My point is that you can find bad loads in any caliber. I recall reading some controversy over the effectiveness of the 110gr .357 mag hollow point once used by the Border Patrol. 9mm Winchester Silvertips supposedly suffered unreliable expansion and so poor performance. And I believe the .38 Special lead round nose cartridge once issued to police officers in many departments was known to some as the "Widow Maker", because the bad guy was still coming after 6 hits and only finally bled out after the officer was killed.
Yes, the 110gr JHP works well against people who aren't wearing coats or are ensconced in vehicles. If someone's in Miami, it should be exceptional for stopping power. The 125gr/140gr JHPs are perfect and the latter is fine if you're going to be up against people behind cover; however, for sheer stopping power in people, I don't believe quite anything compares with the 125gr JHP .357 with the exception of the .357 Sig and the 10mm. The former has better blast and recoil and the latter has about the same blast and recoil. The 158 lead round nose .38
looks impressive, but though it has excellent penetration, it tends to go through the body and not expand.
Ayoob has also said that handloads are a bad idea for self defense and would be used against you by a zealous prosecutor. Even though it's never actually happened.
Yeah, well, Ayoob's seen some courts (and idiot juries) do some amazingly stupid things. He's a professional firearms/ammo witness and has seen some prosecutors who ought to be on the people's side trying to put away decent law abiding citizens who used firearms against intruders and attackers. In the late 70s, when I was working at the NRA in Washington, D.C., the big controversy was "Cop Killer" bullets, so called. The primary thing the NRA did before screwing him over was trying to keep the media from finding out one carefully guarded secret: namely, the 125gr JHP .357 would penetrate
most police bullet-resistant vests. The media already was gearing up to ban copper-clad rifle bullets, many of which will
still penetrate such vests, but all we needed was for it to get out that the popular 125gr JHP/JSP would penetrate cop's body armor! (As it was, criminals were simply aiming for the cops' heads; they weren't buying armor-piercing rounds.)
So I tend to cut Ayoob some slack when it comes to courts, judges, prosecutors and juries. He's probably seen more than he's needed to see over they years, and he knows that in many cases, if it hadn't been for him, many of his clients would have gone to prison simply for defending themselves and/or their loved ones.
Have you actually had a .44Spl fail or are you just judging by paper ballistics???
Never. I've never had
any ammo fail me. But I've done a lot of reading, and I've heard of many failures with a .45 ACP, which I consider ballistically superior to the .44 Spl. If you shoot it out of a S&W 29/629, you can jack it up to an ear-splitting, hard recoiling round; however, why do that when you can get a great manstopper that will stay in a human body and deliver its enormous energy? Such is the .357 Mag. In my view, it's faster, flatter-shooting, more accurate and has much better stopping power. Just opinion.
Ayoob says a lot of things. In "The Gravest Extreme." page 98 he considers the 1911 as an "experts only" weapon.
With its cock 'n lock feature, it really was at the time (and may still be). People carrying the 1911 in Israel quite often would get in brawls over carrying it that way (Condition 1). People considered it dangerous and like cowboys and the Wild West. And many people are dead today because they forgot to trip the safety before firing, so there's a reason.
In discussing women specifically, he notes that .45s and magnums are too powerful for small hands to control, page 40 (as if hand size determined strength). In a 2006 Combat Handguns issue, Ayoob mentioned 1911's as an option for women and men with small hands who have trouble qualifying with other designs. There are many experts out there with many opinions that are not necessarily factual or realistic. It is important to evaluate the content based on the content and not based on who said it.
Well, that was the opinion of many back then -- about women and guns -- and it hasn't proven to be the case. I once took my 110-pound woman friend out to shoot. I started her out with a .22LR and kept asking if I had anything more powerful. I got her up to the .44 Mag Ruger Redhawk and she ate it up! But really, back when Ayoob penned that stuff, who knew? I was kind of blown away!
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