing this post, and Arming Women Against Rape & Endangerment (AWARE) offers firearms courses.

The classes taught in universities are not self defense, they’re theater. They may be very useful theater for all kinds of psychological or political reasons, but if you rely on them for practical self defense, you will more than likely get killed. If a woman is seriously worried about rape or murder, and I think the statistics bear out that it makes sense to be worried, self defense with firearms has to be on the table.

This from The Minnesota Daily, which seems like a good place to close:

Use of a weapon, and especially a firearm, is statistically a woman’s best means of resistance, greatly enhancing her odds of escaping both rape and injury, compared to any other strategy of physical or verbal resistance. This conclusion is drawn from four types of information.

First, a 1989 study (Furby, Journal of Interpersonal Violence) found that both male and female survey respondents judged a gun to be the most effective means that a potential rape victim could use to fend off the assault. Rape “experts” considered it a close second, after eye-gouging.

Second, raw data from the 1979-1985 installments of the Justice Department’s annual National Crime Victim Survey show that when a woman resists a stranger rape with a gun, the probability of completion was 0.1 percent and of victim injury 0.0 percent, compared to 31 percent and 40 percent, respectively, for all stranger rapes (Kleck, Social Problems, 1990).

Third, a recent paper (Southwick, Journal of Criminal Justice, 2000) analyzed victim resistance to violent crimes generally, with robbery, aggravated assault and rape considered together. Women who resisted with a gun were 2.5 times more likely to escape without injury than those who did not resist and 4 times more likely to escape uninjured than those who resisted with any means other than a gun. Similarly, their property losses in a robbery were reduced more than six-fold and almost three-fold, respectively, compared to the other categories of resistance strategy.

Fourth, we have two studies in the last 20 years that directly address the outcomes of women who resist attempted rape with a weapon. (Lizotte, Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 1986; Kleck, Social Problems, 1990.) The former concludes, “Further, women who resist rape with a gun or knife dramatically decrease their probability of completion.” (Lizotte did not analyze victim injuries apart from the rape itself.) The latter concludes that “resistance with a gun or knife is the most effective form of resistance for preventing completion of a rape”; this is accomplished “without creating any significant additional risk of other injury.”

The best conclusion from available scientific data, then, is when avoidance of rape has failed and one must choose between being raped and resisting, a woman’s best option is to resist with a gun in her hands.

Thanks to Everyday, No Days Off.

In a post last week, I wrote about choosing between a 1911 chambered in .45 ACP and a Glock 19 chambered in 9mm for self defense. I weighed what I read in a couple of books penned by Massad Ayoob and Gabriel Suarez, where, though Massad Ayoob seemed fine with a handgun chambered in 9mm as long as one used premium hollow point ammunition, Gabriel Suarez thought hollow points were over-rated and suggested one stick to something chambered in .45 ACP, using ball ammunition.

As discussed in the post, I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the 1911’s reliability, so I decided to go with the Glock, which left me a little nervous carrying a handgun chambered in a caliber that many, like Suarez, consider anemic.

Then Sam came along and left this comment:

Check out Gabe Suarez’s WarriorTalk Forum: http://www.warriortalk.com/index.php

He is now firmly in the Glock 17 9mm camp now as a recommended carry weapon.

In my own experience, both with my own handguns and in professional training classes, I’ve had the same experience as you have. Glocks just work and keep on working. 1911’s demonstrate an all too frequent tendency to malfunction.

With modern, well designed hollow point ammo (124 +P or 147 Speer Gold Dots and 127 +P Winchester Ranger for me), I’m very comfortable carrying a 9mm, and I have developed much confidence in the reliability and “shootability” of my Glock 19.

So I registered on the WarriorTalk Forum and found the following from Gabe Suarez:

Last time we discussed calibers due to some new discussions at warriortalk. It seems some people are still thinking like it was 1911 in terms of terminal ballistics. I think the truth of the matter is that all self defense handgun calibers (excluding the pocket pistol category) are basically the same when it comes to dropping an adversary. That being the case, should we carry a pistol that only holds seven marginal shots, or one that holds as many as twice that number?

I wrote this one a while back and it seems the discussion and emailed questions I got come back to this issue.

Magazine Capacity

I suppose this will be yet another highly controversial issue, but what the heck. Controversy makes for interesting discussion, no? The issue is to look at whether high magazine capacity gives you a tactical advantage, or if we are better served by carrying an equally sized weapon with a smaller capacity of bigger bullets. Before I answer my own question, let me put forth some facts as seen both in force on force training and on the street.

Point One – Pistol bullets, regardless of caliber are all, what one colleague calls, “iffy”. None can be guaranteed to drop an adversary in his tracks reliably. The notion of a one shot stop is an urban myth dreamed up by those with a vested interest in such things. I have seen 45s work and fail, and I have seen 9mm both work and fail. For the record, the only one shot drop (excluding head shots) I have ever seen with a pistol was fired by a good friend as we entered a crack house during a SWAT raid. He shot the bad guy squarely in the heart with 9mm +P+ out of a SIG P-226. He only fired once because the bad guy fell before my friend could reset his trigger for the next shot!

If we look at the most prevalent calibers we see that there is very little difference between them. A 9mm (also .38/.357) is only one little millimeter smaller than the 10mm (aka .40 S&W), and that is only one little millimeter less than the vaunted 11mm (aka .45 ACP). And before we get into the high speed light bullet versus the heavy slow bullet argument, let’s remember that you can only drive a pistol bullet so fast without drastically affecting its integrity. Moreover, since penetration is affected by weight, sacrificing weight for speed will not yield good results. Finally, you can only make a bullet so light or so heavy. There are limits to what you can shoot out of a pistol.

I have seen every one of these calibers fail at one time or another. There are those who disdain the 9mm as unsuitable for anything larger than squirrels. With modern ammunition, this is simply not true. There is also a myth and a cult grown up around the .45 ACP in this country. Sadly, it is not the deadly hammer of god its proponents suggest. This is not new. Read Fairbairn’s Shoot To Live. He writes of two separate times when the .45 failed to work any better than anything else. Although one millimeter may give you a slight edge in a less than optimum body hit, under most circumstances, there will be very little difference between the effectiveness of the various calibers when modern anti-personnel ammo is used. Trauma injury doctors and reputable terminal ballistics experts tend to agree with this statement.

Point Two – Private Citizen CCW Operators do not go looking for trouble. If they are called to fight it is either because they have inadvertently crossed paths with bad guys while they are doing bad guy stuff (walking in on a robbery in progress as an example), or because they have been specifically targeted and stalked (such as a carjack, or home invasion event). They will have to use extreme violence to fight off the surprise attackers. When we translate the conversion of fright and startle into a firearm application we wee that definition is high volume of fire. You will shoot a lot, and until the threat is no longer there.

While these events share slightly different dynamics, the common thread often seen is that of multiple adversaries. The lone criminal or terrorist is an urban myth. If your fight only involves one, consider yourself lucky. More often than not you will be outnumbered.

Another point is the time frames in which these events take place. Think three seconds. After this, either you will be dead, or your adversaries will be dead. Urban gunfights do not go for hours. Unexpected, short duration, high intensity, extreme violence, multiple adversaries. That is the back drop.

Point Three – Our staff has collectively been in a large number of gunfights ranging from police, citizen, and military events. We draw on those experiences to set up mock gunfights in dynamic, unscripted force on force training drills. Although the surprise factor is missing (you generally don t know you will be in a gunfight until it is upon you), the dynamics of its evolution do not change much. Here are some other observations from watching hundreds of those drills.

1). Defenders will fire their weapons until the threat disappears. That means that until the role player falls down (simulating effective hits delivered), or runs away (removing the target), the good guy will keep firing. The concept of school solutions, controlled pairs, or otherwise artificially limiting the number of shots (as one does in a firing string on the range) does not hold up even in guys who’ve been extensively trained to do it.

2). When a training gun stops firing (due to running out of pellets), the shooter is still in the fight and still trying to shoot his enemy as well as trying to not be hit by him. We see them continue to try to work the trigger for one or two times before there is a realization that there has been a stoppage (malfunction or empty gun). This is followed by a visual examination of the gun, and only then is remedial action taken.

This can take upwards of a second and a half before anything is even attempted to fix the gun, and then the additional time needed to reload. Thus the idea that one can read the gun s feel and immediately realize a need to speed load simply does not hold up. Running out of ammo is usually a fight ender if there has been a failure to stop, or there are multiple adversaries at hand.

3). Participants in these reactive mock gunfights are debriefed immediately to get a clear picture of what happened before any rationalization takes place. Besides a shoot them to the ground firing process, most shooters do not remember seeing the crystal clear sight pictures they learned on the shooting range.

We see a great deal of point shooting, and gun index shooting. I have yet to see anyone strike a classic shooting posture and press off a carefully sighted pair in these room distance drills.

The point to remember is that in a fight such as what are likely for the private citizen, one can easily develop Bullet Deficit Disorder, and that this can have deleterious effects on the outcome of that fight.

The idea that a pair or trio of quality rounds carefully delivered onto a high scoring target zone will stop the action fails both the terminal ballistics test as well as the applications test.

A truth of gunfighting – Having more ammo immediately on board lessens the likelihood of ever needing to reload. Not needing to reload translates into more time delivering lead and less time manipulating the weapon. More trigger time increases likelihood of hitting, which increases survivability.

Caleb from Gun Nuts Media was also kind enough to help set my mind at ease with this note:

I say this being a huge fan of revolvers and 1911s; carry the Glock 19. The Glock 19 is dead reliable, it’s easy to get parts for when it breaks (and break it will, there are no magic swords), magazines are cheap, it eats cheap ammo all night and day long, and you don’t have to fiddle with it to make it a reliable, accurate, service weapon.

In fact, if when I was first starting out on this “gun thing” and I knew then what I know today, I would have just bought 3 Glock 19s and a pile of magazines and been perfectly happy with those for the rest of my life.

So, with all that in mind, I got a holster last night, and I’m thinking that I’m mostly ready to go. I still need a better belt and an extra magazine carrier, but the basics are here. The holster’s a Don Hume PCCH. I’m no photographer, as is obvious, but note the tactical folder. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

Anyway, thanks for the advice, everyone. I’ll probably keep tinkering with the 1911, but for now, it’s nice to have this figured out.