In my opinion, just ask the good shots what they use, and copy. What you will find is that there are a number of well characterized loads, that shoot well in just about everyone's guns, and if you tinker, one of them will do slightly better than the others in one of your firearms.
So there are powders that do better as a class, than others, in particular applications, but it is extremely difficult to prove with any certainty, that anything new on the market, is actually, all that better than what is out there.
A huge problem with pistol powders is that few can shoot a pistol to its accuracy potential. And I mean few.
How many pistol shooters can do this at 50 yards, with a rest?
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How many pistol shooters can do this at 25 yards, offhand, one hand?
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I can't. There fore what is "accurate" or "not accurate" in my hands, may or may not be accurate or inaccurate because I can't shoot straight. The vast majority of accuracy claims are based on the
Texas Sharpshooter fallacy. Shooting is a skill, and it takes lots of practice to get good at it. I have my original test targets with my first SuperMatch M1a, and I am holding the ten ring on the reduced SR-1 target at 100 yards. But, given a couple decades of competitive shooting, I am holding the X ring. Any ideas I had about accurate loads, when I first started, were obviously more or less bogus, as my aiming error was greater than the ammunition error.
And due to delusions of self grandeur, everyone thinks they are the greatest shooter in world history, and that the bullets are going exactly were aimed.
The current advertising trend is accuracy uber allis. The market and advertising bureaus work in tandem, we want sugary sweet, they give us sugary sweet, and of course, the current sugary sweet is sold as the sweetest that ever was and ever will be. It used to be power, big, awesome, world killing galactic power, (expressed as velocity), was what the shooting community wanted, and if you look at old magazines and manuals, that is what they are dishing out. Accuracy was more or less unneeded because the wallop would do the rest.
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these Dagmar's on a 1957 Cadillac more or less tell what us what the male mind was thinking of. And bigger was better!
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There is much to be skeptical about any in print shill's claim about accuracy. They shoot, at most, three shot groups, which prove nothing about accuracy, consistency, or accuracy potential. One of the "greatest", Ken Warner, never put down the number of rounds he fired, he grouped test results as accurate, very accurate, poor, etc. It is telling, in one 45 ACP article he wrote, he "gave up on W231" but was extremely positive about the accuracy of HP38. Which is the same powder in a different colored bottle. It is obvious that Ken's test procedures and techniques are nonsense. However, he was just what industry wanted. It is as Noam Chomsky says: "
the purpose of advertising is to create ill informed consumers who make irrational choices"
Chase after the
powder du jour and you will end up with a shelf of partially used powder cans that sit around for decades, because they were not the end of history,