When it's all said and done; and your using lead bullets wadcutter or semi wadcutter how would anybody now if its reloaded or factory after it smokes into some stupid bad guy? There are so many different factory loadings. Why would they waste their time figuring out if it was a reload?

But Newton's third law isn't suspended just because you're shooting for real.

In a real self defense situation perceptions change.

Many buy a gun and think of it as a magic talisman with the belief that it wards away the energy of bad people and endows the holders with super magical nearly fantastical cosmic powers.

In the real-world, a gun doesn't scare off people or stop things. Go to any high crime environment and watch and learn. A gun shoved in someone's face isn't a deterrent

In my career, I've responded to enough shooting where the suspect stopped for one of three reasons.

1. A long gun was used.
2. Enough rounds were dumped into the suspect and he died due to a critical hit or bleeding out.
3. The suspect said "ouch, that hurts", and gave up.

The infamous Miami FBI is an example of number 1 and 2 combined. One of the suspects was mortally wounded. He didn't just stop fighting.

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GOA FL Dir. & Nat. Spokesman

A few thoughts on a topic in an already long thread with the usual comments.

1) I have a few J-Frames and have carried them on occasion, but if I am carrying a revolver it is almost certainly a 3” Model 66 or a 3” Model 686+.

I shoot more than most, 200-300 rounds a week in normal periods, tapered off to about 100 rounds a week in the latest shortage. I’m a very good shot with a J-Frame and .38 Special or .38 +P. But I am an excellent shot with a 2 1/2” or 3” K or L frame with those same loads as well as with my 125 gr .357 Magnum load. I’m more accurate and more importantly the follow up shots are much faster with the K or L frame.

Much gets made of weight etc, and IMHO way too much is made of it. With a decent double thickness leather belt and a well designed IWB holster I can carry a 36-38 oz 3” K or L frame all day long in comfort and it’s as easy to conceal as most mid sized semi autos.

In short, any downside in conceal carrying the larger K or L frame compared to carrying a J frame is theoretical rather than practical. On the other hand, there is a sharp downside to the J frame when it comes to actually shooting it effectively in a self defense situation.


2) The cartridge matters in a short barrel.

The short barrel .38 Special is a marginal caliber. I know that’ll prompt a lot of “But, but, but…”l comments, yet the facts are that while the .38 Special out of a 2” barrel will have more bullet weight it also has less velocity than a .380 ACP from a 3.5”-4” barrel, and the resulting terminal performance is very similar. .38 Special performance isn’t the same as 4” .38 Special performance - and .38 +P loads help but don’t quite make up all the difference.

.357 Magnum isn’t a cure all either, with barrel lengths less than 3” the juice isn’t usually worth the squeeze with .357 Magnum compared to .38 +P. In a 2” barrel you’ll get maybe 1050 FPS with a 125 gr +P load and around 1125 FPS with a 125 gr .357 Magnum. That 75 FPS doesn’t make much difference, and most hollow points don’t perform well at those low velocities.

The downside of most commercial .357 magnums is the slow burning colloidal ball powders most companies use. That 20 ish grain charge weight produces about 40% more recoil than a 9-10 gr charge of medium burn rate flake powder producing nearly the same velocity in a short barrel revolver.

Consequently, putting 1 and 2 together, my preferred .357 carry is a 3” K or L frame with .357 Magnum load using a 125 gr XTP on top of 9 grains of Unique. With a 3” barrel I get around 1300 FPS, which is enough to produce reliable expansion and adequate penetration in 10% ballistic gel.

With a 1 7/8” to 2 1/8” J frame, the Speer 135 gr Gold Dot is a good choice in a .357 Magnum or .38 +P load. But otherwise the bullet selection probably doesn’t make much difference in terms of terminal performance. Wadcutter, semi wadcutter, hollow point, or round nose, they will all more or less bore a .357” hole.

3) Reloads

All that said about wadcutter s and semi wadcutter, try reloading a wad cutter or semi wad cutter under stress. Individually, in a speed strip, or in a speed loader, none of them want to go into the chamber easily compared to a hollow point or round nosed bullet.

The ideal reload is one using round nose or rounded nose hollow points in a moon clip. With good quality clips then won’t come apart of you drop one, and provided you get them pointy ends in the general vicinity of the cylinder they slide right in.

A well made speed loader is next on the list. Loading individual rounds from a dump pouch is a practice that should have ended the day after the Newhall shooting, yet it’s what officers in my department were expected to do 14 years later in 1984. It’s slow and you will drop at least one round.

The FBI and other agencies for a time suggested loading just 2 rounds and getting back in the fight, and for that you really need a speed strip, not a dump pouch. But you can do a full load with a speed loader in less time and get back in the fight with a full 5, 6 or 7 round load. The sole advantage of a speed strip is low profile carry of spare rounds in a pocket. But I still prefer a speed loader in a slip over pouch where 3 of the rounds are inside the belt.


4) Actual “stops”.

All handgun rounds are inadequate.

On the plus side, about half of all assailants shot stop after being shot once with just about anything. As long as the round has enough terminal performance to notify the person he or she has been shot, about half of the people shot decide they don’t like being shot, decide they don’t want to get shot anymore and thus decide to stop doing whatever it is that is causing them to get shot. Those are for the most part psychological stops.

The other half of assailants will require multiple handgun rounds and or a rifle or shot gun round to stop (and some will require multiple rifle rounds). For the truly motivated assailant they only thing that will produce immediate incapacitation is a hit to the central nervous system (the brain or upper portion of the spinal column). Even a cardio vascular hit directly to the heart with immediate loss of blood pressure still leaves 10-15 seconds worth of oxygen in the assailants brain, and that’s 10-15 seconds of still potentially deadly behavior. Anything short of that requires multiple hit and wound channels to drop the blood pressure to critical levels.

So…wound channel size does matter as does accuracy and the ability to deliver rapid, accurate subsequent hits when necessary.


5) Handloaded self defense ammo.

Try as you might you won’t find a single criminal prosecution where the use of a handloaded self defense round turned a legal shoot into an illegal shoot.

Massad Ayoob cited a case where a spouse shot herself with her husband’s revolver and handloaded ammo . In this case he was charged with murder as the comparative lack of powder stippling on the victim suggested she was shot at longer range than was possible in a suicide. However, the police seized his self defense loads for testing rather than the target load that was actually in the gun. The defense had to bring in a ballistics expert to demonstrate that when a target load was used the stippling pattern was consistent with a suicide.

In that case, the problem was the police seizing the wrong ammo and that could have happened just as easily with commercial loads.

The key item with using handloaded self defense ammo is the same as when using commercial self defense ammo. Keep your self defense ammo clearly marked as such and keep it in an and easy to find location separate from the rest of your ammo.

As for the prosecution claiming you were handloading extra deadly ammo in anticipation of shooting someone, there is one major problem with that reasoning. It was either a good shoot where you did not provoke or exacerbate the situation and fired only when an imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm existed - or it isn’t.

There are several areas where it can fall apart.

First your deadliest handload probably isn’t any deadlier than most commercial self defense rounds. I like the 125 gr XTP because it is adequate and readily available at low cost. It is not however the best possible expanding or performing bullet available, yet in the .357 Mag it is sufficiently adequate. (I use the sig V crown in my 9mm and .45 ACP for the same reasons).

Second, my .357 Magnum handgun loads are also just that, not self defense loads. I’ll mark that particular box of 9.0 gr 125 gr XTP ammo I am using for self defense ammo as “self defense”. But you’ll find a couple thousand more rounds of it in the normal range ammo. Push come to shove, I have some maximum loads of Win 296 under the same bullet in my lever action carbine and rifle loads and they are by any stretch “more deadly”.

Then there is also the fact I’m just using a 3” 357 Magnum, not a 3” .44 Mag Ruger Alaskan.

In short, an argument claiming a defendant was hand loading extra deadly ammo as part of looking for an opportunity to shoot might be used by a prosecutor - but it’s never going to be successful if the shoot was in all other respects legal.

You already have the wadcutters . They'll work just fine .

Working fugitives and armed robberies in New Orleans during the 90s was pretty lively and most definitely the real world. I learned plenty, and never got fired.

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“What you got, ain’t new.”

I actually found that having the drop on a criminal actually prevented him from taking further aggressive action on several occasions. On those occasions, I wasn't using my gun to bluff and apparently the suspects knew it. On one occasion I was privy to the interrogation of one of the suspects. The interviewing officer asked if the suspect considered using his firearm and the suspect responded that he did for a moment, but the officer already had his gun on me. Of course, I may not have had nearly the extent of experience that you have had and my experience was from many years ago. Current criminal responses may be much different.

I’ve heard this repeated many times.


Does anyone have tangible evidence of SD ammo choice being an issue in a legit defense case?

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- Post No Bills -

Apparently not. Brian Pearce put this often repeated nonsense to rest a few years ago in one of his many insightful magazine articles.

The old FBI load (+P 158 grain lead HP) saved me w/my issued 4” Model 15, but recoil in a smaller gun could impact your ability to make good combat hits. Try different loads, including wad cutters, at the range and carry what gives you the best results under simulated combat conditions.

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Old Cop
LEO (Ret.)

Because some anti gun jurisdictions are like that.
They may not succeed, but it's still better to avoid an expense trial if you can.

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Merle, retired
western PA

The only thing I ever remember which is periphically related is that there was a SD case in, I think, Colorado some years ago in which someone was shot with a .40 S&W. The prosecutor got a conviction mainly on the grounds that the .40 S&W was too powerful for self defense use, indicating that the shooter had to have been a ruthless killer to use it for self defense. I think the conviction was later overturned. I do not remember any other details. Maybe someone else does.

No. The genesis of this was writing by Massad Ayoob. He's a member here, by the way.

How could they tell? Lead is lead. A bevel base wad Cutter is a BBWC How can any defense tell if it was 700fps or 900 fps? A 158 gr SWC is a 158 SWC. How could they know if it was factory 800 fps or handloaded to 950-1000 fps. Most all ammo companies make component bullet's

By looking at your ammo as a part of the shooting investigation.

If you shoot someone in self defense the police are not going to take your word for it. They are going to confiscate your gun with any unfired rounds as a minimum. I would also expect them to ask for the box of ammo for ballistic comparison and get a search warrant if you refuse.

I once saw a dash cam video on tv, wildest police chases? long time ago. It showed a deputy shooting a 330 pound man in the abdomen and chest 5 times with the original black talon 9mm police load. The guy simply staggered around, and kept yelling.

Also read an article about "stopping power" from a police rag that described a drug user who looked like mr universe, that was shot over 8 times with a .223, 9mm and 40sw handguns, and wasnt downed, while strangling a cop under each arm at the same time, by someone putting a shotgun slug to the guys spine

Context matters. Mas was writing about such matters at a time when civilian carry was uncommon and much less was known about defensive use of firearms. I recall reading some of that well before law school. We now know more, and although unethical prosecutors (* cough* Wisconsin and Minnesota*cough*) will make arguments, competent defense attorneys should be able to hammer them.

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NHI, 10-8.

Cast wadcutters look different from swaged commercial ones. And if one wasn't too badly mangled, it could be differentiated.

I saw a ME photo of a handload that killed somebody. Looked like a cast 200 grain .45 ACP semi wadcutter. It was intact even to the blue wax lube in the lubricant groove.

I carried .38 wadcutters in my Chiefs and 442 for years. Currently I carry the 135gr Gold Dot’s, but I get those for free from my employer. It’s hard to beat free.

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Wheel guns are real guns.

For many it effectively is.

There are many examples. Perhaps the most common is the deer Hunter using a 12ga slug gun. Unpleasant as can be when sighting in, no significant recoil when shooting deer.

I have video from one of my safaris of me shooting my elephant rifle at a target. Lots of rocking at the hip and plenty of muzzle rise; same rifle and loads, same trip but shooting an elephant or Cape buffalo and there is no rocking st the waist and minimal muzzle rise.

The difference? Your focus on the target.

Not African safari here, but …

I can confirm that I’ve never remembered hearing the report or feeling the recoil from ANY shot that I’ve taken while hunting. Combination of adrenaline and focus fills your attention.

Obviously that’s not to say that there is no sound or recoil, it’s just that you don’t notice them under the circumstances.

Slow? My 148 grain hard cast, standard pressure full wadcutters are 875 fps from a 1-7/8" 38 snub.

crstrode - they are semi-wadcutters in my photo.

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In Omnia Paratus

Your dad was smart man, a 148 HBWC loaded backwards is the most lethal thing with 3.0 gr. of bullseye. In a 2" it will bend a 55 gal. steel drum in half and put a 1.5 hole in it. Jim

If I only had lead bullets for my 38 snub nose J frame for self defence....

I would not mind the target speed 148 wc ammo but I would prefer a heavier
158 lead SP doing 720fps that has the same ME but should tend to be able to penetrate more.

Many like the new light 90 & 110 JHP bullets, that have light recoil in a J frame
but I have never tested them with a Winter coat, to see if they will penetrate enough.

Most any load will work againts a cotton "T-shirt".

If you shoot them well in your gun I can see no reason not to use them . It has been a common practice for at least as long as I have been alive with generally good results reported by those who have actually used them on an attacker.

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Grumpy Old Man With a Gun

The factory wadcutter are made for target. They cut a nice clean hole in paper with enough powder to get to the target. They are loaded to much less pressure than a standard 38 Special round. They are also too soft, IMHO.

If you must use wadcutters, get the hard cast at standard pressure for carry. Then use the lesser powered rounds or practice. Buffalo Bore and others make a proper defense wadcutter. You wont notice the recoil in a fight.

Where match wadcutters shine as defense rounds are:

1) Folks who need as low recoil as possible in a viable, common self-defense caliber.

2) Short barrels where even the best modern defense rounds are iffy on expansion; the sharp square shoulder of a wadcutter cuts a nice path, and penetrates comparably to the best defense loads in gel tests.

3) 1 and 2 combined, especially in snubby J-frames where the low-recoil of the match wadcutter is especially useful.

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Pickpocket

I think you need to see how much a HBWC. loaded backwards expands and the devastation it will cause. The big thing is low recoil and rapid recovery for the next shot. It will expend all it's energy in the target, not two rooms away or in the neighbors house.... Jim

From what I have seen a traditional all lead HBWC loaded backwards will expand, but not penetrate enough to be effective. A jacketed or plated HBWC won't expand, but penetrates. If one is intent upon using .38 SPL wadcutters for defense, it appears that loading them as intended, making sure not to load them too hot, which will blow off the skirt, will penetrate and the bullet can actually mushroom to a small extent. So, it looks to me that if one wants to use .38 SPL wadcutters for defense, just use factory loaded ones for the mild recoil, accuracy and effectiveness.

I still have a few hundred Federal 125gr. HP standard pressure Nyclads. It's what's in my old S&W model 12. They do quite a number on a gallon milk jug full of water, more so than any wadcutter.

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LIVE FROM THE DAWGHOUSE

I think you need to see the HBWC backwards in action, they are as good as or better stopper than a .45.... But what ever trips your trigger.... Jim

Are you referring to Hollow Based or Double Ended wadcutters?
Quite a difference.
Both should work well. They are some of my favorite bullets.

The defense attorney may be able to hammer them, but for a slightly higher fee. Well, maybe not so slight! Might be enough for a boat payment. A big boat. Maybe used to be the defendants boat!

73,
Rick

I have to agree with RBMAC above. Use only factory ammunition.

All low-velocity target wadcutters are wadcutters, but all wadcutters are not low velocity target wadcutters.

Similarly, all hollow base wadcutters are wadcutters, but all wadcutters are not hollow base wadcutters.

And lastly, semi-wadcutters are NOT wadcutters.

The 130gr J(acketed) H(ollow) P(oint) W(ad) C(utter)s from Federal as per their Micro HST +P line are not "loaded backwards" and most assuredly do expand with adequate penetration (vs. overpenetration, as some would opine)...

Perhaps the "horse of a different color" you heard about in Oz...?

Cheers!

If you must use wadcutters, this would be one of the loads.

Also, you should keep some of your carry ammo in the original box so that forensics can make a valid test if necessary.

Not sure if anyone has read this article,

Ed Harris: Revisiting The Full Charge Wadcutter. – www.GrantCunningham.com

In it, Ed Harris has written about using the full charge wadcutter load. I found it an interesting read. Interesting enough that when I carried the small bore, I loaded slightly harder cast DEWC to about 900 fps and carried them in my S&W Model 36-1.

Kevin

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Unshared knowledge is wasted.

A good bullet for this type of loads is the Lyman # 358432 in 160 gr. weight (Lyman also cut it in 148 grains and used the same mould number) Lyman has discontinued this mould But ... NOE Bullet Moulds has re-created it and it is a Winner !
NOE # 360-160-WC PB (360432) check out the design at www.n0ebulletmoulds.com
This is the one that is in my 38 Special , Airweight J-Frame (it gets carried) , model 64 on the night stand ...
160 gr. cast WC / 3.5 grs. of Bullseye or Red Dot or 700X ... all 3 loads are very accurate to boot .
Gary

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Certified Cajun
NRA Member

I've done my own testing with "reverse" 148 LWC at 750 fps.

The rounds tumbled and hits were all over the target no "X" hits at 10 yards.

In an article many years ago the same results were achieved by the author and were not recommended for self defense do the unreliable accuracy and lack of penetration through several layers of heavy clothing.

Smiles,

Why would "forensics make a valid test"? Why would anyone NEED to test anything?

What necessity are you referring to? What "original box", and why?

Cheers!

Why would you leave live ammo in your gun, for them to make a case againt you?
My mag would be empty or the cylinder holding spent cases.....

If Factory or reloaded ammo !!

Have not heard that.

You must have a terrible gun or bad reloads mine shoot great out of 2 and 4" model 10 S&W's. I could hit the middle of a 55 gallon drum at 20 yds.but you can only do it once because it bends it and it is laying on it's side with a big hole in it. But only after it was shot with a .357 and a 44 mag. it just shakes a little and has a tiny hole where they went through ..... Jim

Wad-cutters for personal defense? You're kidding right?

This is straight out of the 1960's. With all the excellent PD ammunition now provided by Federal, Speer, and Winchester, why on earth would someone take a giant leap backward?
Totally unpredictable performance in a wide range of circumstances and scenarios.

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Ret. LE, FA Instr, S&W Armorer

Your .38 wadcutter loads will bend a 55 gallon steel drum in half and knock it over?

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“What you got, ain’t new.”

I was curious also.

Kevin

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Unshared knowledge is wasted.

The full charge wadcutter loads are neither unpredictable nor backwards. A 150 grain bullet at 850-900 fps is a formidable choice.

Kevin

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Unshared knowledge is wasted.