Massad Ayoob frequently tells of a case in which he was involved where this became an issue. One of the questions in the case was the distance between the defendant and the alleged attacker. With factory ammo, the standard practice is to obtain exemplar rounds from the factory's stored samples from the same lot, fire them from different distances at the same kind of material the alleged attacker was wearing, and by the powder marks, you can deduce the distance in the actual shooting. With handloads, you may or may not have others available from the same loading session for comparison, and even if you do, it's your word (rather than the factory) that they're the same, and you have motivation to lie about it.

He recommends not just using factory, but finding out what your local police use in their guns, and carrying it (assuming it functions perfectly in your pistol). It's hard for a prosecutor to say there's something malevolent about your ammo when it's what the local police have chosen. He further recommends tearing off the part of the box with the lot number on it and keeping it somewhere, and replace it every time you change your carry ammo to a new lot.

On the other hand, my late friend Steve Ellis carried handloads. His justification was eminently reasonable. He used exactly the same components, loaded the same way, for his competitive shooting. He had many, many thousands of rounds of experience with them--more than he could ever realistically get with factory ammo. He kept meticulous notes about accuracy and reliability and chrono data. He could very plausibly claim that he knew better where one of his rounds would land, and at what velocity, than he could know about any factory ammo. And he had scads of exemplar ammo that he could document were made on the same press run, from the same components, as whatever he was carrying. He was kind of obsessive-compulsive about that kind of thing.

Now, you have to do a heck of a lot of loading, shooting, and record-keeping to be able to make that claim. I haven't been that meticulous. So I carry Pro-Load .45 +p, which is incredibly consistent (SD's always <10) and the cheapest premium ammo I've ever found. Uses Gold Dot bullets, which is fine with me. (I am supremely unconvinced that there is enough difference between various hollow-point premium bullet designs to matter. I previously used Hornady XTP, before I discovered that ProLoad were at least as good in terms of consistency, and much cheaper.) I use Remington +p+ 9mm in my bedside gun, again because I found a really great deal on a case of 1000 a few years ago. It's the only 9mm ammo I've ever found that will reliably take down bowling pins. Power pactor 148.2 from my gun.

As others have said, the main question will always be, did the BG need shooting? If yes, then all the ancillary questions (what kind of gun you used, what ammo, were you an IPSC shooter just itching for a chance to try it out in real life, blah, blah, blah) are just chaff that any decent defense attorney and expert witness can get the jury to disregard with about 2 minutes or less of court time. Ayoob's point is only this: if you can easily avoid it, why give an over-zealous prosecutor *any* additional points to attack you on, even if they're flimsy ones?

I don't disagree with that, but my main reason for using factory isn't legal, it's that I get the accuracy and consistency I want without undue labor. Besides, for the bedside gun, I don't load 9mm at all, and don't want to start.

Sounds both highly specific and not terribly relevant outside of distances where muzzle flash can create burn marks. I've seen some roarin' flames come out of .50AE, but do you get burn marks, even from combusting powder stuck to the slug, outside of 10'?



What happens when your local PD carries UberTactical SuperAmmo ++P++ but the municipality where you're involved in a shooting in carries Subsonic frangible CB caps? Or should you pick the lowest power ammo carried by area PDs?

Or more seriously, what if the caliber you carry (10mm) is loaded to sub-standard levels (Federal Hydrashocks)? Do I just have to settle for it, or can I carry something else, and if so...why not handloads?




I'd wager that reliability is the biggest issue. I've had real good reliability from my handloads, but I stay within published load limits and use quality components. At the end of the day, I have a hard time believing that a machine loading thousands of rounds an hour will produce ammo of any higher quality than a machine producing only a few hundred an hour and pretty closely hand-inspected at that.

Ayoob, always thinking in terms of questions to be asked of a witness, puts it this way. "Mr. Smith, you say your ammo is as good as factory. This affidavit from the head of Federal's factory there in the Twin Cities says that they spend $12 million a year on quality control. How much do you spend?"

[Defendent Attorney]
According to that same affadavit, they also produced 500 million rounds of ammunition, which means that they have $0.02 invested in quality control for each round.

My client loaded 2000 rounds of ammunition in that same period and spent $400 on quality control, or $0.20 per round, 10 times as much as was spent by Federal. Furthermore my client takes the time to check his equipment and final product by hand every 100 rounds, using high quality instruments capable of measuring to thousandths of an inch. Are we to believe that Federal can produce 500 million rounds of ammuniton with that level of hand inspection?

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, despite the other side's attempts to portray a commerical ammunition maker as the be-all, end-all of quality control there is little evidence presented here or in our every day lives that would lead us to believe that the products produced by industrial mass production, regardless of the money spent on quality control, surpass those of the individual hand craftsman, and my client's ammuniton is no exception to that standard.

Furthermore, my client's ammunition did not "fail" -- if his quality control process was faulty we would not be here, as his ammuntion would not have worked and instead of being on trial, we would be joining his wife and family in mourning his untimely and criminal death at the hands of criminals with long histories of felonies and jail time.

The prosecution is only raising this issue because they do not want to talk about the real issue at hand, and that is my client's legitimate and law-abiding use of deadly force to defend his life when armed criminals with a history of violent felonies threatened it.

Here would be my response to Ayoob's mock prosecutor question:

Fact: "Four years ago, Federal Cartridge produced 350 million rounds of ammunition. This year it expects to manufacture 1.2 billion rounds and expects to produce 1.5 billion next year."

"Well, let's see, Federal cartridge says they will make 1.2 billion rounds of ammunition per year. So, that computes to at most 1 cent per roud spent on quality control. "

"Now, I command a salary of about $40 per hour when I work under contract, and I spend approximately 1 to 2 seconds inspecting each round I produce. So if we break that down I'm spending a minimum of 1.1 cents per round on quality control. This doesn't count time spent inspecting tooling, supplies, and equipment, or evaluating round performance. So actually I spend more per round on quality control than Federal Cartridge does."

"Now can we move on to the part where we dicuss the fact the criminal I shot in self defense was pointing a gun at my wife and I and committing a felony?"

Ayoob's point has always been to keep all the factors in your defense as simple as possible. Every additional factor makes it easier for the prosecutor to distract the the jury. The central question should always be, Was it a good shoot? Carrying hand loads or a modified weapon is very defensiable but should you have to spend a lot of defense time and effort on it. I don't believe that MN is as suseptible to this type of attack as other states. Minnesota case law has always focused on the central action and excluded all outside factors. I personally prefer to keep things simple and not chance makeing case law.
Mike

I like his columns. Most of the time he's a firearms self-defense expert talking about firearms self-defense. But there are others where he's a firearms self-defense expert talking about the law, and I sometimes think his reach exceeds his grasp.