daBear said:
Oh God, here we go again......
dB
Yeah... I spend a nice peaceful week in Montana, puttering around the house and happily blasting away at the local range (arriving there with pistol on hip, not in a locked box and trigger locked), and look at this...
Surprised it didn't take a right turn and become a bear defense thread (although I am mulling the idea of buying a Glock 20C for bear defense should I head up North again next year... no room or inclination to carry a shotgun with a Panjar gas rock drill, car battery, GPS total station, surveyor's tripod, etc strapped on the backpack)...
Hmmmm... I suppose I could post whore if my post total was important, but I think I'll just get 'er all done in one.
gushulak said:
Have fun defending yourself in court should you ever have to use a firearm in self defence using handloads. The defence will eat you up.
Ummmm... the defence should be on your side... but I digress:
Yes, and the state will eat you up if you use a handgun with an aggressive name like "Cobra". Ayoob warns against that one as well, and I'm told he repeats that warning in one of his more recent articles. With the bad name Glocks are getting in the newspapers these days, I suppose it is just a matter of time before we shouldn't carry Glock's anymore...
And they will eat you up if you've been to some nasty tactical school with a name like "Lethal Force Institute".
And they will eat you up if you use a laser and then deliberately drilled him right through the sternum when you could just as easily have used the laser to shoot the assailant in the leg.
And if you have some Black Talons still laying around, you better not carry them for defense, because then the state will REALLY eat you up, now that everybody in the world has been told how inhumane they are.
Of course, if you carry a handgun for self defence, it can just as easily be taken from you and used against you.
Now all of these things CAN happen... and in fact, all this stuff we're supposed to cringe in fear and run away from has happened at one time or another in the past. However (as we like to tell the gun grabbers when they're condemning firearms after some tragedy) the exception does not prove the rule. Or anything close to it.
There are assorted good reasons for factory ammunition to be a better choice in the majority of personal situations, for the majority of people, but fear of what the state might do isn't a very credible reason.
With the variety of tried and proven factory loads on the market by major manufacturer's, why take the risk? Its about the stupudist thing you can do....using your own handloads.
Well, I have two rounds of issue carry ammunition sitting in my "treasures' box - both of which have dented primers but did not fire. Happily, this happened on the range, not while somebody was at work. So perhaps Forrest Gump said it best "Stupid is as stupid does..."
I keep having to see this from Redleg's side however: what risk? I bet I can find more press clippings of people who had their firearm taken away from them by an assailant than you can find of somebody who got raked over the coals because they used handloads. In fact I know I can. Does that mean we shouldn't take the risk and instead should choose not to carry a handgun where legally allowed to do so?
Or is that somehow "different", and not enough of a risk to worry much about?
Go to the local gunstore or online and buy some Win Ranger T's, Rem GS, Speer GD's, Federal HST's, or get yourself one damn good lawyer.
Pretty broad assumption here. I've heard of references to exactly TWO cases, spaced over a 20+ year period - I can even find you the case names if I get annoyed enough to go dig them up. How long is your list of instances where this happened - bigger than two?
Nobody on this site seem's to disagree with Kleck's claim that there are around 2.5 million defensive uses of firearms each year. And that only about 1% result in any shots fired. So now we have about 25,000 incidents per year where shots are fired. Of course, some of those are warning shots, some complete misses, etc. I don't know how to break it down beyond that, but let's take a ballpark guess which I think is a little bit lowball and say about 3% of actual shootings involve the use of handloads by the "dummies" who aren't frightened witless of what might happen if they carry a handgun for self defense.... errrr... sorry, wrong argument, carry handloads for self defense. So that's... what... about 750 instances each year in the US where somebody shoots an assailant with their handloads?
Okay, 750 instances times about 25 years of intensive magazine writing on self defense by Ayood and others. So we have two instances identified where handloads became an issue in court (not the central one, BTW) compared to, (to keep the numbers simple), about 20,000 defensive shootings with handloads.
So, you have about a 1/10,000 chance of having your use of handloads becoming an issue leading to court. Thinking back to your university statistical analysis courses, what do you need for a confidence interval to even have statistical significance? Most will agree that the narrowest interpretation of that would be about three σ. 1/10,000 falls so far below that test that it isn't even a significant number. To put it on more personal terms, if somebody told you that if you carried a handgun for self defense, you had a 1/10,000 chance of having it taken from you and used against you - would you decide that carrying a handgun was just too risky?
I doubt you would. Incidentally, if you don't like the best guess, ballpark estimates I used above, feel free to suggest numbers you think are more likely.
gushulak said:
Massad Ayoob has written plenty of articles on the use of handloads and has citied cases in which he has personally testified on the use of handloads vs. factory loads.
Ayoob has also written articles detailing where people got raked over the coals for having a hangun with a name like "Cobra" or "Combat Masterpiece" - does anybody suddenly want to advise people not to carry a handgun with a less than innocious name?
Ayoob has indeed written many articles referring to this. However, he always cites the same two incidents in these articles - when he cites any at all. One would think his list of examples would grow, or at least change from one article to the next, due to the piling up of additional cases over the years he has been issuing this dire warning. My personal suspicion is that he uses the same two over and over again because they are the only two he has ever become aware of - you of course are free to draw your own differing conclusion as to why this is.
In both of these instances, the handloads weren't even the major factor. In the first, his police acquaintance had loaded ammunition considerably hotter than the issue ammunition they were using back in the day, but the central point was that this was a negligent discharge where he had insufficient justification to shoot in the first place. Was the issue the fact they were handloads - or the fact he didn't carry what he was issued, but instead handloaded rounds significantly more powerful than ones the police force had issued him? Civilians don't get issued ammunition, and why would we presume that handloads are always more powerful than what is being issued to police? He was still acquitted, BTW.
The second involved an apparently suicidal girlfriend/wife (it's been a couple of years since I read the stories of each case). The issue was whether he murdered her or she shot herself; the state used ammunition other than what he had in the revolver for ballistics testing. His lawyer, apparently, didn't feel any particular need to take issue with what was clearly an undefendable way of collecting forensic evidence. If you were using Speer's new factory Short Barrel defensive loads in your snubby, would you mind terribly if the state did their forensic testing with Speer's regular Gold Dot loads - or perhaps Winchester instead because they just happened to have some laying around? If they were all factory loads... "no problem"?
So, were the handloads a problem - or was the real problem retaining a moron for a lawyer and then the defendant being a moron himself for allowing his lawyer to accept that forensic evidence without attacking the validity of the methodology?
This has led to many civil cases where this has been an issue and has lead to troubles in an otherwise justifiable shooting.
"Many"???
Well if this is true as you say, then surely anyone claiming this can easily name specific instances where this happened. So, can you name a short list from these many cases... or are you just faithfully repeating what you have heard? Nothing too extreme: about a half dozen or so general references to specific cases should establish their "many" frequency.
Why take the chance when your life is on the line using reloads?
That's a different issue from the legal one. My short answer is I have had factory ammunition fail to go bang on a few cases over the years, but I have never had one of my reloads fail to go bang. Why take a chance on a factory load that I personally haven't ensured has a flash hole that passes all the way through the case - like one of the factory issue rounds in my treasures box suffers from?
And while I have carefully crafted target/recreational/competitive loads that just happen to use proven defensive bullets and are extremely accurate in all my handguns, I have yet to find a factory load that performs just as well in all of them (rather than just good in one, so-so in the other).
Use factory ammo and reduce chance the defence can use anything against you.
If my defence lawyer is using anything against me, I'm going to get a new lawyer...
Besides, factory ammo is consistent and has proven performance, just as you said.
If it is that perfect in all guns, why do law enforcement agencies regularly test all ammunition submitted to bids in their issue handguns - and reject ammunition not infrequently on the basis of that ammunition testing? Do you have the cash to fire three or four thousand rounds of CorBon, Double Tap, or similar ammunition for YOUR reliablity testing in your firearm? Or do you just take a chance that there won't be a problem, just like those using their proven handloads take a chance it won't become an issue in the event of a shooting?
This argument always comes around to what the evil DA will do to you, and the Soccer Mom jury. Which conveniently sidesteps the fact that not all DA's are out to get you, that if you have any brains in your head you have a pretty good lawyer as well, and (amazingly enough) juries of ordinary people if anything feel more sympathetic to somebody who was attacked by somebody who in most cases has a long criminal record of violence. Anybody wanna bet which way the "Soccer Mom Jury" is going to lean when they hear Joe Dirtbag had a criminal record for raping some Soccer Mom's little girl, or sticking a gun in some Soccer Mom's other Soccer Mom friend's face and carjacking her?
Of course, there's also the fact that most good DA lawyers end up going to being defense criminal lawyers, and are generally speaking legally superior to the nasty-ambitious lawyers who are still in the DA's office trying to use it as a springboard in politics. They are probably better politicians than the good defense lawyer, but unlikely to be superior trial lawyers.
Ultimately, the DA who reviews the shooting is not there to "discredit you anyway he can" as gets constantly alleged - which is why Ayoob and others probably can only find two references to repeat where handguns figured as a legal issue in a defensive shooting. If DA's were out to get those involved in defensive shootings, there'd be one hell of a lot more case law out there to draw from. The DA is there to review the evidence of what happened as presented by police, witnesses' statments, whatever statements you choose to give, forensic evidence, etc. That is compared to the relevant law in that jurisdiction regarding use of force. And on that comparison the decision is made on whether you were justified in your use of force.
Yes, you might just run into the relatively rare malicious, ambitious, DA who tries to use the "handloads" issue to string you up - but then again, he might go after you because your handgun was a "Cobra" or you got training at the "Lethal Force Institute" or whatever. But the chances of that happening are infinitisimally small, and I'll bet nobody worried about handloads would turn down a free trip to the Lethal Force Institute or not carry a handgun with an aggressive name because that might happen as well.
In the grand scheme of things, the legal risk to carrying handloads is no greater than many other related risks that nobody gives any serious thought to. However, everybody gets to make their own choice, based on their own circumstances.
- Not! I have a place in Idaho too.
