Self Defense Ammunition Guide

Because only roughly 0.0001% of all shooters are talented and experienced enough to land critical hits on an advancing opponent. Because unless you’re the biggest, baddest MFer on the planet, dumber than a bag of hammers, or simply have no sense of self-preservation, you will be in a dead panic in one of these scenarios. A better solution is to hedge your bets with expanding ammunition.

The world of ammunition design has come a long way since the Chinese first launched iron and pottery projectiles from fire lances nearly 900 years ago. Despite this, ammunition designs then and now face the same problem with terminal ballistics: how to impart as much energy from the fired round into the target without under or over-penetrating.

The solution to the issue came in the form of lead projectiles. The solution of using lead as a projectile is actually ingenious. Here’s why: lead is a relatively dense material and thus heavy proportionate to its size. And since the force of a round is calculated by determining its change in momentum over time, and momentum is defined as mass times velocity, this is the perfect storm for destruction.

Think about it. You have a small, heavy object traveling at an incredibly high speed. This is how guns made plate armor obsolete overnight. But it gets even better. Since lead is a soft metal, when it encounters resistance (like a soldier’s body) at high speed, it deforms. This deformation occurs perpendicular to the target since it represents the path of least resistance. In doing so, the round’s diameter increases and thus makes a larger hole in the target. The bigger the hole in a soft target like an animal or an enemy soldier, the faster the target will lose blood and the greater the odds of striking a vital organ and incapacitating the target.

But there are some issues with using lead projectiles - especially as ammunition and firearm science advanced. In the late 1800s, repeating firearms became the norm in European armies, but the first bolt-action rifle has been around since the creation of the Needle Rifle in 1836. This was a breech-loading, single-shot rifle that used a firing pin or needle to detonate a primer inside the base of a cartridge.

This was a huge development since the majority of military guns at that time were muzzle-loaders. These guns are what you see most Civil War reenactors using where they have to pour a charge of gunpowder down the barrel followed by a patch and bullet. The shooter then uses a ramrod to drive the bullet all the way to the base of the barrel. A small hole that leads to this area from the nipple on the action is topped with a percussion cap that, when struck, sends burning gas to the powder, ignites it, and sends the bullet downrange. This takes a tremendous amount of time and is part of why the Needle Rifle’s breech-loading mechanism was so revolutionary.

Following the Needle Rifle’s creation, major militaries began searching for even faster methods of loading rounds. A repeating firearm was needed, but existing models up to that point were too expensive, too fragile, or simply ill-suited to hard military use. The answer came in the form of metallic self-contained cartridges and internal magazines. These two aspects combined to make incredibly fast-loading weapons. But there was one glaring issue - the exposed soft lead projectiles in these cartridges would occasionally deform when being chambered, leading to inconsistent shooting at longer ranges since each bullet would be aerodynamically different. The answer to that problem was the now ubiquitous full metal jacket bullet or FMJ.

A full metal jacket round is simply a lead (or other softer material) core projectile surrounded by or jacketed with a harder metal. For most modern ammunition, this jacket is made of a copper-nickel alloy known as cupronickel.

And it works great. The rounds don’t deform when manually or mechanically loaded into a chamber, and as an added bonus, they are more dimensionally consistent and aerodynamic, leading to better accuracy. The jacket also better resists corrosion than exposed lead, so even ammo that is stored in sub-optimal conditions will last a lifetime. 

There’s just one problem with full metal jacket rounds - that harder gilded metal coating the lead makes the projectile much harder at the point of impact and thus leads to vastly increased penetration. If your intended target is paper, steel, or behind concealment, the extra penetration is fine. However, if you’re shooting a soft target like a deer or a human attacker, this overpenetration is detrimental for two big reasons.

The first is overpenetration - the rounds pose a real threat to innocent bystanders since the bullets won’t stop in the intended target. The second drawback stems from the same penetrative qualities. Since the rounds feature a hard outer shell, they tend to ice-pick through soft targets, leaving a narrow wound channel that is unlikely to cause sufficient damage to stop an attacker. 

The first issue can’t really be overcome without changing the projectile, while the second can only be mitigated with excellent shot placement. By this, I mean a shooter aiming for and reliably hitting hard targets within the soft target, like bones. But this isn’t a realistic solution in self-defense scenarios.

Why?

Because only roughly 0.0001% of all shooters are talented and experienced enough to land critical hits on an advancing opponent. Because unless you’re the biggest, baddest MFer on the planet, dumber than a bag of hammers, or simply have no sense of self-preservation, you will be in a dead panic in one of these scenarios. A better solution is to hedge your bets with expanding ammunition.

During the First World War, the British military began experimenting with the concept of expanding ammunition to maximize the lethality of its military rounds against enemy combatants. The first successful rounds were developed by Captain Neville Bertie-Clay at the Dum Dum Arsenal in modern-day West Bengal, India.

The arsenal’s name became synonymous with expanding projectiles for years, leading to all expanding ammo being informally referred to as dum dums. These original expanding rounds were simply .303 British FMJ rounds with the tips cut off, exposing the round’s lead core. When the round struck a target, the opening would cause the bullet to mushroom, which would increase the impact’s opening and dump more of the round’s kinetic energy into the target.

Although crude by modern standards, the results were significant enough for the rounds to be banned by name in the Hague Convention of 1899 for being inhumane for use against traditional armies. Though interestingly, the rounds were still permitted for use against irregular forces and native combatants

Hollow point ammunition began increasing in popularity among police officers during the massive rise in crime partially spurred on by the Crack Epidemic in the 1980s. Criminals were increasingly using firearms on par with or superior to those issued to most police departments. One solution came from Federal Ammunition with its Hydra-Shok hollow-points which gained nationwide acceptance across dozens of police departments.

The adoption of these rounds was met with opposition from various civil rights organizations due to the perception that they were designed to cause inhumane damage to people. The reality was that most departments had just begun to replace aging .38 special revolvers with 9mm Wonder Nines, whose FMJ projectiles were poor fight-stoppers. Additionally, these higher-velocity rounds had a much greater potential to over-penetrate criminals and posed a greater risk to civilian bystanders.

By the late 1990s, as the crack-fueled crime wave showed no signs of slowing down, many states began passing legislation allowing lawful gun owners to conceal firearms on their person for self-defense. These gun owners began to look to law enforcement equipment as a guideline for which arms and ammunition were appropriate to defend themselves. As a side note, this is the ideal home defense ammunition. It expands upon impact and prevents overpenetration, which can be a very real danger to innocent bystanders like your family. The only issues with hollow point ammo are cost and reliability.

While it’s true that most hollow point ammo is built to greater standards than FMJ rounds, some firearms can be picky about which rounds they’ll reliably feed. So it’s important to fire at least 200 rounds of a given defensive ammo through your chosen defensive pistol before committing it to a home defense role. Yes, this will be expensive, but if the alternative is having a malfunction while someone is attacking you and your family, it’s worth every penny.