Don’t sweat the ammo! 
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This short article originally appeared in Police & Security News
By Ralph Mroz
A lot of police officers get their knickers all in a knot when it comes to choosing duty ammunition. They read all of the manufacturer's specs and test results, they read all the gunzines to see what the "experts" (more appropriately called "writers" — including me) think is the best load in a caliber, they spend hours on the countless internet forums that debate "stopping power," and they pour over the results of whatever street shooting data and analyses they can find.
Honestly, that time would be much more profitably spent on the range practicing skills and tactics.
Here’s why — all handgun ammunition sucks! Even, you big-bore bigots, .45s.
It's like the joke John Farnam tells: "What does a person do after they are shot with a handgun bullet?" Answer: "Whatever they were doing before they were shot." Because all handgun rounds are anemic.
If you really want to stop someone right now, you really need a rifle. Really. The only reason we don't carry rifles all the time (at least most of us don't) is because they are inconvenient to schlep around all day long. Pistols are (relatively) convenient, and that's why we carry them.
If one handgun round is, say 33 percent "better" — defined in any reasonable way you like — than another, that doesn't make it any significantly better along the much longer scale. The only scale that matters: dropping people reliably with one shot all of the time.
No one can reliably define "stopping power" anyway. There are some reasonable definitions out there, but they all are somewhat unsatisfactory. Even if you could so define the term, understanding what really happened in a shooting is impossible most of the time. Even if you could ascertain that, you'd still not be able to understand the participants differing mental states, blood chemistries, and so on.
There is no magic bullet; and the competing notion of "shot placement" is, while true in theory, all but impossible to practice on the street where everyone is moving, under the effects of startle, and so on. The real world is more complicated than the range.
Don't despair; here’s what you can do:
1) Confine your search to the high-performance loads from the major manufacturers.
2) Review the usually generous gelatin test data that they can provide on those rounds. This will give you a reasonable indicator of real-world of penetration and expansion, and a reliable comparative indicator of such.
3) Narrow your choice to those rounds in this set that meet your perceived needs of penetration and expansion.
4) Listen to the anecdotes you hear about the round, but listen skeptically.
5) Pick one. You can spend a lot more time and money in choosing a round, but your efforts won’t be commensurately more intelligent.
That said, how do you apply the round you pick? We have dispensed with both the "magic bullet" and the "shot placement" theory of handgun bullet performance above. Instead, commit yourself to placing somewhere between several and many rounds to the parts of your assailant that you can see and hit, in rapid succession. And train accordingly.
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In partnership with PoliceOne.com, POSA is offering free tactical training videos on subjects like tactical shotgun usage, crisis entry, disarming a suspect, and more. Click here to view the videos.
To learn more about POSA, visit www.posai.org
Police Officers Safety Association, Inc.
PO Box 685
Chepachet, RI 02814
Phone: 401.568.9951
Fax: 401.568.9677
David Kenik, Executive Director dkenik@posai.org
Ralph Mroz, Training Director rmroz@posai.org |
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