Ruger PC Carbine - Merry Christmas from the wife!

ArmedGinger

ArmedGinger

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Wife picked me up a Ruger PC Carbine in 9mm. Haven't had a chance to take it out yet but already upgraded it with an M*Carbo Extended Bolt Knob, Muzzle Brake, and a shock buffer. Just for ####s and giggles I threw my Burris Veracity PH scope on it. Figured I'd see if I could ring the 400 yard gong with this thing.

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Yeah, I've never taken that '9mm isn't sufficient for defensive use' nonsense seriously. Just an extension of '.22lr will hit a winter jacket and bounce off' idiocy. 9mm Luger has been a dominant cartridge for light military and police arms for over a century for good reasons. For SMGs the reasons are obvious: low recoil, lightweight ammunition, sufficient stopping power for near to middle range use in battle. For police sidearms it's just as obvious: sufficient stopping potential without massively excessive penetration, especially when using hollowpoints.

Sure 10mm is more powerful. So what? Does one always need to use something two or three times as expensive, just to be a 'real man'? Seems a lot like how teenaged boys talk tough about their video gaming skills, frankly, and it's an embarrassment. Show me one Internet tough guy bragging on his 10mm and ragging on 9mm who will volunteer to stand at 500 yards and take a hit from a 9mm round of any description. Just one. I'll wait.
 
GerardSamija said:
Yeah, I've never taken that '9mm isn't sufficient for defensive use' nonsense seriously. Just an extension of '.22lr will hit a winter jacket and bounce off' idiocy. 9mm Luger has been a dominant cartridge for light military and police arms for over a century for good reasons. For SMGs the reasons are obvious: low recoil, lightweight ammunition, sufficient stopping power for near to middle range use in battle. For police sidearms it's just as obvious: sufficient stopping potential without massively excessive penetration, especially when using hollowpoints.

Sure 10mm is more powerful. So what? Does one always need to use something two or three times as expensive, just to be a 'real man'? Seems a lot like how teenaged boys talk tough about their video gaming skills, frankly, and it's an embarrassment. Show me one Internet tough guy bragging on his 10mm and ragging on 9mm who will volunteer to stand at 500 yards and take a hit from a 9mm round of any description. Just one. I'll wait.
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I watched a clip on Youtube from "IraqVeteran8888" called "How far will a 9mm kill" where they shot sheets plywood and a ballistic gel torso out to 440 yards. At 440 yards the 124gr FMJ was passing cleanly through the plywood and it's 2"x4" frame. Same with the ballistic gel torso. Clean through. So yeah, the issue is more a case of can you hit the target at that distance rather than will you incapacitate it if you hit it at that distance.

EDIT: Didn't see that someone already mentioned this on Page 1..... Sorry fellas.
 
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armybuck041 said:
I watched a clip on Youtube from "IraqVeteran8888" called "How far will a 9mm kill" where they shot sheets plywood and a ballistic gel torso out to 440 yards. At 440 yards the 124gr FMJ was passing cleanly through the plywood and it's 2"x4" frame. Same with the ballistic gel torso. Clean through. So yeah, the issue is more a case of can you hit the target at that distance rather than will you incapacitate it if you hit it at that distance.
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That's the video just above my post, yeah. You'll get no JHP expansion at such distances of course - he promises to do a follow-up video testing that. But a 9mm hole through your body is a 9mm hole, whether it's at 50 yards or 440 yards. And I'd guess it would still do enough damage at 600 yards to kill if it hits something vital. Heck, CCI SV .22lr still retains 35fpe at 600 yards, and 35fpe is more than enough to get through a skull. Bullets are dangerous until they stop moving. But yeah, 10mm JHP will certainly cause more 'splatter' if that's what's wanted, and I'd agree that for some applications, such as a bear defense pistol, I'd want 10mm hardcast with a flat nose.
 
GerardSamija said:
Seems a lot like how teenaged boys talk tough about their video gaming skills, frankly, and it's an embarrassment. Show me one Internet tough guy bragging on his 10mm and ragging on 9mm who will volunteer to stand at 500 yards and take a hit from a 9mm round of any description. Just one. I'll wait.
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Your reference to teenaged boy with video games made me chuckle. My son, like many other young men, grew up playing some first player shooter type of games. He, like all of his friends love to extol their knowledge of various firearms platforms through sheer knowledge of these games.

I remember a few years back bringing him to my club. Brought a variety of guns for him to try.

Now, my son at almost 21 is significantly bigger than me but all the same I thought I'd ask him what he would like to shoot. He looked over what I had brought and said the X95 looks cool (which it does!). At that point he never shot one before - he shot a couple of my .22s and that was it. He said yeah, that (X95) will be just like the video games. He said he is familiar with it (Tavor I guess). Regardless I showed him how to safely handle it and then showed him how to load it. When he went to shoot it, he jumped back. "The recoil!" he exclaims. "What recoil?" I ask. I said, "hey, shouldn't you be comfortable with the Tavor? After all, according to you it's just like the video game". I moved him to the PC Carbine. Same thing - he said it was hard to keep it on target at 25 yards. I said, yeah, that's because there's no mouse and keyboard here...lol... Then I put him up on the M4 shooting 12ga slugs. I have a video of him shooting them and he kept jumping and was screaming like a little girl (incidentally his teenage sister who is smaller than me has shot all these with no problems). Apparently during the last two shots with the 12ga he kept his eye closed while the gun was pointed forward. He then requested to go back to a bolt action .22 for the rest of the afternoon.

PCCs are fantastic HD guns.

Congrats to the OP for the new Christmas present. Count yourself blessed to have a wife who will buy such a thoughtful, cool Christmas present.
 
GerardSamija said:
That's the video just above my post, yeah. You'll get no JHP expansion at such distances of course - he promises to do a follow-up video testing that. But a 9mm hole through your body is a 9mm hole, whether it's at 50 yards or 440 yards. And I'd guess it would still do enough damage at 600 yards to kill if it hits something vital. Heck, CCI SV .22lr still retains 35fpe at 600 yards, and 35fpe is more than enough to get through a skull. Bullets are dangerous until they stop moving. But yeah, 10mm JHP will certainly cause more 'splatter' if that's what's wanted, and I'd agree that for some applications, such as a bear defense pistol, I'd want 10mm hardcast with a flat nose.
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There's very few situations, if any, that someone will be in a HD or SD situation at 400-600 yards. Probably not even 50 or 100 yards on average. The ballistic gel blocks or better yet the ballistic gel skeleton experiment videos are always interesting because it provides more of a visual representation of damage, as opposed to a lot of the academic discussions with ballistic flight data, trajectory, weight, etc. I think the FBI uses these to gauge effectiveness. Ultimately, folks just need to know whether they can stop a threat, not necessarily argue about all the academic and scientific theory behind it.

Also something to consider is the need to test SD or HD rounds in a particular gun. Just because a certain round feeds reliably in a 9mm pistol doesn't mean it will feed reliably in a 9mm carbine. And some guns are pickier on some ammo than others. My 9mm carbines cannot consistently feed Hornady 9mm Critical Defence 124 or 135gr rounds . But someone else's carbine it may feed fine. Same with something that may work on mine but not someone else's. Even though JHP rounds are expensive to run through testing at the range, better to find out then what works and what doesn't rather than presume and be up the creek without a paddle when a real life scenario requires proper function. All the internet tests and information online about round X or Y are rendered moot if those rounds don't reliably feed or eject in your gun. So always find what works best through experimentation. Just my 2 cents...
 
That sort of thing contributed significantly to my decision, even before buying my PCC, to settling on 1 bullet weight. Eliminating one variable from the complex set of values involved meant I could tune my TNW to suit that bullet weight and small range of velocities - about 100fps between the weakest and the most powerful among 147gr cartridges on the market here.

Polishing the feed ramp and otherwise optimizing the action resulted in zero failures to feed or eject, whether cheap Remington UMC with a small flat tip, or whatever JHP with a big hole in the front and sharper edges. I doubt I could have achieved such reliability if I just shot whatever bullet weights and velocities out of the same firearm. Along similar lines I chose 140gr as my standard for my Sig Cross in 6.5CM. Just makes sense to me, shooting FMJ and hunting rounds of the same weight, to achieve close to identical trajectories. Better to standardize where one can, reducing the variables and simplifying targeting.
 
GerardSamija said:
That sort of thing contributed significantly to my decision, even before buying my PCC, to settling on 1 bullet weight. Eliminating one variable from the complex set of values involved meant I could tune my TNW to suit that bullet weight and small range of velocities - about 100fps between the weakest and the most powerful among 147gr cartridges on the market here.

Polishing the feed ramp and otherwise optimizing the action resulted in zero failures to feed or eject, whether cheap Remington UMC with a small flat tip, or whatever JHP with a big hole in the front and sharper edges. I doubt I could have achieved such reliability if I just shot whatever bullet weights and velocities out of the same firearm. Along similar lines I chose 140gr as my standard for my Sig Cross in 6.5CM. Just makes sense to me, shooting FMJ and hunting rounds of the same weight, to achieve close to identical trajectories. Better to standardize where one can, reducing the variables and simplifying targeting.
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Agree...one of the products I quite enjoyed..and I think Tenda carried it, is the Federal Practice and Defend line of ammo. Aside from the fact that price was excellent, you get 50 rounds of Syntech training rounds of a certain weight (say, 147gr 9mm) and also 50 rounds of JHP defensive ammo - in this case Federal HST, in the same box. You can practice rather inexpensively with the same weight that would you use in an emergency but also see how the JHP rounds react to your targets.

While it's out of stock now...it's worthwhile getting on the notification list. All things considered it's tremendous value (considering normally a box of 20 x HST rounds are close to $40 already. Here you get 50 of them and then 50 Syntech training rounds too).

https://www.gotenda.com/product/federal-practice-defend-9mm-147-gr-hst-synthetic-box-of-100/
 
If I weren't well stocked on every kind of cartridge I might need for many years to come, I'd go for something like that. If a particularly good deal ever comes up on 9mm JHP I might jump on it, but it would have to come close to my initial investment in a batch of Winchester 147gr JHP of $25/50. Some kid in Coquitlam who bought a pile of the stuff then decided his gun liked hotter, lighter rounds better.
 
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