Just got a call from my county’s Sheriff’s office. As of tomorrow, I’ll be putting all of this concealed carry and self defense talk into practice.

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.

This is the probably the most loaded subject on the internet, and I’ll more than likely anger any number of people. If I’ve come to one conclusion about gun folks, it’s that they have a tendency to be a bit monomaniacal when it comes to their favorite firearms. The never-ending 1911 versus Glock argument is a cliché at this point, only matched in its ubiquity by the argument over which caliber is a better manstopper: the large, slow-moving, hard-hitting .45 ACP round, or the small, fast, deep-penetrating 9mm. I’m currently reading Tactical Pistol: Advanced Gunfighting Concepts And Techniques by Gabriel Suarez (with a forward by Jeff Cooper), and he makes no bones about his preference for .45 ACP. Massad Ayoob, whom I’ve just finished two books by, In the Gravest Extreme and The Gun Digest Book of Concealed Carry, thinks both are fine, given the right kind of ammunition.

If there is any kind of consensus, however, it’s that .45 ACP is one of the best manstoppers out there. I’ve never read anybody argue that .45 ACP is a lousy self defense round. Conversely, I have read many arguments that 9mm is a lousy self defense round, though usually those arguments are restricted to ball ammunition. There also seems to be a consensus that any round much smaller than 9mm is inadequate.

If  stopping power were the only consideration, I’d probably opt for something chambered in .45. But stopping power can’t be my only consideration. For one thing, I need to be able to shoot my carry gun, and shoot it a lot. Like most people, I don’t have much expendable income, and that means I have to take into account the price of ammunition. As any one who’s been to any of the big box stores knows, 9mm runs about half the price of .45. And, perhaps even more importantly, .45 is really hard to find right now. Thanks to a hysteria in gun culture about Obama’s election, all ammunition is in scarce supply, but particularly .45.

Which brings me to the second consideration for my carry gun besides caliber: reliability. I don’t want to carry a gun that I can’t trust to go bang every single time.

I have three handguns that I could conceivable carry: a Ruger GP100 with a 4″ barrel chambered in .357 Magnum, a Glock 19 chambered in 9mm, and a Springfield GI Mil-Spec 1911 chambered in .45 ACP. I’m ruling out the Ruger GP100 for a number of reasons. It has an adjustable rear sight, which can get knocked off center getting carried around all day, it’s slow to reload, .357 Magnum costs even more than .45 ACP, and it’s just slightly less heavy than a shotgun. Most importantly, however, is that I have a harder being quick and accurate with the long double-action revolver trigger than I do with either the Glock or the 1911. (Which is not to say expert revolver shooters can’t be just as quick or quicker; but you’ve gotta be an expert, and I’m not.)

Which leaves the Glock and the 1911. I bought the 1911 last year with the express desire to make it my carry gun in the future, and that plan is still in place. Over the last two months, I’ve been tinkering with it consistently. Among other things, I changed the mainspring housing to remove the lawyer lock, swapped a long trigger to match my long fingers, and added a really ugly — though functional — drop-in beavertail grip safety to stop the hammerbite (though to be honest, I’ll probably put in a fitted version sometime soon, just because it bugs me aesthetically). I love the 1911’s trigger, I love the way it feels in my hand, and I’m more accurate with it than I am the Glock.

But it’s not as reliable. Not even close. In firing thousands of rounds through the Glock I’ve never had a failure of any kind, no matter what kind of ammunition I use. I’ve fired less than a thousand rounds through the 1911, and I’ve had dozens of failures. That very well could be because I’m shooting reloads due to the ammunition drought, but I don’t know that, and I can’t know it until I can get my hands on factory ammunition in quantities enough to prove it. It could also be resolved by tensioning the extractor and/or swapping in a stronger recoil spring, but to do that kind of tinkering, I need to be able to shoot a bunch of ammunition through it to test the results. I think it’s fair to expect a carry gun to go through 500 rounds without any hiccups before it’s considered reliable.

So, I plan on doing all those things to the 1911, and figuring out what the problem is. That’s part of this project, to be able to all the basic work on my final carry gun that I should be able to, and that means keeping it reliable. But until I figure that out, I think the Glock’s going to be my carry gun as soon as my permit comes through.

Personally, I think Glock is a great first gun. It may not be the prettiest or flashiest firearm on the planet, but, at least in my experience, it always goes bang when you want it to, it never goes bang when you don’t want it to, you can dry fire it all you want without hurting it, it’s really easy to field strip and clean, it doesn’t rust, and, at about $500 new, it costs less than most other quality guns. There very well could be other handguns at the same price point that are just as good, but I haven’t owned them. I have owned a Glock, and I’m happy to recommend it for those looking for a first self defense gun.

Part of this project is not only to learn how to properly use a firearm for self defense, but to think about self defense as a whole. To interrogate what it means. There are a lot of ways to do that, but I thought I’d begin with the most basic.

Not to get all personal, but one of my oldest friends killed himself last weekend, and I haven’t been thinking about much else. Though I hadn’t been in daily contact with him in years, its been no fun whatsoever for me, and I can’t even imagine what its been like for his girlfriend or those of our friends who still saw him frequently. From what I can see, they’ve been destroyed.

I haven’t found a whole lot to take away from his suicide. I’m an atheist and not much of a philosopher, and as far as I can tell, there’s absolutely nothing to be learned, and no sense to be made of any of this shit. Except, maybe, one real simple point: I don’t like it when the people I love get dead.

That’s it. And that seems to me the most basic reason to carry a handgun. There are lots of kinds of death I can’t do anything to stop, even if I’m standing right there. But there is one kind of death that I can stop, if I have the right tools and I practice hard enough to know what I’m doing. So, I’m going to make sure I have the right tools and I practice hard enough to know what I’m doing.

It’s the same reason I have smoke alarms and a first aid kit. And if there were other kinds of tools and knowledge available to stop other kinds of deaths, I’d have ‘em. Trust me, the minute they make a suicide or a cancer prevention tool, I’m all over it. But, for now, there are only certain kinds of tools to prevent certain kinds of deaths, so I’m going to make sure I know how to use those that actually exist.

I know there are all kinds of general arguments against firearms, whether it be because of accidental deaths or because of the societal nature of crime, and I may even agree with some of those arguments, at least in part. But, for me, they’re all trumped by the desire to do everything humanly possible to keep those I love from getting dead.

Your mileage may vary.

Yesterday, I posted an article by self defense instructor James Rummel about choosing an appropriate caliber for self defense, and Charley Arthur inquired (facetiously) about the use of Dirty Harry favorite, .44 Magnum. James was kind enough to reply with a great breakdown of exactly why he doesn’t recommend guns chambered in .44 Magnum for carry, and I thought I’d post it here for those who don’t read the comments.

RE the .44 Magnum….There are two reasons why I didn’t include it on the list.

The first is, although I’m sure to scandalize just about every .44 Mag enthusiast out there, it is hard to find someone who can actually shoot it well under combat conditions. Let them set up a long shot, with a lot of time against a static target, and they do great things. Have them run around, find cover, and place accurate shots fast? That is another thing, indeed.

This is particularly true when discussing medium frame handguns with modest barrel lengths, the type that would be used most often for concealed carry. Like I said, great things can be achieved with a large frame revolver equipped with a 6″ barrel/ But carrying it inside my waistband every day, and relying on a T-shirt to conceal the gun, isn’t going to work really well.

The second reason I don’t recommend it to my students is because it tends to overpenetrate something as small as a man. Zips right on through, and has lots and lots of energy left while it zooms along downrange for maybe another mile or two. Since everyone is responsible for every single bullet they launch from their gun, and the wounds received by any bystanders just minding their own business from said bullets, there are better choices available. After all, most defensive shootings take place in urban areas, with plenty of people around.

There is another reason I actively discourage my students from choosing a .44 Mag as their concealed carry choice, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the utility of the round in combat.

It is because they really should practice a bunch with their concealed carry choice so they know what it can do, how it handles, and their comfort and confidence levels grows. They would have to have a lot of cash available to buy enough ammo to do that with a .44 Mag.

Having said all this, what would I choose as an emergency arm if I was hiking in bear country? A heavy frame .44 Mag with a 4″ barrel, of course. But I’d be carrying it openly on my belt, would not have to worry all that much about neighbors getting in the way, and would be worried about something a lot bigger and more robust than a junkie mugger.

Everything has its place. The .44 Mag, or really anything more powerful than a .357 Magnum, isn’t really suited for concealed carry.

Dirty Harry may not be much of an influence anymore, but there’s one similar gun that appears in bad Hollywood movies more than any other: the Desert Eagle, usually chambered in .44 Magnum or the even larger .50 AE. It always cracks me up when I see it because it’s such an awful choice for carry.

On the subject of whether a revolver or autoloader would be more suitable to my circumstances, I remembered this article, where Caleb from Gun Nuts Media took apart a Charter Arms press release. Charter Arms is a pretty respectable manufacturer of affordable self defense revolvers, but they didn’t do themselves any favors with some of their claims in this thing. (Though they did include a really funny dig at the Taurus Judge.)

Anyway, this stuck out in my mind.

In all seriousness though, revolvers, especially snub nosed revolvers are in fact more challenging to shoot well than a full sized pistol such as a Glock or a 1911.  Their short sight radius and heavy trigger pull make a 2 inch wheelgun something that is going to require even more practice to master than a compact auto pistol.

Shooters at any level do NOT buy a short-barreled compact revolver to take to the range and plink, hunt or shoot targets with. Yet people will talk and blog endlessly about so-called “excessive recoil,” short barrel sight radiuses, etc. as though target shooting, plinking and hunting are why the person initially bought the compact firearm in the first place. Their technically irrelevant remarks relate to snub nose revolvers with the same credibility as comparing a Ferrari to a dump truck.

Actually, we make those comparisons because we know what we’re talking about. Seriously, the paragraph right before this in their white paper they say that people don’t practice enough with their compact semi-auto carry guns, so they should carry a revolver because it requires less practice! Dammit Charter, I’m trying to be nice here, but that’s just not smart. Seriously, ask anyone that shoots lots of bullets for blood or money and they’ll tell you that wheelguns are harder to shoot effectively; and as mentioned later in the white paper only hits count. That means that even with your 2 inch snubbie, you need to go to the range and actually burn up rounds so that if/when you need to use your firearm to defend your life, you’ll have the necessary skills to get the hits you need.

The rest.

Wheelguns are harder to shoot effectively. I own one wheelgun, and I can attest to that. I can shoot accurately with it, but it takes far more attention to my trigger finger to do so when shooting double action — which is probably the only way one would shoot a revolver in a self defense situation. Seems worth considering.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what type of gun I’ll be using for self defense, and what caliber of ammunition I want that gun chambered in. I’m getting down to choice time — my CCW permit should be coming through in the next couple of weeks — and I want to make sure I’m concentrating most of my practice on the gun I’m going to be carrying. I’ll be writing up a post on the subject sometime soon, but in the meantime, here’s one from James Rummel.

If someone is planning on arming themselves with a handgun for self defense, they will want to buy what will be the most effective. This is the most common question that is put to me.

The answer is: It depends.

I’m not trying to dodge the question, or weasel out of it in some way. It is just that everyone is different. Everyone has a different threshold for noise, recoil, and the weight of the gun itself. And, of course, the size of your hands will determine how large a gun you can comfortably use. Since the single most significant factor in ending a violent encounter is through correct bullet placement, it is vital that everyone understands their own limits and preferences, and chooses a gun around them.

For new shooters, those who have very limited knowledge of the technical side of this hobby of ours, I always suggest that they choose a handgun chambered for one of the cartridges on the list below. In the interests of standardization, all data is taken from the ballistic tables of Winchester Silvertips loaded to standard pressure.

.380 ACP (Auto) 189 Ft/lbs

.38 Special (Revolver) 218 Ft/lbs

9mm Parabellum (Auto) 383 Ft/lbs

.45 ACP (Auto) 411 Ft/lbs

.357 Magnum (Revolver) 535 Ft/lbs

There are a few things that should jump out at anyone with a working familiarity of firearms. The first is that the list is very short, with only 5 calibers included. This is because I want to limit myself to the most common cartridges that are still potent enough to be used for defense. Walk into any gun shop, general store, or hardware store with a gun counter in the United States, and you will almost certainly be able to find that they stock ammo from the list above.

The rest.

I only regularly follow three kinds of blog: art blogs, book blogs, and gun blogs.  Once upon a time, I used to read a fair number of political blogs, but I don’t bother much anymore. My politics run towards pretty traditional hard-left anarchism, which puts me squarely in the minority; if I chose to do so, I could probably waste a lifetime arguing back and forth with both liberals and conservatives. But I burned out my tolerance for political flame wars a couple of years ago and I don’t argue politics online anymore, unless there’s some practical reason for doing so.

That said, most gun blogs are political, and their politics most assuredly ain’t mine.  They pretty universally come with a conservative/libertarian viewpoint. But, to be honest, I find more to agree with from them than from your average mainstream Obama-head. See, the crux of my political worldview is a deep, fundamental distrust of state power, and a wholehearted belief in the rights of the individual. And, though I do tend towards anarchism, I also happen to believe that a good seventy-five percent of all my quarrels with the world could be resolved if the US just abided by its own Constitution.

I’m just sick of the picking and choosing horseshit that seems so prevalent in what passes for political debate in this country. Libs like the First, hate the Second. Cons like the Second, hate the First. A pox on both their houses, as the saying goes. As far as their core mandates go, I’d be a happy supporter of both the ACLU and the NRA, if, y’know, I could stand being affiliated with either the left or the right.

I guess all I’m trying to say is that I like gun blogs and I’ve learned a lot from them. Yeah, I may not agree with a lot of the bloggers on a whole range of shit, but who cares? I don’t agree with anybody on everything. And, as far as the internet goes, I’d rather concentrate what I can learn from than enter into rounds of pointless debate about nothing.

So, here’s a few good ones, off the top of my head and in no particular order:

Hell in a Handbasket.  This one’s run by an Ohio self defense instructor by the name of James Rummel, who specializes in training the elderly and disabled.  His advice is always pragmatic and usually aimed at those of us who want to protect ourselves but don’t have the expendable income to buy Wilson Combat custom carry guns. Representative post: Rotate For Freshness

Xavier Thoughts.  He’s a Louisiana nurse with a gun who started blogging out of anger at the firearms confiscation programs attempted in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. He’s particularly good on the 1911 platform which he unabashedly prefers over all others. Representative post: Choosing Your First 1911

Massad Ayoob on Guns.  Massad Ayoob is pretty much a legend, and his posts are as good as you’d expect: down to earth, knowledgeable, and practical.  Representative post: The Guns of Winter.

View From The Porch. This one’s run by a very snarky and very knowledgeable competitive shooter out of Indianapolis. For pure wit, this is my favorite, hands down. Representative post: Crazy, but just a little bit

War on Guns.  Penned by David Codrea who writes for Guns and Ammo, Handguns, and Guns. Absolutely priceless, especially for his “The Only Ones” series, where he provides a mass of evidence as to why government enforcers are “the only ones” trained and professional enough to carry firearms. Representative post: We’re The Only Ones . . .

Anyway, these are just a few of my favorites. I read a bunch more, and you’ll see me linking to them as I’m posting throughout this project. And, please, if anyone has recommendations, let me know.

In the comments, Charley Arthur has been mounting a spirited defense of the shotgun as a home defense weapon over Massad Ayoob’s objections to it. My biggest problem with a shotgun is that I don’t want to risk shooting one of my kids or neighbors by using a weapon with the spread of a shotgun blast. I don’t want to go into too many details about the layout of my home — mainly for risk of boring the hell out of everyone — but it is small, and the way my kid’s rooms are located I have to be very aware of overpenetration. However, I also have to consider Charley’s great point here:

I concede your point on kids, but suggest that their presence on-scene would also tend to increase they likelihood of your coming unglued in the moment, as well as the sheer intensity of whatever panic you experience, thereby diminishing your probable accuracy with a handgun considerably. Clearly, your kids won’t be BETTER off if daddy misses his shot and therefore gets his head split by an ax-wielding intruder who’s then free to go to work on them leisurely.

That’s pretty hard to argue with. All I’d say is that I still am not convinced that a pistol-grip shotgun is gonna be easier to shoot accurately than a handgun in the seriously confined spaces of my very small abode. I tend to think the pistol will be easier for me, especially in that my home defense weapon is going to be the same as my concealed carry weapon. It’s going to be the one that I’m doing dryfire excercises with, that I’m shooting with, and that I’m carrying around all day. If I’m doing things right, I’m going to be very, very familiar with that weapon, and swapping it out for something else that I’m less familiar with, especially in the event of a middle-of-the-night home invasion when I’m still half asleep, seems to me a bad idea.

In a perfect world I could train with both, of course. But given the time involved and the price of ammunition — even birdshot — that’s just not possible for me. However, I think that Charley’s right, in that in a lot of situations, a shotgun might be just about ideal.

We also got this fantastic feedback from personal security expert Dennis Golden at IM-Safe.

While buckshot is often considered the great leveler consider the use of birdshot in the 7 1/2 ounce range. For fun take your 18 inch scattergun (pump or double barrel) out to a range and at a distance of 10 feet fire it at a cardboard target — then do the same at 5 feet. See how often you miss.  Also put a dummy wall or frame of 2 x 4s and sheet rock behind the target, place a second wall or frame behind that — you don’t need much a couple of 2×4s and some sheet rock into 2′ x 2′ pieces — after your test you can decide if a shotgun works for you in a home environment.

Now, of course, that kind of experiment is the sort of thing that gets me excited to no end. So I started poking around on the internet immediately to see what others might recommend for staging the shoot. And, as I found out almost immediately, it’s been done. (Which was disappointing, I’ll admit.)

The folks at StoppingPower.Info did a series of front and back indoor wall tests with a variety of rounds. They explain their setup here and even provide a short animation.

Here’s 00 buckshot hitting a front indoor wall:

And here’s the same load of 00 buckshot hitting the back indoor wall, after having already passed through the front indoor wall:

There’s no way I can even consider using that kind of load in my situation. And 7.5 oz. birdshot isn’t much better. In fact, given the spread, it might even be worse.

Unfortunately, though they also have videos of handgun rounds penetrating both walls — and every serious self defense caliber does, easily — they’re using ball ammunition in all cases. I need to find out what happens to hollow points when they hit walls. I’ll post with anything I find when I’ve poked around some more.

Thanks immensely for weighing in, Charley and Dennis (and Tam, author of one of my favorite gun blogs, View From The Porch). This project’s only about a week old, and having this kind of discussion with folks who obviously know what they’re talking about is already far more success than I expected.