Massad Ayoob - Gun Digests Best Concealed Carry Guns & CCW Gear eShort

THIS S&W MODEL 28 .357 and department issue duty gear were carried by one of authors brother officers in the 1970s. Many still rely on this technology.

There are lots of choices to make in this matter. The trick is making the right ones for the right reasons.

The gun? In the military it will be issued to you, and in police service or security work it might be picked for you, and thats that. If the gun youre likely to be fighting with is, say, an issue Beretta 9mm, thats the gun to be both training and competing with, to best hard wire your abilities to reflexively use that weapon when your life is on the line. (And youve got a fine gun to do it with, anyway. Ive seen champions like Ernest Langdon and David Olhasso win major titles shooting the Beretta 92 against everything else out there in IDPA, and have seen the Beretta in the hands of military aces like Marine Gunnery Sergeant Brian Zins win the Distinguished and the Presidents Hundred against the most finely tuned 1911s at Camp Perry. I won the next-to-last PPC match I shot, a Police Service Pistol event, with a 92G.)

You can live with the company gun, but wish it was more finely tuned to better win a match with it? Consider buying your own match version. I know lots of cops who carry a Glock 22 on the street, but use a longer barrel Glock 35 for IPSC Production Class competition. In the police revolver days, it was common for officers to carry a four-inch service revolver on the street, and maybe use it in Service competition to get a six-inch version for Distinguished matchesand perhaps to have a custom gun made up on the same frame and action with a heavy Douglas or Apex six-inch bull barrel and a sophisticated BoMar or Aristocrat sight rib for open class competition.

Each modification lighter trigger, heavier barrel, sights changes the match gun a little bit more from the street gun. The individual shooter has to balance his or her particular needs or goals. If a slightly lighter trigger, longer sight radius, or sights more suitable for ranges than dark alleys give that particular shooter a better scoreand winning the match is more important than perfect replication of the street guns handling and shooting characteristicsthe battery of similar but not the same guns may make huge sense.

But if youre shooting competition purely to improve your skills with your home defense gun or carry gun and could care less about winning a prize, shooting with the exact same gun youre likely to be carrying on that day makes the most sense of all.

Only you can make the which gun choice.

BULLET TESTING ON MASSIVE COW femurs is predictive of whether a bullet is likely to smash a human pelvis or not.

MSC (MAXIMUM SUB-CALIBER) AMMO, designed by Ed Sanow, was probably the best load ever developed for a .25, but history still shows us that a .25 auto is a poor choice for self-defense.

X-RAYS CAN SHOW what to look for during autopsy.

If caliber isnt chosen for you, pick for your needs: the person giving you advice may have found the best choice for him, but not necessarily for you. The four-inch-barrel Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum was the gun the great Elmer Keith carried until the end of his days: he had helped develop it, over a lifetime of hunting big game, working cattle, and living outdoors with large things to shoot. Ross Seyfried, the second American world champion of the combat pistol, won the title with a Pachmayr Custom Colt .45 auto, but carried a Model 29 .44 Mag identical to Keiths when working a cattle ranch, and for some of his career as a big game hunting guide, for exactly the same reasons. When I hunted big game in Africa, I carried a four-inch S&W .44 Magnum, because in that time and place, my needs were much like theirs. As an old guy who spends less time outdoors than I once did, that gun no longer suits my needs, and the .44 Magnum is certainly not the best choice for your elderly grandmother with osteoporosis. Choice is based on individual need and individual capability.

Once youve decided on revolver or auto, chosen all metal or polymer construction, picked the platform and the brand and the caliber, its time to choose the ammunition. There again, you want to make the choices for the right reasons. Theres a lot of myth on this topic thats spread as fact. Were talking here about defensive ammo, not competition ammo.

TWO 9MM 115 GRAIN BULLETS recovered from flesh and bone that was alive at time of shots. Top, Federal 9BP has mushroomed nicely. Below, faster Cor-Bon has fragmented to a degree, but caused a distinctly wider, more macerated (chewed up) wound channel.

Most private citizens who carry guns or keep them at home for self-defense dont get to debrief many police officers or other citizens whove been in gunfights. Most of them dont get to talk with homicide detectives who investigate shootings in detail, or surgeons who treat gunshot wounds, or medical examiners who perform the autopsies when those shootings prove fatal. Nor do they generally get to have long, detailed discussions with the engineers who design and test todays ammunition, using ballistic gelatin and various barriers in the course of their extensive research.

My work does allow me to speak in detail with all those people. Researching gunfight results, going over the detailed reports of fatal shootings and discussing them with the people who put them together, and picking the brains of industry professionals have been part of my job for decades. Nineteen years as chair of the firearms committee of the American Society of Law Enforcement Trainers, and the last several years on the advisory board of the International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association, have given me an uncommon opportunity to access lots of people in lots of law enforcement agencies large and small, to get the inside story on how assorted guns and ammunition have actually worked in real-world gunfights.

The collective input from those real-world sources causes me to shake my head at some of the myths and magical thinking about defensive ammunition that have appeared to some degree in the firearms press, and flourish to a much greater degree on the Internet. Lets look at a few of those.

Myth #1: Hollow points wont expand anyway, so why use them?

Reality: Unless youre using old or old-fashioned hollow points, thats just not true. The modern high-tech hollow points such as Federal HST, Remington Golden Saber, Speer Gold Dot, or Winchester Ranger-T, almost always expand in actual shootings unless theyve gone through something like steel first (tends to crush the nose cavity shut) or plaster wallboard (fills the cavity with inert matter and prevents expansion). And even then, sometimes these bullets will still expand after theyve pierced the given barrier to strike flesh.