Most gun owners know the importance of choosing good self-defense ammo that works for their particular handgun. The problem is, most aren’t sure how to do that. How do you know which ones are good, which are only OK, and which ones excel? There are a few basic criteria for picking good self-defense ammunition for your particular handgun.
First, it has to be a round that expands.
Every bullet you fire in defense of yourself or others has a lawyer attached to it, so you’re responsible for what happens once it leaves your gun. Therefore, you need to do everything you can to avoid being responsible for shooting someone other than an attacker.
Ideally, self-defense ammunition will have a good blend of effective penetration and expansion. It should penetrate to a sufficient depth to compromise vital organs, but also expand enough to dump its energy into your target and then come to a stop.
Don’t listen to anything you hear about “stopping power.” Handguns don’t have much (relatively speaking). Newton’s Third Law dictates that a gun has to produce enough force to knock YOU down through recoil to produce enough force to do the same to the bad guy who’s coming at you. To get that, you’d need an elephant gun and unless you’re going up against graboids, that’s not gonna happen.
To sum up, you need expanding ammunition because it’s less likely to go through the target. But it needs enough penetrative ability to hit something that matters. Placement will take care of the rest, which is what you learn to do with shooting practice – it’s just as much about where your self-defense ammo goes as it is about which kind you buy.
Secondly, you need to choose ammunition that functions reliably in your gun. That means spending some dollars to find the brand that your firearm “likes” and shoots reliably. You’ll have to shoot some self-defense ammunition at the range, which – yes – is a bit expensive. But that’s the only way to be sure the ammo you’ve chosen works in your gun.
Most guns these days aren’t as particular as guns used to be even five to ten years ago. That said, some guns just seem to like certain brands and bullet weights more. They cycle certain rounds more reliably and shoot them more accurately. So you need to do the work to find those brands and varieties that work best with your gun.
Note how close the pistol/ammo combinations pattern relative to your practice ammunition. You want to use ammo that prints as close to your typical box of hardball as possible for consistency’s sake.
Once you find the best round for you and your handgun, the rest is easy. Lay in a good supply and stick with it.
My carry gun feeds most JHP ammo pretty well, but I’ve noticed that Winchester PDX1 tends to hit closest to the point of impact of the range ammo I typically buy (Blazer Brass, if you’re curious) so that’s what I carry.
Those are the basics. Your personal defense ammo has to be expanding and it has to work in your gun. So, how should you go about picking one?
It’s always good to choose a brand that has some sort of track record of success in the real world. It’s all well and good to buy the newest tactical hotness made by a bunch of cowboys in a turnip shed somewhere, but personal defense ammunition is a tool you’re staking your life on. It really has to work when you need it most.
This is where things get complicated. You have to do some legwork and make the best decision you can.
In my case, Winchester has been making ammo for a long time. The PDX projectile – meaning the bullet itself – is the same one that’s been used in Winchester’s premium JHP for ages, from Black Talon to Ranger T Series. It’s proven, or at least is as proven as a bullet can be. While there are no guarantees, I can reasonably expect it to work.
Plenty of testing data is out there, though you should be aware of its limitations. Ballistic gelatin is an imperfect simulation of human tissue; in fact, ballistic gelatin uses the aggregate density of all human tissue.
In other words, it’s the average of bone, skin, blood and muscle density. Per a conversation I had with Chris Laack, head of handgun ammunition development for Vista Outdoors (that’s who makes Federal and Speer and many more) at SHOT Show, the correlation seems to be about a 2:3 ratio. If a bullet penetrates 12 inches in gel, it will penetrate about 8 inches in a person. So bear that in mind when you look at testing results, such as that done by Lucky Gunner Labs or ShootingTheBull410.
For my money, the best ammunition testing is done by YouTuber Paul Harrell, who uses an actual meat target. He’s incredibly thorough.
Conventional wisdom is (or at least used to be) that you find out what your local cops are carrying and buy that, which is actually not bad advice. For one, it’s what the professionals use, so why shouldn’t you? Secondly, some prosecutors have been known to question ammunition choice in the wake of a self-defense shooting.
The idea some prosecutors have is that if a person selected a particular type of ammunition – such as jacketed hollow points – they clearly intended to kill someone. According to Massad Ayoob, you can easily answer them by saying, “Well counselor, the police use this same brand and type of ammunition to protect people, so I thought it would be a good idea to get the same kind to protect myself and my family.”
So what do cops carry?
Police officers almost universally carry jacketed hollow point ammo. There are a number of bullet styles – which I’ll get to momentarily – but JHP reigns supreme among law enforcement at the local, state, and federal levels. It’s the most common self-defense ammo.
What brands, specifically?
Federal HST, Remington Golden Saber, Speer Gold Dot and Winchester Ranger are the most prevalent. The ammunition industry makes “law-enforcement only” ammunition, but it’s typically no different than what you can buy at your local Sportsman’s Warehouse. Additionally, some retailers will sell LEO-only ammo to civilians, though you’ll have to do some hunting online.
However, there’s something you should know. The typical police officer carries a duty pistol such as a GLOCK 17 or SIG P320. The typical civilian carries a compact semi-automatic, with many preferring a subcompact. Why that’s important is that not all self-defense ammunition is made to function well in pistols with short barrels.
A truncated barrel also truncates muzzle velocity, and the thing about expanding ammunition is that – depending on its design – it may not work below a certain velocity threshold. Therefore, if you carry a small pistol, such as a Smith & Wesson Shield, GLOCK 43 or Ruger LC9s, select a load that’s designed for a short barrel.
That’s a lot of words, but all the information I’ve absorbed about ammunition and terminal performance leads to me to conclude the following:
The really popular styles of ammunition for practical purposes, including self-defense and hunting, are the most popular for a reason in most instances. They’ve been proven to work reliably and – at this stage in the game – it isn’t terribly likely that the wheel is getting reinvented anytime soon.
Incremental improvements will happen, but JHP has been shown again and again to be the best choice for self-defense ammunition in a handgun. If my mind changes on this front, I’ll fess up about it.
So you have to do some homework to find a good carry load. There are a lot of different brands and flavors of self-defense ammunition out there, and lots of claims about each one. So doing the homework first is a very good idea. Now get to it.