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Old July 21, 2006, 04:46 PM   #2
Unclenick
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Join Date: March 4, 2005
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Curmudgeon's Response

There is a pretty extensive thread on this at the 1911.org forum. Every kind of failure you can have in a handload has also been experienced by someone shooting factory loads. No powder; loose bullets; excessive pressure; bullet setback in magazines leading to excess pressure. Bullets pulling from recoil in a revolver. I, personally, have two Winchester .223 cases without flashholes that I culled from a bulk purchase of new brass. Presumably they load these in the factory machinery, too. You have only to look at all the unfired commercial rounds abandoned at ranges with perfectly good looking firing pin indentations to realize this stuff was unreliable in somebody’s gun.

For the above reasons I prefer carefully loaded (one-at-a-time) and inspected handloads that I've fired lots of copies of without feed or firing failures. Extra steps I take include using include a K&M benchrest priming tool. This tool has a special compound leverage system that lets you feel the primer bottom out in the pocket without crushing it. It also has a spring-loaded sleeve that surrounds the primer and makes certain it starts squarely into the primer pocket. I use only new Starline +P brass that I've weighed and inspected. This brass is a little heavier than standard and less likely to bulge or cause extraction problems. I use Federal primers for adequate sensitivity, then apply sealant and dry them a week, then put them and the powder I intend to use in a sealed ammo can with a bunch of desiccant for a month before loading them. I keep them in dry magazines and rotate them out of the gun for shooting practice from time to time.

I use the .45 ACP so I can avoid the whole expanding bullet issue. The .45 is "pre-expanded". If the prosecuting attorney in a civil suit wants to make out that you used expanding handloads because you intended to inflict an inhumane and unnecessary degrees of damage, he will do so over the use of commercial expanding ammunition as well. I use a flat meplat solid bullet (usually the Hornady 230 grain FP ENC, pseudo-truncated cone). I choose that because hunting experience indicates a flatter meplat stops game faster than a round nose. That is my only concession to special shape. I load only to miltary ballistics; around 850 fps, and I observe rule 4, so I am not concerned about "overpenetration". Given the nearly random nature of much handgun ammunition expansion in real shootings, anyone who depends on expansion to prevent a bullet from damaging someone behind the perpetrator is foolish and quite possibly may be negligent in the eyes of the courts.

I read a post by a fellow whose med-school girlfriend did a forensics rotation and witnessed the autopsy of someone who’d been shot five times by police using Cor-Bon Pow’R Ball bullets. These have a polymer ball in their hollow nose to help them feed reliably. Anyway, the M.E. didn’t find any bullets and couldn’t figure out from the wound channels what had made the ordinary looking through-and-through holes, nor what all these little polymer balls were he found inside the corpse? So, they expanded, didn’t stop, and didn’t do any more damage than any other kind of bullet. Dr. Martin Fackler says that at autopsy it is often impossible to distinguish wound channels made by expanding handgun bullets from those made by solids. Unlike high power rifles, there just isn’t enough energy in a typical handgun bullet for the perimeter of the temporary cavity to be reflected in permanent damage. Human tissue is more flexible and stronger than that.

The argument might be made for hollow points limiting ricochet, but I would need to see that demonstrated. .45 slugs flatten out on hard objects pretty well, spaltter the lead core around, then what remains may go on a Frisbee tear (I’ve had a few whirr over my head; and no, don’t ask). For all I know, an expanding design would do the same?

I’ve seen two reports from the sandbox now saying the 9 mm frequently requires multiple torso hits to achieve a stop, while the .45 typically does it in one. This is ball ammo in both cases, but it seems the forgotten lesson of 1903 in the Philippines was no figment of the imagination. Maybe the Army is gradually relearning this? An interesting bit of information related to military cartridge choice comes from CBS News, here. It seems the government had more faith in the concept of spray-and-pray shooting than in training people to shoot. Now CMP volunteers are training Squad Designated Marksmen because the Army doesn’t have enough knowledgeable staff to do it any more.

The bottom line on ammunition is to get the most reliable you can lay your hands on. Whether it is your handloads or, lacking faith in them, a factory lot that has never failed you. Whatever you shoot, be sure you practice clearing exercises or else shoot a revolver. Much of the fancy commercial exanding handgun bullet stuff is just marketing hype. They don’t go out and test their theories on men.

If you have to shoot somebody in civilian life, be prepared to demonstrate they absolutely had to be stopped from doing what they were doing, and stopped then and there and that asking them to play nicely either didn’t work or wasn’t an option. Usually the purpose is to protect life, but preventing kidnapping or rape probably qualifies in most jurisdictions. Protecting property only counts in some. It boils down to preventing or intervening in an extreme violation of the victim’s rights, whether that victim is yourself or someone else. The violation should be extreme enough that taking life is justified in preventing it and your shot placement should reflect that. That this cuts down on follow-up civil suits is a bonus.

Nick
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