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Premium lines from four big makers, covering four popular calibers. This, for the most part, is the type of round the author recommends.
Defensive ammunition choice is about picking what works best to neutralize armed and dangerous human beings before they can maim or murder. Scientific testing of ammo in ballistic gelatin can help predict bullet performance in the field, but at the end of the day, it is the performance and not the prediction that will matter.
Thirty-four years of carrying a sworn police officer’s badge, 20 years as chair of the firearms committee of the American Society of Law Enforcement trainers, and several years now on the advisory board of the International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association have combined with several trips to major seminars of groups like the International Law Enforcement Firearms Instructors Association and the International Homicide Investigators Seminars to give me a solid base of cops who’ve investigated a lot of shootings for their departments. These aren’t “war stories,” they are full investigations of shootings including evidence recovery, complete autopsy and forensic ballistic testing protocols, and intensive debriefings of the shooters and the witnesses. From that collective pool of knowledge emerges a profile of which duty cartridges perform the best.
OBVIOUSLY, POLICE ISSUE AMMUNITION IS USED IN A SIGNIFICANT MAJORITY OF THESE SHOOTINGS. That’s why police duty calibers and loads have the strongest “data bases” to learn from.
Fortunately for armed citizens, they and the police tend to choose the same calibers. Picking a load that has proven itself on duty with the police gives the armed citizen added confidence in what their chosen gun/cartridge combination can deliver. As many have noted, using ammunition that is widely issued to police is a strong defense against unmeritorious courtroom allegations such as, “He used evil hollow point bullets that rend and tear, and that shows he had malice in his heart!”
Let’s look at what the “street feedback” is indicating is working best in the “ultimate laboratory” these days.
This 230-grain standard velocity Gold Dot 45 ACP bullet expanded to some 60-caliber after striking bone, kept on going to deliver massive wound track. Expansion was not textbook, but neither are living things. Gold Dot has done very well in officer-involved shootings.
HST is Federal’s current top defense load. These two bullets expanded differently because they met different resistance. The one on left went through a hog’s heavy skull before utterly destroying the brain; the one on the right entered the shoulder and tore a large wound through the chest. Both animals were stopped instantly. +P 230-grain 45 round was doing better than 950 fps from 5-inch barrel.
38 Special
Concealed carry permit instructors tell me that the 38 Special revolver, usually in compact short-barrel form, is one of the most common guns brought to their classes by students, and often the single gun that their graduates most commonly carry on the street. For most of the 20th Century, this caliber revolver was also by far the most popular in law enforcement, with plainclothes and off duty officers generally carrying “snubbies,” and uniformed personnel generally carrying larger framed, longer barrel models.
At this writing, there are still thousands of senior cops carrying “grandfathered” 38 revolvers on duty in New York City and Chicago, and many more who carry them as backup or off-duty guns. In fact, the snub-nose 38 seems to be the most popular police backup handgun to this day, and is still widely used for off duty carry.
Only two cartridges really stand out as head and shoulders above the large pack of available 38 Special rounds. These are the “FBI load” and the “New York load.”
The FBI load gets its sobriquet from the fact that this round was adopted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation circa 1972, right after Winchester introduced it. It was also adopted by the Chicago PD, and remains the 38 Special load of issue there to this day. Metro-Dade (now Miami-Dade) police likewise found it to perform superbly, as did cops throughout the U.S.A., and it continues to be known by some locally as the “Chicago load” or “Metro load.” This cartridge comprises an all-lead, semi-wadcutter shaped hollowpoint bullet at +P velocity.
It works particularly well out of a 4-inch barrel, but cops quickly discovered that the projectile generally upset and expanded at least to some degree – even out of short barrels that reduced velocity. The reason was that with no tough copper jacket to peel back, the soft lead expanded more easily in flesh.
Winchester and Remington both produce this 158-grain LSWCHP +P round. The Remington seems to have the softer lead of the two, and therefore, opens a bit more dramatically. This is a good thing.
Seen from bottom, this Winchester Ranger 127-grain +P+ 9mm round expanded to slightly over 60-caliber, and at 1250 foot seconds impact velocity did massive and instantly fatal damage to a man-size hog.
Base-on view of expanded 45 ACP Federal HST 230-grain +P bullet that instantly dropped a man-size hog with a chest shot. Bullet destroyed both lungs and top of heart, expanded to approximately 90-caliber.
Base-on view of still-bloody HST 230/45 +P recovered from hog shot in skull and killed instantly. Expanded diameter is a hair under an inch at widest point. Irregular expansion was due to striking heavy bone on slight angle, which did not deviate bullet from its trajectory. Penetration depth was optimal.
A few years ago, NYPD realized it still had some three thousand officers carrying 38 Special service revolvers as primary handguns, and that the overwhelming majority of their plus/minus 35,000 sworn personnel carried snub-38s as backup and off-duty guns. They approached Speer to create a load that would optimize 38 Special terminal ballistics when fired from a revolver with a barrel measuring 1-7/8 inches. Ernest Durham at Speer led the project, and the result has now become known colloquially as the NYPD load. It comprises a wide-mouthed 135-grain Gold Dot bonded, jacketed hollowpoint at +P velocity.
In numerous shootings with both snubs and 4-inch service revolvers, NYPD officials tell me that they are more than satisfied. Because of the lighter bullet, it kicks less than the FBI load, and because of the modern Gold Dot technology, it expands widely and reliably. They have found it to be a good man-stopper.
Either will work well. In a snubby, I prefer the Gold Dot for two reasons. First, the lighter recoil is helpful in fast, accurate shooting. Second, the all-lead FBI load is more lightly crimped than the Gold Dot, and when fired in a super-light snubby in the ten or eleven ounce weight range, such as the Titanium or Scandium S&W AirLites, recoil is so severe that after a shot or two, the projectiles can start pulling loose from the case mouths. They “prairie dog” up out of the chamber at the front of the cylinder, where they can strike the forcing cone of the barrel and lock the gun up solid. While this can happen with any make of the all-lead +P FBI load, it does not occur with the Speer NYPD load.