With all the choices, What & Why

I've never been shot or shot anyone. My experience with SD ammo is shooting paper.

If it feeds and shoots straight, it's good to go in my opinion.

I don't buy into magic bullet marketing. Humans are soft targets and a small piece of metal flying at 800-1400 feet per second will have a devastating effect regardless.

Of course that is if you hit what you are shooting at.

Shot placement is good too.

I have only shot feral dogs with defensive ammo, no 2-legged problems. That said, the performance of Gold Dots and Federal HST has left me not looking for anything else.

I've tried most of the major manufacturers. I'm currently using HST, which is reliable, has a solid reputation, performs well in all tests I've seen and most importantly feeds reliably in my CCW's. That last factor is most important, as I've tried other manufacturers who also have a great product, but who's ammunition does not feed as well for me.

Sol writes:

I've never been shot or shot anyone. My experience with SD ammo is shooting paper.

If it feeds and shoots straight, it's good to go in my opinion.

I don't buy into magic bullet marketing. Humans are soft targets and a small piece of metal flying at 800-1400 feet per second will have a devastating effect regardless.

Of course that is if you hit what you are shooting at.

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This is me as well. When I began carrying (again) after years out of LE, what I could get my hands on enough of to test and "qualify" my guns without losing my home was plain-old Remington JHP fodder. At the time, my EDC was a Bersa Thunder in .380, so that was the caliber. When I went up to 9mm, that was also the maker I could easily source ammo for, so I stayed with it.

Remington-UMC 115-grain JHP in the PF9 and P95, and their 88-grain JHP in the Bersa.

I don't buy into magic bullet marketing. Humans are soft targets and a small piece of metal flying at 800-1400 feet per second will have a devastating effect regardless.

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Yep. Real-world results have proven time and again that there is practically no difference in the the effect of 9mm, .40SW, or .45ACP on the human body when using quality ammo.

The only ammo I specifically seek out is Speer's "Short Barrel" HP Gold Dots for my .22WMR Black Widow. Other than that, I shop for basic weight/type/velocity, but not manufacturer or brand name.

Look for projectiles that will place leaking holes reliably where you would like for them to be.

One can go broke worrying about having the most up to date "Tactical" ammunition stuffed in ones handgun.
Truth is any bullet will kill dead as dry paint one time and completely fail the next.

Find a load you feel comfortable with and that shoots to your satisfaction and that doesn't bleed your wallet dry every time you buy 50 rounds and stick with it.

Whenever I'm working a range qual/training session, and I want to shortcut some earnest shooter's desire to "debate" superior handgun make/model, caliber or brand of ammunition, I suggest we go downrange and run them and their equipment through some demanding, rapid drills with which they're unfamiliar. Some things they didn't get to see someone else perform prior to having to do it themselves.

More often than not, it afterward becomes a discussion about how they might best work to improve their performance under stress, meaning being able to get solid hits on threat targets, handling & manipulating the equipment, more suitable tactics, etc.

A surprising number of folks discover they not only can't get the hits they expect to get, but they experience some moments of confusion (mistakes) when it comes to handling & manipulating their equipment under stress.

You can't buy mindset & skillset in a nice box.

You hear over and over to "shoot what you train with".

As of right now, I have the magazines from 3 different pistols loaded up with a combination of Federal Guard Dog and Hydra-Shock. I am a normal working guy with a kid in college. This stuff is expensive (at least to me). To be honest, I really can not afford to train with $1.00++ a round ammo.

I have been thinking about changing up my thinking and carrying what I can afford to shoot.

"Old school", Federal Hi-Shok are available and in my budget for both 9mm and .45acp. I think I'll give them a try. I realize that there are better more hi-tech bullets now around for use. However these I can afford and they are time tested.

Gold Dot and HST. Both have sterling reputations and both have always functioned 100% for me. In my eyes, the HST is a superior design by a hair or two but the Gold Dot has a very well established street history of effectiveness. I like both quite a lot, across calibers and weights.

CANNONMAN said:

... He left and I happily strapped on my old 1911 filled with wad cutters, shook my head and thought to myself, "A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still." By the way. those wad cutters... I know exactly what they would do. I've been loading um for over more than a couple of decades.

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You're talking about the old-style truncated metal case target wadcutters in your 1911? Or a 200gr hardcast LSWC?

My father once carried a Colt Gov Model that had been reworked by the Border Patrol Armory in the 60's, after having been marked as being used in both the US and British armed services. He really liked that old slab-sided, mottled finish 1911, and carried 185gr MC target wadcutters in it, having been told it had been tuned to feed them. (He also had a couple boxes of the old Remington Hi-Way Master loads that were given to him by the BP agent who traded him the gun.)

He liked his MC wadcutters when he carried that 1911, but then again, that was back in the days when JHP's weren't all that available for .45 ACP, and not all Gov or Commander models would reliably feed them without some work and trying to find the right magazines. (I had a few Vega mags that actually worked well with the old CCI 200gr JHP in my Commander, myself.)

CANNONMAN said:

I'll try for better threads in the future. ...

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What needs to be better? You didn't get the answers or comments you were wanting?

Having been a long time .45 shooter & user, as well as a LE firearms instructor for 24 years, including being trained as armorer for much of that time (including having been through the Colt Model O Pistol armorer class), I've had a bit of opportunity to listen to caliber/ammunition debates, discussions, testing, use, etc.

There are some pretty decent modern HP loads available nowadays. I've used a bunch of different brands/loads over the years.

I was an avid handloader as a young man, but haven't done it as a hobby for going on 30 years.

Ammunition availability & choices can change over time.

Mindset, experience, skillset and common sense? Can't be bought, has to be earned and developed. Well, we hope those things also improve and can be applied to any guns and ammo we might be using, right?

These "best caliber/bullet for SD" discussions, while fun, seem unresolvable to me. In order to answer this question, we'd have to do a controlled experiment on bodies and have some way of measuring "damage". Ballistic gelatin tests are on the right track, but I don't think they accurately depict shooting into a person (people have clothing and variable density tissues, such as bones and lungs). We simply don't have enough quality data to do a statistical hypothesis test, which is really what we're asking for.

What we DO know is that even the lowly .22 LR is lethal if delivered directly into someone's aorta. That means that the one objective thing we can be confident in saying is "shot placement is a huge factor".

So my proposed answer to the question "With all the choices, what and why?" would be "whichever caliber you're most accurate with", and the "why" would be "because shot placement is the biggest factor in lethality".

I personally know only one civilian who has ever had to use a gun in a defensive situation. That was my wife seven years ago; she has yet to ask me what ammunition was in the gun.