How to Select Your Carry Ammunition

Many concealed carriers will spend hours pouring over data about ammunition. They'll read about bullet weights, powder levels, hollow points, soft points, frangible bullets, muzzle velocities, and penetration depths in ballistic gelatin.

I'm going to try and simplify this for you. What should your best all around ammunition look like? What kind of bullet, what weight, and how much powder should it have?

What type of bullet should you carry?

Some flavor of hollow points. Hollow points dump more of their energy in the target, can cause larger wounds that create more blood loss and could help stop an attacker, and are less likely to over-penetrate your target and injure some third party behind them.

All that being said, only about 20-25% of hollow points actually expand when they hit a human body. This is taken from actual shootings, not gelatin. Why isn't that number higher? Clothing sometimes fills that nose and prevents expansion, sometimes you just hit the target at an odd angle, sometimes you miss.

Just like our motivation for carrying a gun, it's all odds, cost benefit, and risk management. We want to carry rounds that have the best chance of staying in our attacker and stopping the attack, and for that job we want hollow points.

What weight of bullet should you carry?

If you look at a box of ammunition you'll see a number followed by "gr". This is the weight of the bullet in grains, an apothecary unit of measurement. You might think off the bat that more weight is better but that's not necessarily the case.

Generally, lighter bullets moving faster are going to expand more reliably than slower heavier bullets. What drives that hollow point to expand on impact is the force of the material pushing into the nose of the bullet. The faster you hit, the more fluid pressure builds up and helps to mushroom that round.

If the bullet is heavy it's harder to get it up to speed and speed is our number one factor to try and get these bullets to expand. This is especially true of semi-automatic cartridges because of the short cases and doubly true for a lot the concealed carry pistols out there because our barrels are also so short.

What brand of ammunition?

My best recommendation for carry ammo? New, factory, once loaded, and brass cased ammunition. Please do not carry hand loads or reloads for self defense. Why? Factory ammunition is more reliable. That's the whole reason.

Yes, it's true that if you look at enough ammunition from ANY manufacturer that you will find defects. Nothing made by man is perfect and anything you make millions of is going to have mistakes. Easy, easy fix for this. Inspect your ammunition before you load it into your magazines.

Lastly

Prove the ammunition in your gun. Take at least 100 rounds to the range and make sure your gun will eat that ammo with no malfunctions before you rely on it for your life.

Don't drive yourself crazy looking at ballistic data and gelatin. I have never heard of anyone who has ever been raped, robbed, or murdered by gelatin. If you want to do research, look at actual shootings that have been evaluated.

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-Patrick Smith Jr.

-Gun Safe Academy

-Omaha, NE

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