Replies

You're right about that.

I didn't mean to seem snippy at you, it's just that so much stuff in gun mags seems to be written by PR and marketing types rather than anyone who actually knows something about guns.

It's quite possible to get a one shot stop with a .22 LR round. Of course, you'd have to get a dead on spinal cord or brain shot to do it. By the same token a few years back some junkie in Chicago took 30 9mm rounds without going down.

There was another case in which the Illinois State Police hit some drugged up whack job with about a dozen or so 9mm +P+ rounds and he was still returning fire at them. He didn't go down until he took a 2nd hit from a 12 guage slug.

The key of course is to get the 'solid hit' you mentioned. A good solid hit to the aorta with a .25 is going to stop a fight a lot quicker than a marginal hit with a .44 magnum.

You're quite correct about the .45 round. It's an excellent fight stopper provided the good guy does his or her job properly. The reason that there are so few departments using that cartridge is that in the 'old days' there weren't many DA type guns chambered for it and many departments were nervous about letting officers carry a firearm 'cocked and locked' as it were.

IMO that was more of a training problem than anything else, but they don't listen to the likes of me.

The .40 is a pretty good round, but IMO what led to it's wide acceptance among the LE community is that has less recoil than a .45 or .357, the cartridge itself is smaller so that lends itself to smaller firearms, (this is important because of the large number of female officers with small hands), and the fact that Glock and Sig both make them. They seem to own the LE market these days.

Here's an interesting little 'muzzle flash' story from the past. In WWII our guys in the Pacific were convinced that the Japanese had some magic gunpowder that didn't emit a muzzle flash. What was really happening was that the barrel of the 6.5 mm Arisaka was just the right length to insure that all the powder had burned before the bullet left the barrel.

I know I used to load my .44 mags pretty hot, but then I realized that out of a 4" barrel that huge ball of flame was just a waste of perfectly good Bullseye. It wasn't gaining me anything velocity wise, although it was certainly quite a sight with the lights turned down at the range. So, I cut back back a grain or so on the powder charge. Voila, not nearly so much muzzle flash and I didn't lose anything in velocity.

I've read that Cor-Bon uses some kind of 'low flash' powder in their ammo. I've got a suspicion that they just do a lot of testing to match the powder charge to shorter barrel lengths but I could be wrong. I know it's hard to believe, but I have been wrong before.