Details are in the video below, or keep scrolling to read the full transcript.

Hey everybody, I am Chris Baker from LuckyGunner.com and today I’m going to talk about using a handgun to defend against a bear attack.

A lot of you guys have asked me to cover this topic over the years, but I’ve been reluctant. I’ve got a fairly deep well of knowledge on guns, ammo, ballistics, and self-defense. What I know about bears is more like a sippy cup of knowledge in comparison.

Fortunately, there is an excellent resource we can lean on here: the collection of handgun defenses against bear attacks compiled by the firearms news website Ammoland.com. Since 2018, they’ve been collecting every account they can find where someone has used a handgun in a bear attack. They just published their latest update in May of this year and they’re up to 162 documented cases. To be clear, we don’t have any relationship with Ammoland. I haven’t talked to them about this video and we’re not getting anything from them for doing it. I just think they’ve done some really good work on this topic.

The Ammoland stories come from news reports, books, Freedom of Information Act Requests, and their own interviews with involved parties. The 162 incidents do not include cases where the outcome was unknown or where a handgun was used in combination with another weapon like a rifle. They publish small excerpts from each case so you can get a little context, and provide links to the full stories when possible. The incidents come from all over the world with the majority from the US and a few from Canada and Norway.

Bear Attacks in Perspective

Before we dig into the gun stuff, I want to add some perspective here. Bear attacks are extremely rare. It’s hard to nail down exact figures. Estimates range between roughly one to three fatal attacks per year on average in North America, with a slight increase in recent years.

There are a ton of ways mother nature will try to kill you that are many times more likely than a bear attack. For example, since 2007, six people have been killed by bears in national parks. In that same time period, 10 people died from lightning strikes and 46 were poisoned. 74 died from stuff falling on them like avalanches, trees, branches, and rocks. 118 died from hyper and hypothermia. 428 fell to their deaths, and 830 people drowned.

If you like to play outside, underestimating the environment or the weather is usually what gets you. Dangerous animals are definitely a reality. But if you spend more time thinking about a bear gun than you do about how to handle getting lost in the woods, you might be doing it wrong.

Deterrence and Avoidance

Also keep in mind that unless you have the right hunting permits and they’re in season, you can’t shoot a bear just for being a bear. You could face legal trouble if you shoot one without a good reason. Personally, I don’t particularly want to shoot a bear. They’re amazing animals and they’re fun to watch… from a safe distance.

There are a lot of ways to avoid a bear confrontation altogether. The standard advice from the wilderness experts seems to be pretty effective. Travel in groups, make lots of noise, keep your food secure. If you do encounter a bear, don’t run away, but also don’t approach them.

Bear spray can be an excellent deterrent. It’s not 100%, but it’s worked really well for a lot of people and it requires far less skill to use than a handgun. It’s an especially attractive option when you can have one person ready with the bear spray while a skilled shooter backs them up with a handgun in case the spray fails.

So with that in mind, let’s look at five lessons we can learn about bear defense from Ammoland’s story collection.

Lesson 1: Bears Hate Getting Shot

The first lesson is that bears really hate getting shot, regardless of caliber. Out of 162 handgun bear defense incidents, only four were unsuccessful. Caliber was more or less irrelevant in those cases because in all four failures, the shooter either missed, or wasn’t sure if they hit the bear.

Now, I wouldn’t say that necessarily means caliber should be irrelevant in choosing a gun for bear defense. If you read through these stories, there are a lot of close calls. There were several incidents where the bear was shot but continued advancing until it was shot some more. But generally speaking, the most important factor in terms of hardware was just having the gun accessible and ready to fire.

Many of the incidents appear to be what we call “psychological stops” where the bear fled even though it was still physically capable of continuing the attack. Often, the bear was shot just once before running off and later on they found it dead just 30 or 40 yards away. More often than not, you don’t have to incapacitate a bear to get it to stop attacking.

Lesson 2: Warning Shots Are Often Effective

In many cases, the bear was not shot at all. 29 incidents involved warning shots to try to scare the bear away. That worked in 21 of those cases or 72% of the time.

When we’re talking about defense against a violent criminal, there are several reasons, both legal and practical, why warning shots are typically ill-advised. We might have to adjust that mindset for dangerous animals. In the wilderness, there’s a far smaller chance of accidentally hitting an innocent bystander with that warning shot. And it looks like there’s a pretty good chance it will actually work.

Of course, it’s a calculated risk. You have to consider how far away the animal is. Is it already aggressive? How much ammo do you have in your gun? In several of those cases where the warning shot worked, it took multiple shots to get the bear to leave. Oftentimes, the bear fled, but then came back later.

When the warning shots failed, sometimes the shooter waited way too long to transition from warning shots to trying to get actual hits. I understand the reluctance to shoot a bear, but I think you have to decide in advance where your line in the sand is going to be and stick to it. Maybe don’t wait until the bear is within hugging distance to start shooting.

Lesson 3: Carry a Reload

And that brings us to lesson three. If you’re going to carry a gun for bear defense, spare ammo might not be a bad idea.

I’m normally not a big advocate of carrying a reload with a daily carry gun. There’s nothing wrong with it, if that’s what you want to do. But it’s almost unheard of for an armed citizen to need a reload in defense against a violent human.

With bears, it’s a different story. I counted eight cases in the Ammoland incidents that mention a reload. In three of those cases, the reload was actually necessary to fend off the attack.

Three out of 162 is not a lot, but it’s a much higher percentage than we see in defensive gun uses against humans.

Revolvers make up more than half of the handguns used in these bear attacks, so most people are starting off with lower ammo capacity. Then they fire warning shots or miss with their first few shots. Bears often leave and return later, so you’re much more likely to have time to reload than in a street encounter.

If you carry a revolver for bear defense, I’d suggest carrying spare ammo on a speed strip. You probably won’t need it, but they’re flat and really easy to carry somewhere on your body within arm’s reach.

Having said that, it seems like the most common reason for running low on ammo is not hitting the bear. So if you’re trying to decide on a gun for bear defense, your ability to shoot it well is probably more important than caliber.

Lesson 4: .44 Magnum Has an Impressive Track Record

On the other hand, .44 Magnum seems to work really well on bears. I’m not saying it necessarily works better than any other specific cartridge, but we have a lot more cases to look at. For the incidents in which the caliber of the handgun was known, 35% were .44 Magnum. That’s over three times more than any other single cartridge.

In 25 of those cases, the shooter managed to hit the bear and the story specified the number of times. 13 bears stopped after a single shot. Ten stopped after two to three shots, and two stopped after five shots. That’s a pretty good track record.

It’s hard to draw any meaningful conclusions about the other cartridges because the number of incidents is so much smaller. The second most common cartridge was .357 Magnum with 13 cases. It seemed to do really well. I know there’s a lot of interest in 10mm as a bear cartridge, but there were only seven of those. And for whatever reason, a lot of the stories involving semi-autos did not specify the number of hits, so we don’t have a ton of info to go on.

Overall, one-shot stops were not uncommon except with .22. Again, the most important thing is to actually hit the target.

If we run with the assumption that .44 Magnum does perform better than other cartridges, it’s probably because it’s generally a good penetrator. It’s possible to get really deep penetration out of 9, .40, .45, 10mm, and .357 magnum, but you have to be more picky about ammo selection. Hard cast lead bullets are ideal, especially for the revolvers.

For the semi-autos, this is one of the few cases where I might consider something like Underwood X-Treme Defense or similar ammo designed for penetration.

Lesson 5: Brown Bears are More Dangerous

And finally, brown bears are a lot more aggressive than black bears. We don’t need the Ammoland project to tell us that. It’s common knowledge. But it does give us an idea of just how much more dangerous brown bears are.

In the United States, brown bears account for 7% of the overall bear population. They make up 64% of the attacks gathered by Ammoland that took place in the US.

Most of our country’s brown bears live in Alaska. About 30,000 or so. Only 2000 live in the lower 48, and those are all concentrated in three states: Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho.

If we look at the Ammoland bear attacks by state, Alaska, Wyoming, and Montana together make up 70% of the incidents. Alaska had a mix of brown and black bear attacks, but all of the attacks in Montana and Wyoming were from grizzly bears.

So if you don’t often hang out in the wilderness in those three states, your odds of being attacked by a bear go down pretty dramatically. There are about 400,000 black bears in the US. They encounter humans all the time and are generally happy to leave you alone unless you have food, or you wind up between a mama bear and her cubs. That’s bad.

The Best Handgun for Bear Defense

So with all of that in mind, what is the best gun for bear defense? As always, it depends. What kind of bears? What are your risk factors? Are you carrying openly or concealed? Are you trying to minimize weight for a long backpacking trip?

When I go out for a day hike here in the Smoky Mountains, I’m more than okay with a can of bear spray and a small 9mm. If I was hunting in Alaska and thought I might be dragging around a dead animal carcass for 20 miles, I’d probably want a 12 gauge and a .44 Magnum and a couple of buddies with the same.

Don’t overthink it. Spend some time learning about the bears in your area. Whatever gun you choose, just make sure it’s loaded, accessible, and that you’re a competent and confident shooter. And of course, when you need ammo for that gun, be sure to get it from us with lightning-fast shipping at LuckyGunner.com.

The post Handguns for Bear Defense: Lessons from Real-World Attacks appeared first on Lucky Gunner Lounge.

Details are in the video below, or scroll down for the full transcript.

Hey everybody, I am Chris Baker from LuckyGunner.com. Last time, we talked about the idea of a true practical rifle. For me, it’s a suppressed Savage .22 LR bolt action that I use for pest control. Today, I’ve got a quick follow-up for you with some more .22 goodness. I want to talk about practical external ballistics for the .22 LR cartridge.

What is “Practical Ballistics?”

External ballistics refers to what the bullet does between the muzzle and the target. If we were talking about what the bullet does after it hits the target, that’s terminal ballistics. We’ve talked about .22 terminal ballistics in the past and I’m sure we’ll cover it again sometime. But for now, we’re looking at external ballistics – in particular, bullet velocity and trajectory.

What I mean by practical external ballistics is that I want to look at what the bullet does in flight and then apply that knowledge to how I’m going to use the rifle outside the shooting range. The main thing I really want to know is bullet drop. For the distances I’m planning to use the rifle, where do I need to aim in order to hit my target? Velocity is important because faster bullets will drop less by the time they reach the target. Velocity is also important for pest control because I want to make sure the bullet’s going to have enough energy to take out that animal quickly and cleanly. But that gets us back into the territory of terminal ballistics.

You can find numerous ballistic tables for .22 LR online. There are multiple ballistic calculator apps that’ll give you excruciatingly detailed information about what a bullet should do at a specific distance. These can all be very useful tools. Of course, ballistic tables are just a starting point. You have to actually shoot some groups out of your own gun to find out what your specific rifle and ammo combo are going to do.

But the issue I have with a lot of ballistic tables is that they’re often based on the velocity you get from something like a 20 to 24-inch barrel. A lot of the most common .22 rifles today have barrels closer to 16 to 18 inches. That means the ballistic data from a longer barrel might not even really be useful as a kind of ballpark starting point.

So, we did some of our own testing to give you one more data point to work with when you’re considering .22 ballistics.

.22LR Loads Tested

We measured the bullet drop and muzzle velocity of six different loads out of my 16-inch Savage Mark II.

Two of the loads were subsonic with muzzle velocity a little over 1000 feet per second. Those were the CCI 40-grain Polymer Coated Clean-22 and the Eley 38-grain Subsonic Hollow Point.

We had three high velocity loads that measured close to 1300 feet per second – The 40-grain copper plated round nose version of the CCI Mini-Mag, the 40-grain copper plated Winchester Wildcat, and the 36-grain Remington Viper.

And then we had one extra high velocity load that measured around 1500 feet per second – the 32-grain copper plated hollow point CCI Stinger.

Results

To be completely honest, for me this is more of a theoretical than a practical exercise. For pest control, I’ve never needed to take a shot more than 50 yards away. My property is just not that big. So I use subsonic ammo with a suppressor to stay as quiet as possible. I zero the gun at 50 and it’ll hit within about a half inch of that between 15 and 50 yards. It’s pretty straightforward.

But, of course, .22 LR is viable far beyond 50 yards. In the comments on that last video, some of you guys mentioned using your .22s to take out squirrels, prairie dogs, and other pests at 100 yards and beyond. So, for these six loads, we fired five-round groups from a benchrest at 50, 100, 150, and 200 yards.

We zeroed our rifle at 50 yards, so that’s our starting point. At 100 yards, the subsonic loads dropped more than 7 inches. The Stinger has about 50% more velocity and it only dropped two inches. Moving out to 150, the gulf between the fastest and slowest bullets is even wider. The Eley 38-grain Subsonic that I like to use at home drops 30 inches at 150 yards, while the Stinger drops just under 11 inches. The other supersonic loads were a few inches lower.

All of these bullets really start to drop between 150 and 200. We had to staple together a special extra tall target just to catch all of the bullets. At 200 yards, the Stinger impacts 2.5 feet below the point of aim. The Eley drops 4.5 feet.

Conclusions

I know lots of shooters practice with .22LR out to 300 and 400 yards and beyond. For that, you really need a scope with some kind of bullet drop reticle and you have to be 100% sure of your exact range. That’s the difference between ballistics and what I would call practical ballistics. For small game hunting or pest control, 200 is probably pushing the limit of what’s practical. With this gun and the simple duplex reticle in this optic, I wouldn’t be comfortable trying to shoot a small animal at an unknown distance if I thought it was much past 100 yards.

But even at 100, we can see how ammo selection makes a huge difference. The higher velocity loads give you a big advantage because they don’t drop as much. The CCI Stinger, for example, is marketed as a Varmint load, and that’s not just hype – that extra velocity really does make range estimation less of a factor you have to worry about with small targets. In my case, with targets inside 50 yards, a subsonic load works just fine because keeping the noise down is a greater priority than a flat trajectory.

Okay guys, that’s all I’ve got for today. Hope you found that helpful. Next time you need some ammo, be sure to get it from us with lightning-fast shipping at LuckyGunner.com.

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Hey everybody, I am Chris Baker from LuckyGunner.com and today I’m going to talk about all the junk I carry around all the time, or what the cool kids call EDC or Everyday Carry.

I’ve put off doing a video like this because it always seemed a little immodest to assume the world should care about the mundane crap I keep in my pockets. But you guys do ask about my carry gear on a fairly regular basis. Mostly my carry gun and holster, but I also get questions about my watch and my pocket knife and stuff like that. So we’re gonna do this. But we’re gonna do it my way. Which means I’m gonna start off talking about the gear, but then we’re going to dive into some related issues that you guys had no idea you were signing up for when you asked for this. But you did ask for it, so you only have yourselves to blame.

Let’s take a look at what we’ve got here. My carry gun is a Smith & Wesson Model 332 Ti snub nose chambered for .32 H&R Magnum. I carry that in a Phlster City Special holster with a DCC belt clip. The knife is a Spyderco Cat. For a flashlight, I carry a Streamlight Protac 1L. The watch I wear most of the time is a Citizen EcoDrive. I’ve also got a POM flip-top pepper spray dispenser. And then there’s my car key, an iPhone Mini, and my wallet, which is an Alpine Swiss Minimalist.

Why a Snub Nose?

I’ll talk a little more about the gun first because that’s probably what you all came here for. The gun I’m carrying day to day changes a lot more frequently than any of my other carry items. Part of that is just because of the nature of this job. But there are other reasons, and I’ll get into those more in a minute.

I always end up coming back to a lightweight snub nose revolver. My favorite so far has been the Smith & Wesson 332 Ti. It has an aluminum frame and a titanium cylinder, making it among the lightest of the J-frames at just 13 ounces loaded. Smith only made J-frames in this caliber for a few years in the early 2000s and they’re tough to find today. I got lucky and picked this one up at a bargain price because of the worn finish. But mechanically, it’s still in great shape.

I installed a set of Crimson Trace laser grips – the shortest ones they make, model LG-405. Even without the laser, these have the best grip shape that I’ve found for J-frames. The ballistics of .32 H&R Magnum are comparable to .38 Special out of a 2-inch barrel, but with less recoil and six rounds instead of just five. My carry ammo is the Black Hills 85-grain jacketed hollow point. It consistently penetrates about 15 inches in ballistic gel tests and it also tends to have better availability than most other ammo in this caliber.

The main thing I like about snubbies is the ratio of weight to size. They can be extremely light, but they’re not so small that I have a hard time fishing one out of my waistband. The angle and size of the grip make them easy to draw consistently. Any semi-auto that weighs 13 ounces is going to have some ergonomic challenges to deal with that I don’t have with a J-frame or a Ruger LCR.

Other Carry Gear

I’m not going to go into a ton of detail about these other items. I’ve been carrying some of these things for a very long time. The knife and the watch, I’ve had for over a decade. I have duplicate backups of each of them. They’re nothing special. They weren’t very expensive. Most of the things here were relatively affordable. The stuff I carry gets knocked around and abused. Some of it gets lost on occasion. I don’t want to have to stress over whether I should use or carry something because I’ve got a lot of money invested in it, so I tend to stick with stuff that’s “decent but affordable.”

The knife is not a fighting tool. 95% of the time, I use it to open packages. The rest of the time, it’s a makeshift screwdriver or pry bar – things I would never do with a $300 blade, but this was 45 bucks, so… no big deal.

I’ve owned a few of the Streamlight Protacs and I like them, but that’s one piece of gear I will probably change at some point. I use the light multiple times every day and I end up changing the battery at least once a week. In the near future, I’d like to replace it with one that has a rechargeable internal battery.

I never leave the house without a pepper spray dispenser. If I happen to encounter a potentially violent situation, there is a very good chance it will not require a deadly force solution. Pepper spray offers an option that is, in the words of Chuck Haggard, “between a harsh word and a gun.” The POM formula is reportedly very potent stuff and the dispenser is one of the most user-friendly on the market. They’re affordable. I buy these by the case and give them out to friends and family. It’s really hard for me to find a reason not to carry something like this every day.

A Minimalist Approach to Concealed Carry

A trend you might notice here is that each item is fairly small and lightweight relative to other options. The gun is small, of course. My phone is small. I wear a small watch – although, that’s mostly because I have a small wrist. My car key is the only key I carry – I’ve installed push-button combination locks on everything else I need regular access to. You might also notice the conspicuous absence of certain items like spare ammo, a fixed blade knife, or medical gear – stuff that a lot of people would consider essential.

I can and have carried those things and I’ve carried bigger versions of all of the things I do carry. But ultimately, I tend to default back to a somewhat minimalist approach. The upside is that I literally do carry it all day everyday, with very few exceptions. This stuff can go with me regardless of the weather or what I’m wearing or what I’m going to be doing. But my real reason for taking this route is that I like to be prepared, but I also have a low tolerance for the physical discomfort caused by carrying around a bunch of stuff. That is not something you’re supposed to say if you want to be taken seriously in the concealed carry and self-defense world. And that’s why we’re going to talk about it for a minute.

Does Comfort Really Matter?

I’ve brought up this issue of comfort in the past. It’s an aspect of concealed carry that doesn’t get nearly enough attention, especially the subjective nature of comfort. If our gear is uncomfortable, we’re supposed to just suck it up. Think of the lives that could be saved by having the appropriate gear. Think of the pain and anguish your poor orphaned children are going to go through when you’re killed in the streets for not carrying a spare magazine.

I think that’s a phase of the concealed carry journey that a lot of us go through at some point. Hopefully, as we develop in our knowledge and skills, we also develop a more nuanced approach to the hardware.

If you need a nudge in that direction, last week, my friend Sarah from Phlster Holsters released an excellent video on this topic. She explains why we should not just ignore discomfort from our carry gear. Then she outlines some extremely helpful tips on how to alleviate a lot of common comfort issues just by changing some minor details in how our carry gear is set up or positioned. I’d consider it required viewing for anyone who has ever found their carry gun to be uncomfortable – which is everyone.

Another great resource that explores these topics is the YouTube channel Armed and Styled. Tessah very clearly articulates some of the finer details of concealed carry. She actually breaks down and explains stuff that a lot of us had to just figure out through trial and error because nobody was really talking about it. A good video to start with is the Concealment Percentage Principle – that’s about how to get a ballpark idea of what size gun is likely to fit you best before you ever try one on.

Sensory Overload

Even with great resources like these, if you want to carry on a daily basis, you still might run into comfort-related problems that nobody seems to have a good answer for. I’ll give you a personal example. Like a lot of people, I often struggle with sensory overload. In my case, it’s nothing debilitating, but sometimes I find it overwhelming to be around things like loud noises or strong odors. I have a hard time tuning that stuff out, even when the people around me seem to be able to do that just fine.

Carrying around too much stuff in my pockets or on my belt is like the tactile version of that. Even the small amount of stuff I do carry occasionally drives me up the wall. At least once a week, I’ll be sitting at my desk working and I have to just empty my pockets, take off my gun, my watch, and even my wedding band. It’s like I can’t stop noticing that it’s there.

I don’t bring this up because I want you to feel sorry for me. It’s a fairly minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things. My sensitivity level has ups and downs for months, or even years at a time, and that’s a big reason why I vacillate between small guns like the J-frame and not-quite-as-small guns like the Sig P365 XL.

I know some of you out there are dealing with similar challenges, but nobody’s ever told you that that’s not normal. There are a few different medical problems related to sensory processing or sensory overload. Most people never receive an actual diagnosis. It’s an area of medical research that seems to be in its early stages. Even in my case, I’ve known about my sensory issues for decades, but it was only a couple of years ago that I connected that to the struggles I had with finding comfortable carry gear.

Maybe you don’t have sensory issues, but you’ve got something like a nerve disorder. Or maybe you’ve had abdominal surgery. There are a ton of issues, medical or otherwise, that can make concealed carry more of a challenge.

So when your favorite shooting instructor or Instagram star or whatever insists that “anybody” should be able to carry — fill in the blank with a specific size of gun or spare mag or a tourniquet or whatever — you feel like you’re doing something wrong when that doesn’t work for you. Now, anything new is going to feel uncomfortable at first, and there is a lot you can do to optimize your gear for comfort. Most issues can be resolved with a little coaching, experimentation, and patience. But it’s also possible to do everything right and still feel like your gun or your other carry gear is physically intolerable.

Individuals Require Individual Solutions

I don’t have any easy solutions for that. Carrying a smaller gun and minimizing my other carry items has worked pretty well for me. Of course, that has some drawbacks. I’ve had to put in extra work at the range to be able to shoot a snub nose at a skill level that I’m comfortable with. And I’m also okay with that compromise because, based on my own personal demographics and where I live and hang out, I’m at extremely low risk for violent criminal assault. I also carry some additional gear in a backpack that goes with me most places, at least in my car. I keep a medical kit in there, and other emergency items and everyday tools.

What I hope I’m getting across here is that everyday carry gear is a personal thing that has to be tailored based on the needs of each individual. That’s not to say there are no wrong answers. There definitely are. If you’re unclear about what your needs are and what gear is worth trying, you can fumble around for years with stuff that is either uncomfortable or ineffective. So don’t try to figure out all of this stuff on your own, but don’t carry something just because somebody else carries it. Seek out concealed carry advice from credible people who understand that everybody’s different and they need different solutions. Except, that is, when it comes to procuring ammo. There can only be one solution and that is to buy it from us with lightning fast shipping at LuckyGunner.com.

The post My Everyday Carry Gear and Why It’s “Wrong” appeared first on Lucky Gunner Lounge.

Details are in the video below, or scroll down to read the transcript.

Hey everybody, I am Chris Baker from LuckyGunner.com where you can get all your ammo with lightning fast shipping.

This is a broken red dot optic. I try not to ever let broken equipment go to waste. An equipment failure is always a chance to learn something or demonstrate something. I know the die-hard iron sights guys are probably going to love this. But my goal here is not to make an argument for or against optics. I think the pros generally outweigh the cons. But we have to acknowledge that optics add a layer of complexity to the firearm. They can be much easier to use than iron sights, but they’re more administratively complicated.

Problems with optics can be especially difficult to diagnose. This optic failed in a way I have never seen an optic fail before. So today I’m just going to talk about what happened and some things we might be able to learn from it.

The optic is a Holosun HS507K. Until a couple of days ago, I had it mounted on the Sig P365 XL. I’ve got the Swamp Fox Sentinel back on there for the time being. I had the Holosun on the Sig for more than a year and several hundred rounds and it was working just fine.

Then a few weeks ago, I went to a class called Cognitive Pistol and Tactical Anatomy taught by John Hearne. Excellent class. I’ll have some details from that trip in a future video. This class involved a lot of shooting at small target areas. I noticed pretty early on that my shots were hitting a few inches low. At first, I just figured the optic maybe had a little more offset than I remembered. So I started compensating for that, but I was still getting a lot of shots lower than I would have expected.

Usually, this just means bad trigger control on my part. But when I have bad trigger control, I tend to get some left and right deviation as well. During the class, most of my low shots were right down the middle. Aiming a little high got me through most of the class okay.

At the very end, we did an exercise with a steel spinner target. I could not hit that thing to save my life. But I was still halfway between thinking I had a hardware issue and thinking I just forgot how to shoot. Most optic problems turn out to actually be shooter problems, so I was reluctant to blame the equipment.

When there is a legitimate problem with an optic, nine times out of ten, it’s related to the interface between the optic and the gun. Either the mounting hardware has an issue, or there are loose screws or something like that. After class, I checked my optic screws. They were still nice and snug. The optic wasn’t moving or rattling. So I had plenty of time on my drive home to ponder how I had become such an incompetent pistol shooter.

The next day, I went out to the range to see if I could figure out what was going on. Here’s a five-shot group at five yards.

With a properly zeroed pistol optic, you will have some offset at close range, but that’s a little more than what’s ideal. That offset should have disappeared by the time I moved to about 15 yards, which is the distance I had last zeroed the gun. But here’s a five-shot group at 10 yards and it’s even lower than the five yard group. At 15 yards, my group was not only low, one of the rounds was off the target completely.

That was odd. So I cranked the elevation adjustment up several clicks. Shot another group at 15 with this nice cluster in the X and one guy way down here in the 8-ring. I was shooting these all from the bench, so I knew for sure it wasn’t me this time. Something was definitely up.

I shot several more groups and every time it was the same story. The first shot would be six or more inches low, and the rest would be grouped pretty close to the point of aim. I tried switching ammo. I tried a few rounds of HST, which I know this gun has grouped well with in the past. Same thing.

I would not have shot so many groups, but the fact that I was consistently getting just one low shot out of every five rounds was really perplexing. And I’m still not quite sure why that was the case. This is the first time I’ve had an optic behave like that. I was beginning to wonder if there was something wrong with the gun itself and not the optic.

I checked my optic screws one more time and I snaked the barrel a couple of times. Tried a few more rounds and got this train wreck. This is a lot more erratic than before, and it’s more like what I would expect from a malfunctioning optic.

But I still wasn’t sure if the problem was the optic itself or the way the optic was mounted. Maybe it was moving around on the slide and I just couldn’t tell. So I removed the optic and put the original iron sights back on the gun. It grouped fine at 15. I took the Holosun and mounted it to the Sig P322 that I reviewed a few weeks ago. That gun had some reliability issues, but it was very accurate. And the slide is cut for the same optic footprint as the P365, so it made a good test platform.

Six rounds of .22 told me everything I needed to know. Crazy vertical stringing.

Without the recoil of the 9mm, I could actually see the dot moving in the window. After every shot, it would jump to a different spot relative to the iron sights. Apparently, whatever is supposed to hold the emitter in place on the vertical axis inside the optic is not doing its job, so the dot is just moving up and down freely.

I filled out the warranty form on Holosun’s website last Friday. On Monday, they sent me a shipping label and by the time you watch this, the optic will be on its way back and hopefully will be repaired or replaced.

My purpose here is not to drag Holosun’s name through the mud. We have six or seven of their optics here and this is the first time we’ve run into an issue. I have no reason to believe this is a common problem. I plan to keep using Holosun optics for the time being. There are a couple of things we can learn here that are not specific to this optic.

The first one is that sometimes optics fail in unexpected ways. The number one concern people tend to have with pistol optics is that the electronics will fail and the dot will just not be there when they draw the gun. Based on the popularity of optic torture tests, the second most common concern seems to be that the gun will somehow fall ten feet and land optic-first onto pavement. So everybody wants a super rugged optic with long battery life. Okay, I get that. Those are good features.

But an optic spontaneously losing zero? That’s not a problem I hear people talk about too often. In this case, I was still able to get hits, even with the failing optic. They weren’t as good as the hits I wanted to get, but they were acceptable. The optic would not have gotten me killed in the street this time. If the windage adjustment had been wandering rather than the elevation, I might have had a much bigger problem.

Again, I’m sure the iron sight guys are enjoying some schadenfreude right now. So I have to remind everyone that iron sights fail, too. I’ve had front sights launch themselves off of guns more than once, and I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had a rear sight wander around in the dovetail. However, I will say that when there’s a problem with iron sights, it’s usually evident pretty quickly. You can look at a rear sight and tell if it’s way off center. I had no way of knowing this optic was failing except seeing where my shots were going and there are a lot of other variables that can cause the point of impact to be off besides a failing optic.

So another good lesson to learn from this is that backup iron sights are very good to have. To mount an optic on the P365 XL, you have to remove the rear sight. That leaves you with just a front sight, which really doesn’t help much. That’s one of the biggest disadvantages of this model.

Some of the newer Sig models are not set up this way. This is a new P365 in .380. This one came with the optic. You can see that it’s a little farther forward on the slide so there’s room for a rear sight behind it. And this version has sights that are tall enough to see through the optic window. That’s an ideal setup.

If I had had a setup like that on the XL, I could have figured out that I was having an optic issue at the beginning of that class instead of the next day on the range.

We tend to think of backup sights as an emergency failsafe in case the optic shuts off unexpectedly. They could also be useful for diagnosing other problems with the optic.

Okay guys, that’s all I’ve got for now. I hope you found some of that helpful. If not, here’s another tip for you: never eat yellow snow. But do buy some ammo from us with lightning fast shipping at LuckyGunner.com.

The post My Pistol Red Dot Optic Broke appeared first on Lucky Gunner Lounge.

Details in the video below, or scroll down to read the full transcript.

Hey everybody, Chris Baker here from LuckyGunner.com.

Most defensive shooting instructors and content creators will at some point at least pay lip-service to concepts like awareness or mindset. But it’s very rare to find reliable, detailed, and actionable instruction on the mental side of preparing for a deadly force encounter. There are a handful of instructors doing some really good work in this area, and at the top of the list is John Hearne.

I first met John about seven years ago when I took his 8-hour seminar called “Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why.” I thought it was enough of a game-changer that I took it again the following year. John has since added a range class called Cognitive Pistol and Tactical Anatomy as a follow-up that builds on the principles he teaches in the lecture class. I had the opportunity to take that class a couple of weeks ago at Royal Range in Nashville. I highly recommend both classes. He teaches them a few times a year at different locations around the country.

While we were in Nashville, John was kind enough to let us ask him some questions on camera. We’ll start with a little of John’s background.

JOHN HEARNE: I have an interesting dual career track. I’ve been a currently-serving peace officer serving for about 30 years now, starting back in 1992.

On the other side of that, I have a strong academic background. I thought I was going to go on and get a PhD, ended up staying in law enforcement. So I’ve had this dual career of being able to work in law enforcement, see the good and bad side of humanity, and at the same time, use that to fuel my curiosity and research topics and use that to ground my research and presentations.

Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why?

Q: The big lecture you’ve been presenting for the last several years covers a ton of different topics, but they’re all inter-related. I think it’s all relevant for anyone who’s interested in human performance under stress. Can you talk about what all you cover in that presentation?

JH: The whole purpose of the lecture is to understand who wins, who loses and why in interpersonal conflict. And a big part of that is just being able to perform well under stress. So the talk isn’t necessarily applicable just to people in gunfights. It’s applicable to anybody in a high-stress environment, whether it’s a firefighter or a pilot dealing with an in-flight emergency.

We get into the weeds of human performance, human evolution, where people come from, how the mind functions under stress, how it transitions from an emotional state to a rational state. And ultimately, because the stakes are so high, how do we keep you in the rational state for as long as possible so you can perform all the skills, apply the knowledge you’ve been developing (hopefully) over the years, and actually be able to deliver that at a reasonable level when the need is present.

Thinking with a Gun in Your Hand

Q: Why is it important to be able to think with a gun in your hand?

JH: A lot of times when we go to shooting classes, I’m just performing a contrived drill. I know before whatever the start signal is — and it’s almost always an audible start signal when the real world only gives us visual start signals — I know before the drill even starts exactly what I can do. I can prepare in my head exactly what I need to deliver and it’s much easier to access that motor program and just deliver.

In the real world, I don’t know what motor program I’m going to need to deliver until the last possible moment. So, thinking with a gun in your hand is very useful from just the standpoint of, it’s just a useful skill to develop, but it’s also more reflective of the problems we’re going to solve in the real world.

One of my mentors called it ‘problem solving at the speed of fight’. I think that’s a good way to say that. What we’re trying to do is give you a chance to think with a gun in your hand, practice solving problems with the pistol as a tool. We need to think of the pistol as just another tool — a piece of emergency life-saving equipment. And we have to learn how to apply that as reality unfolds around us. We have to adapt to reality as it presents itself, not as some contrived drill tells us to do.

Q: Can you think of any specific examples where somebody had the technical skill to handle the problem in front of them, but wasn’t prepared for the mental load or the decision-making that was required?

JH: I’d say that we see that every day. If you watch badge cam, you’ll occasionally see some stellar rock stars on badge cams. But what we see most of the time is people that are barely surviving the confrontation primarily because they suck less than their opponents.

A really good example — a tragic example — is the murder of Deputy Kyle Dinkheller that took place down in Georgia. If you go back and look at the training on Dinkheller, his co-workers thought he was the best shot in the police department. If they had to pick one person to win a gunfight, they would have picked Kyle. but when you watch that video, you see that he did not handle that fight the way that he would have wanted to — or anybody would have wanted. We want the good guy to have won. So that would be a classic example that everybody is very familiar with of somebody not being able to perform well the moment the flag flies.

[Editor’s note: The Dinkheller murder is commonly presented as an example in officer survival training, but it’s not as well-known among the general public. Dashcam video of the incident is publicly available. The footage itself is not especially graphic visually, but the audio is disturbing. For defense-minded individuals, it is worth watching at least once.]

Technical Skill and Mental Capacity

Q: So having a high level of technical skill isn’t always enough by itself. But at the same time, I know you also advocate for pursuing a high level of skill because it can help with the mental side of things. Can you explain that?

JH: We have very finite mental resources. We’re not nearly as smart, don’t have nearly as much attention as we think we do. And when you get under stress, you’re gonig to have even less of those resources. So the better technical shooter you are, that’s going to free up mental resources to be able to solve the problem at hand.

If you have to think about how to run the gun, you can’t think about where your nearest point of cover is, whether I need to perform a failure drill. So by having very high levels of technical competency, it frees your mind up to solve that problem.

There’s a video that just came out — a body cam video — where an officer is getting in a gunfight and literally every time he tries to get a mag in the gun, it’s backwards and he’s struggling just to get the gun [into the fight]. If you’re struggling to get the gun reloaded, you can’t be thinking about where your next point of cover is, where other officers are moving to. So again, high levels of technical shooting are vital because it frees our mental resources to focus on other aspects of the fight that we need to be more worried about.

Q: Can you talk about the importance of gun-handling skills: the stuff we do with a gun other than actually shoot it?

JH: It comes back to core competence. If I want to know whether somebody is a competent shot, I want to see how they handle the gun. How they load, unload, press-check, perform reloads and stuff like that.

The way you handle the gun is indicative of the amount of training you’ve put in overall and how much the gun is an extension of your self. There’s a great quote from Bill Lewinsky that the expert has automatic use of the tool. How you handle the gun is directly reflective how expert you really really are.

So, maybe you can shoot 100 points on a bullseye at 25 yards. But if it looks like a train wreck getting the gun up, if it takes you forever to do that… Being able to press the trigger straight back is great, but how you handle the gun is more indicative than just about anything else I can look at if I want to size you up as a shooter real quick.

A Frank Denial of Reality

Q: Tom Givens has talked about the phenomenon where victims of violent crime often report afterward that the only thing going through their head at the time of the attack was “why is this happening to me?” What can we do to prepare mentally to avoid that kind of mental block and go right to problem solving mode?

JH: “Why is this happening to me,” is just a frank denial of reality. Criminal violence happens every day. I mean, just look at the murder rate that’s gone up in the last couple of years. Murders spiking off the screen.

It should not be a shock to your conscious that somebody’s trying to rape, cripple, rob you, murder you, something like that. That happens over three million times every year. Just as a matter of odds, it was probably going to be your chance sooner or later.

So, the biggest problem we have is to accept the unfolding reality in front of us. You have to be in the position where you can say, “I knew that some person might try to hurt me, harm me, or something like that. I didn’t know it was going to be today, but I recognized it as a possibility, so I’ve prepared for it. I’ve got a mental parking space in my head for what I have to do. And I have the technical skills to back that up.”

Q: Anybody can take steps to prepare themselves to handle highly stressful events, but is there an element of personality involved as well? Are some people just naturally better at remaining calm under pressure?

JH: There’s definitely some personality aspects to that. We have this thing called the Big Five personalities. We know people that tend to be higher on the neuroticism scale tend to be more likely to freeze under stress.

So there is, in fact, a personality attribute to that. But a lot of these have to do with subjective trainable impressions. A lot of how your situation is is just a result of how bad you think it is. So if we can change your situation — your assessment of how bad something is — we can make the problem easier for you to solve.

If you do have high levels of technical skill and you have a very easy shooting problem, there’s no stress associated with that. You can deliver that all day, every day, twice on Sunday, and it’s not a big deal.

Developing Emotional Control

Q: Are there any hobbies or careers or other pursuits outside of defense-specific training that can help us learn to better adapt to high-pressure situations?

JH: Something we have to understand is what we’re struggling to do first and foremost is develop emotional control. We’re trying to let the sub-conscious trust the rational mind and let it stay in control of the problem.

There’s research that comes to us out of the military, out of the selection for high-end military units. There are certain recreational activities like skydiving, rock climbing, and motorcycle racing. People that excel in those three arenas tend to do very, very well in high-end military units because all those skills basically require that you be able to maintain self-control, you be able to perform fine motor skills while under, literally, life and death stress.

I also think it goes to — that’s your idea of fun. We’re always assessing the problem in terms of “how bad is this?” Well, people that go out and engage in those kind of activities, their “how bad” meter is kind of broken, for lack of a better word. They’re certainly not like normal folks. So when they get into difficult situations, their idea of how bad it is — it doesn’t even blip the radar, so they’re able to perform much better.

Reality-Based Training

Q: Where should a shooter be in terms of skill level before they co consider incorporating things like force-on-force training or increasing their cognitive load – training that goes beyond just putting holes in paper?

JH: I think that, obviously, you have to be able to hit. Because ultimately — this is what’s different from real world problems and a lot of other stuff. The gun is just a tool. And it’s no different than any other tool that I might use in work.

So, let’s just use a tool that we’re all familiar with: the car. At what point do you have to be good enough with a car to be able to take a racing course? Well, you have to be able to get the car into gear, make it go forward and backward and understand steering inputs and stuff like that.

But a lot of times, if you’ll get into something at the advanced level, you’ll learn the skills quicker because you’re being pushed. Obviously, you have to be able to be safe with the gun, be aware of your trigger finger, muzzle discipline.

I would say there’s three gradations of skill when we talk about this stuff. The first skill is you have to have enough trigger control to be able to press the trigger without disturbing the sights. The next level of trigger control for me is being able to change the amount of trigger control you need to solve a problem based on available targets. And finally, you need to be able to track your sights. That would be the ultimate goal.

Realistically, if you can just press the trigger straight back without disturbing the sights, if you can do that consistently, you have enough basic level of skill to start to learn how to do this stuff. I would say that learning to do it in the more proper context where you’re actually going to be doing it is probably more important than being really really great.

You don’t have to be able to shoot a two-second Bill Drill to take advantage of a force-on-force class. The great advantage of force on force class is letting you build the mental maps you need to solve the problems. If you have to have a one-second draw to solve your shooting problem, you’ve probably screwed up a lot of stuff to get in that much of a hole where a one second draw is going to make the difference. If you’re surviving by a tenth or a quarter of a second, you’ve screwed up a lot of stuff way in advance before you get there. The importance of a good force-on-force class is to teach you all that other stuff that you have to have in order to do well.

Variation in Training

JH: A lot people out there in the community are like, “well I’m not going to do this or that because…” their reasons — “it’s not tactical, I’ll get training scars, that’s not realistic,” and stuff like that. The problem is there is no single training thing that we can do that teaches us everything we need to know. So what we need to do is go out and work all these different training modes and take something from each one of them.

A lot of people say “just plinking with a gun doesn’t help.” No, I think it does. First off, shooting well is not a natural act. So even if you’re just popping tin cans with your .22, you’re exposing yourself to gunfire, you’re showing your mind that if I follow the shot process, I get the hits I want. And we can make it match up with their reality. So if I’m a red dot guy with my pistol, my 10/22, my 15-22 probably needs to have a red dot on it so I get that training crossover. If I’m still shooting an iron sighted pistol, maybe I plink with iron sights. But even something as simple as plinking tin cans has training value.

And we can go up from there, whether I’m doing structured practice, structured dry practice, I’m shooting matches, I’m doing man-on-man events, I’m attending professional training, I’m taking cognitive classes, I’m doing video simulators. All that stuff has value and if we put all of those different experiences in different kind of modalities of training together, then we have a very competent shooter. Because none of those things is going to be the solution by itself, but if we put them all together we can build a very strong foundation to let us be able to perform well when the flag flies.

Huge thanks to John for sharing (free of charge!) a couple of the valuable insights he’s learned over his long years of study. If you want to take a class with John, head over to his website to see his training schedule.

Next time, we’re going to look at a couple of drills John showed us that you can try at the range to add some mental complexity to your practice sessions.

Until then, I’ll leave you with one more tip to make your life better. If you’ve just completed a magic trick and you want everyone to applaud, the word you’re looking for is “voila.” Not walla. It’s V-O-I-L-A – with a V as in “Victor.” It’s a French word that basically means “look at this.” It’s not “walla” like the city in Washington.

But you can pronounce it however you want. I won’t judge as long as you get your ammo from us with lightning fast shipping at LuckyGunner.com.

The post Thinking with a Gun in Your Hand: Interview with John Hearne appeared first on Lucky Gunner Lounge.

Details are in the video, or scroll down to read the transcript.

Hey everybody, I am Chris Baker from LuckyGunner.com. Sometimes you think you understand a concept really well. You’ve heard it explained a thousand times in a hundred different ways. You’ve even successfully taught other people about that concept. But then somebody comes along and offers a slightly different perspective, and it’s like you’re looking at that topic for the very first time.

My friends Ashton Ray and Tim Chandler from 360 Performance Shooting recently had an experience like this. They were training with another instructor and one little side comment he made about how he uses pistol sights just kind of blew their minds. That’s led to some major changes in how they teach the principles of aiming and sight alignment.

I think their approach should be thought-provoking for shooters at any skill level. They’ve got a couple of twists on some familiar ideas that bring clarity where there is often ambiguity. I caught up with Ashton and Tim at the Rangemaster TacCon last month, so I’m going to let them do most of the talking today. This is a super-distilled version of what they’ve been teaching in their pistol classes.

Revisiting Old Cliches

TIM CHANDLER: So we’ve encountered a number of things over the years where people were saying the right things but we didn’t fully understand what they meant.

One of the big ones is, “see what you need to see,” in reference to iron sights. There are a lot of people who struggle with iron sights because they’re told these euphemisms and these vague statements – “See what you need to see,” “equal height, [equal light].” But it isn’t super helpful. It doesn’t really help them have confidence in learning how to use them.

The way it’s taught is that the sights are the primary driver of accuracy on the pistol, but that’s not actually true. Once you get some time on your belt, once you get some experience, you kind of learn it works differently, don’t you?

Sights are the Windshield

ASHTON RAY: Right. The analogy that we like to use is, we talk about driving a car. When you’re driving a car, the sights are your windshield, right? They tell you what exactly it is that’s going on. You look through them? You have the world around you and how you’re trying to interact with it and you look through that windshield and evaluate how well you’re doing with the operation of that vehicle.

If the sights are your windshield, your steering wheel is how you’re mounting the gun with your hands. Now, if you’re driving the car and the car is not going where you want it to go, very few people are going to tell you to “look through the windshield harder.” Because if your sights are telling you that you’re not keeping your car between the lines, you need to fix some things underneath that windshield. You need to fix some things about how you’re interacting physically with that gun.

So if you can go with me with this analogy: the sights are your windshield. You have the steering wheel, that’s how you grip the gun, how you mount the gun. And then the trigger is going to be your accelerator and your brakes.

Unpacking “See What You Need to See”

TIM: “See what you need to see.” right? Anybody who has done any level of firearms training, you’ve heard somebody talk about “see what you need to see” with iron sights.

But, you know, I spent God knows how many years – every time I heard that, I wanted to throw something hard at the ground because I don’t know what that means. Because all of our vision is different. And the fact that there’s somebody out there who has lots and lots of experience and they’ve sort of developed this “snatch the pebble from my hand” understanding of “see what you need to see” isn’t terribly helpful for your typical person.

So where we come in is taking somebody who’s basically safe and try to help them become proficient. Mastery is an endless quest but we can help you find proficiency. One of the greatest revelations we’ve had is changing how we use sights.

I have a little visual aid — this is a representation of iron sights. And what you’ve been told all your life, if you’ve done formal firearms training, police academy or something, you need to have “equal height, equal light.” Front sight centered. Or you’ve been told you don’t need that, you need to “see what you need to see.” Well, let’s talk about what that means.

Over here, we have a target with a number of different size hit zones. I have this radical theory – and we’ve kind of worked on this after doing a bit of training with Tim Herron. He uses sights completely differently because he didn’t come up through the institutions, he taught himself. And he thought, “why not use the rear sight as your primary cue?” And that, of course, is immediately going to make a lot of you all very, very uncomfortable because you’ve been told, “Focus on the front sight! Focus on the front sight!”

Think about this: I want to see what I want to hit through the rear sight, right? This part here, this void, that’s called the notch. It can also be called a window. What do we do with windows? We look through them! I want to see what I want to hit through my rear sight window. Now this is important – if what I want to hit is bigger than my rear sight window, and my front sight is in that window (albeit imperfectly), I’m still going to hit what I need to hit. That’s all I “need to see.” Because if it ends up anywhere in here, that’s going to end up being a hit inside this target.

ASHTON: Well what about distance? What if the distance is such that that’s not going to work out? Well, it’s really interesting, because what we’re working on is a relative relationship between size and distance. So if the target area is larger than the aperture of the rear sight, that window in the rear sight, this works. If it’s the next smaller size, that’s just about the same size. Guess what? That still works.

If you go to the smallest size, now we need to start using a little bit more refinement and a little more traditional view of those sight picture techniques that we’ve all been taught and talked about. That’s where it becomes a little more important. But whenever it comes to these larger, more forgiving relative target sizes, if it’s bigger than the rear window and the sight is visible, send it.

Sight Picture vs. Sight Movie

ASHTON: Now there’s another aspect of the “see what you need to see” part. Your sighting system is never going to be static. It’s always going to be moving, it’s alive. Gabe White calls it a sight movie, and I agree with him wholeheartedly. If your sighting system — whether it’s a dot or irons makes no dang difference — is moving around within the target area, and is not exiting the target area, press the trigger. Send it.

If it’s moving around without the target area, that means you need to fix it. That means you’re doing something that you need to correct in the steerage section. That means the way you’re mounted, the way you’re standing, all the stuff that goes into the grip and mount of the gun needs to be refined such that it stops. You arrest that movement, you keep it inside your prescribed aiming area, then you can send it.

How is This Relevant?

TIM: Here’s where the benefit is for your typical defensive shooter. If your typical defensive shooter just takes the rear sight and you drive the top of the rear sight to about armpit level, what’s inside your rear sight window now? We call that…

ASHTON: The soup kitchen.

TIM: Because that’s where all the good stuff is, right? And if our front sight is somewhere inside that window, what are we going to be hitting? We’re going to be hitting the areas of a threat that are most important to stopping them from doing whatever awful thing it is that’s causing us to have to shoot in the first place. We don’t need to spend a bunch of time staring at the sights, hoping that the answer to life’s problems appear.

What we’re really trying to do is just get enough on our sights. That’s where, “See what you need to see.” comes in. That’s really what it means. All I need is a reference that’s good enough to call whether or not I can send it, or I need to fix it.

And the smaller the target is, or appears in this relative reference of the sight window, the more of a focus I need on my front sight. I don’t need a hard front sight focus to do that at five yards.

ASHTON: Not at all.

TIM: Really, if you just grip the gun properly and get the gun in front of your face, and you get something like that, guess what? You’re gonna hit what you need to hit.

ASHTON: And, critically speaking, most of the shooting errors we see have little to do with sighting and much more to do with changing the grip before/during the trigger press. That’s what moves the sights off the target, that’s where your “low-left” comes from. That’s where the mistakes are usually made. It’s not made with the visual reference of looking through the windshield, it’s made with the physical interaction — that man/machine interface between the grip of the gun and the hands.

TIM: But the sights, because we’re visually oriented creatures, the sights are the only part of shooting that we can see. And so that’s where our brain and our focus wants to be. We want to focus on the part we can see. But — and I’m gonna say something that will sound slightly controversial but stick with me — the sights are the least important part of firing an accurate shot. I didn’t say they’re unimportant, I said they’re the least important. Just like your windshield is not what drives your car, these are a passive reflection of what you’re doing with the real controls. The real controls being your steering wheel and your pedals.

ASHTON: So when you’re working with your gun, when you’re dry firing or live firing, one of the most important things you can do is gather the information that your sighting system is giving you.

We’re talking about iron sights today but dots are absolutely the same. Dots, they scream at you. They’re a big neon billboard and they are shouting at you. Your iron sights are talking too, but they whisper. And you really have to pay attention.

But if you watch what those sights are doing while you are setting up and then executing through your trigger press and making that shot, they will tell you how successful you’re being in dry fire. And that translates directly to live fire. The problem is, most people are only looking for holes in the target. They’re not paying attention and taking this information back on how well they’re doing with mounting the gun, maintaining their grip and breaking that shot effectively.

A huge thanks to Ashton and Tim for sharing that with us. If you want to train with them in person you can find their upcoming classes at 360 Performance Shooting. And of course, the next time you need ammo be sure to get it from us with lightning fast shipping at LuckyGunner.com.

The post An Alternate Approach to Pistol Sights appeared first on Lucky Gunner Lounge.

Details are in the video below, or scroll down to read the full transcript.

Hey everybody, I am Chris Baker from LuckyGunner.com and today we’re going to look at how recoil affects accuracy in handguns. Now, that’s a pretty broad topic. Practically speaking, there are lots of ways recoil affects accuracy. Most of them are related to the shooter’s technique. Recoil moves the sights off target and it can move the gun in our hand. It can cause recoil anticipation or pre-ignition push. We have to apply good shooting techniques to counteract those effects.

But today, I want to focus on an aspect of recoil that’s mostly out of our control. Does recoil have an objective, mechanical effect on the bullet’s point of impact? Or, to phrase it another way, does the muzzle begin to rise before the bullet leaves the barrel. And if so, does it rise enough to cause a noticeable change in where the bullet ends up?

I’ll go ahead and tell you up front that, regardless of the answer, there is not a whole lot of practical application here for the average shooter. This is something gun nerds debate on occasion. We’re going to have fun finding out the answer. But for shooting handguns at typical handgun distances, it doesn’t matter much. There are a couple of very narrow use-cases where it might come into play, and I’ll get to those at the end.

To aid us in our mostly useless quest, we’ve called upon some assistance from a Chronos 2.1-HD high speed camera. We did one batch of shots at 4370 frames per second, which is 182 times slower than real time. Then we did a second batch of shots with a lower resolution at just over 10,000 frames per second, or 437 times slower than real time. If we crank up the frame rate any higher than that, the resolution gets too fuzzy to really tell what’s going on.

Okay, back to our big question: does the bullet leave the barrel before the muzzle rises? It depends on the gun.

Semi-Autos

Let’s start with a semi-auto. This is a 9mm Sig P365 XL. I’ll just let it play through in real time first. And here it is in slow motion. There goes the bullet, and there’s plenty of recoil. The gun wants to move straight back. The shooter’s hand stops that rearward motion, so the gun takes the path of least resistance, which is up. The result is a rotational movement, or what we sometimes call muzzle rise.

But let’s go back and look at it frame by frame. Did that rotation start before the bullet exited the barrel? First, we see a little smoke, and then a couple of frames later… there we go. That gray blur there is the bullet. Let’s back it up one frame when we know for sure the bullet is still in the barrel. If we compare that to our last pre-ignition frame, we can see the slide and barrel have started to move to the rear while the bullet is still in the barrel, but we’re not seeing any of that rotational movement yet. There is no upward movement of the barrel. That doesn’t start until right about… here, and by then the bullet is already out of the frame.

So, for the Sig, at least, it looks like muzzle rise should not be a factor in the bullet’s point of impact.

Let’s look at another semi-auto. This is the new .380 Beretta Cheetah 80X that I’m in the process of reviewing. This gun has a straight blowback operated action. The Sig was recoil-operated. Let’s see if that makes any difference in when the muzzle rise begins.

There goes the hammer and there’s the bullet. Before I even go frame by frame, you could probably see what happened there. With a blowback pistol, the barrel doesn’t move with the slide, it stays locked to the frame. There’s the bullet right there. We back up a frame, compare it to the frame when the hammer stopped moving. There’s slide movement, but the barrel hasn’t moved at all. The rotational movement doesn’t begin until the slide is almost completely open.

Revolvers

Okay, you know what’s coming next. What about revolvers? We’ve got a Ruger GP100 and let’s start with a really mild load. This is a .38 Special 148-grain wadcutter from Black Hills. It’s puttering along at 660 feet per second with almost no muzzle flash, so it’s pretty easy to see. Let’s go frame by frame. There’s the bullet. Back up a frame. Compare it to the pre-ignition frame. There is definitely some rotational movement there while the bullet is still in the barrel.

But how much movement, and is it enough to really matter? I tried a half dozen different methods for measuring the change in the barrel’s angle and I wasn’t really satisfied with any of them. We would need a high speed camera capable of much higher resolution and framerate in order to measure that accurately. And that’s not in the budget right now.

But my best estimate is that the barrel moves roughly .2 to .3 degrees before the bullet exits. That doesn’t sound like much, but at 25 yards, that translates to a point of impact that’s between 3.1 and 4.7 inches higher than if the muzzle had remained in place.

So let’s say you locked the gun in some kind of mechanical rest so that it could not move, and you zeroed the sights to be dead-on at 25 yards. If you took the gun out and shot it with your hands, you would be hitting three to five inches high.

Now, that wadcutter was moving pretty slow. What if we tried a magnum round? Would it exit the barrel before the muzzle rises? This is a Remington 125-grain jacketed soft point moving at 1400 feet per second. It definitely spends less time in the barrel compared to the wadcutter. Only five frames versus nine. But there does still seem to be some rotational movement taking place before the bullet exits.

So muzzle rise does influence the point of impact for revolvers. The degree of that influence probably changes depending on the load you’re shooting, although it’s hard to see that in our high speed footage. But we know a slower bullet will spend longer in the barrel, which means it should rise more before the bullet exits. That’s at least one of the reasons slower bullets typically have a higher point of impact than faster ones.

Theoretically, a bullet that recoils more (like a magnum) might have more muzzle rise before the bullet exits. That could be a factor. But looking at the footage of our wadcutter and magnum, there is not much difference in the amount of rotational movement of the gun in that short period while the bullet is still in the barrel. I’m inclined to believe the amount of time the bullet spends in the barrel is more important than the magnitude of the recoil because most of that recoil happens after the bullet is gone.

Can Grip Influence Point of Impact Shift?

So what about grip? Does a firm grip cause less muzzle rise than a loose grip? I tried firing a magnum load with a firm two-handed grip and again with a loose one-handed grip. Obviously, the loose grip allowed a lot more rotation overall. I could not really tell a difference in the amount of movement before the bullet exited.

What I did notice is that no matter how hard I gripped the gun or how little or how much recoil the gun had, the grip appeared to move in my hand before my hand reacted. Our hands are covered in squishy things like skin, fat, and muscle, so they’re always going to have some give. Regardless of how tight you squeeze, the gun will be able to move at least a tiny bit before it encounters the full resistance of your grip.

Having said that, I did not want to dismiss grip as a possible factor in shifting the point of impact.

The Sandbag Test

So I tried Plan B. Instead of gripping the gun differently, I tried firing with sandbags for support. First, with only the frame of the gun supported, and then again with an additional sandbag under the grip. I compressed it down as much as possible so the grip was firmly planted on that sandbag. This is not the same as immobilizing the gun. The sandbag does not prevent that rotational movement, but I figured it would cause the gun to recoil in a different way. If that was enough to alter the point of impact, then I think it stands to reason that it’s at least possible that the way you grip the gun could also change the point of impact.

Here it is first without the bottom sandbag. The rotation looks pretty much the same as shooting unsupported. Now, with the bottom sandbag, it’s a little different. The gun moves back and then up. Again, this is not something I could easily measure and compare based on our high speed footage. Instead, I just shot some groups at 25 yards.

Here’s a five shot group with the Black Hills wadcutter at 25 yards. First with the bottom sandbag supporting the grip. And another group without the bottom support. That’s about three and a half inches higher than the first group. It looks like that bottom sandbag delayed the muzzle rise, which caused the lower point of impact.

And now the Remington 125-grain Magnum load. With grip support on the left, without it on the right. About two and a half inches higher. Same effect as the slower bullet, but with less muzzle rise, maybe because of less time in the barrel.

So what can we take away from all of this? For most of us, not much, except that shooting is fun and so are high speed cameras. But if you like to shoot revolvers at 25 yards and beyond, there might be something here. It’s probably a good idea to make sure your grip is unsupported if you zero your revolver from a bench rest. Always confirm your bench rest zero by shooting a couple of groups without the bench. Any time you’re shooting at those longer ranges, try to make sure you grip the gun exactly the same way every time. And of course, the next time you need some ammo, be sure to get it from us with lightning fast shipping at LuckyGunner.com.

The post How Recoil Affects Handgun Accuracy appeared first on Lucky Gunner Lounge.

Details are in the video below, or scroll down to read the full transcript (although this time, it won’t make a whole lot of sense without watching the video).

Hey everybody, Chris Baker here from LuckyGunner.com. Today, we’re going to look at more high speed footage to better understand what happens during handgun recoil that we normally cannot see with the naked eye. This time, we’re looking for clues that might help explain why recoil feels different from one gun to the next.

I don’t just mean that some guns recoil more or less than others, although that’s part of it. Why do we describe recoil as snappy or soft, bouncy or smooth, harsh or flat? We’re not just talking about the magnitude of the felt recoil. And it’s more than the subjective differences based on factors like technique, hand size, and grip strength.

Every handgun recoils a little differently than others. We’re going to look at some comparisons where that difference is really obvious.

Revolver vs. Semi-Auto Felt Recoil

The most overt example is revolvers versus semi-autos. Here, we’ve got a Wilson 9mm 1911 and a Ruger GP100. They weigh about the same. They’re different calibers, but both are firing the same bullet weight at comparable velocities.

When you fire a revolver, all of the recoil energy is immediately transferred to your hand. With the 1911, there’s a short delay and the recoil is spread out over a longer period of time. The bore line of the revolver is also much higher relative to the hand and wrist. All of these factors combine to make the revolver feel like it has significantly more recoil even when the total amount of energy delivered to the shooter is roughly the same.

But there are other differences. For example, the revolver’s muzzle arcs up when it’s fired and immediately back down because of the pressure I’m exerting on the grip. The 1911 arcs up, and then there’s a moment when it seems to kind of stall. It’s moving back down, but very slowly at first. Then the slide closes and that has kind of a reverse recoil effect. It helps to push the muzzle back down on target.

If I speed it up some and let it play out, you can see another side effect of the slide movement. The force of the slide closing causes the muzzle end of the pistol to bounce up and down a few times. The revolver muzzle just snaps back on target and stays there.

I can still see the front sight on that 1911 while it’s bouncing around. If I’m just trying to throw rounds into the center of a big cardboard silhouette, I don’t have to wait for that sight to completely settle before I fire another shot. But it’s not ideal, and I much prefer the way the sights track on the revolver, even though it takes more effort to control the recoil.

Again, there is some subjectivity here. If you shot these two guns, you’d probably notice some differences but they might not be the same ones I just mentioned. Except that the revolver has more felt recoil – that’s pretty universal.

Small-Frame Revolver vs. Pocket Pistol

Let’s look at another revolver-semi-auto pair. This time, a Ruger LCR and a Glock 43, both in 9mm firing Speer Gold Dot 124 gr +P.

These are much lighter guns, so the felt recoil is more severe. Again, more so with the revolver. The LCR has a decent-sized grip compared to the Glock, but even so, you can tell it really wants to free itself from my hands. It’s quite a handful with +P ammo.

This time, the revolver is the one that seems to stall at the top of the recoil arc. The short slide on this Glock takes less time to cycle than the big heavy 1911 slide. So that little assist from the slide closing happens sooner.

Both of these guns have a little bit of that muzzle bounce at the end. They also don’t return quite to the same spot they started – you can see that the muzzles are not level – probably because the grips have shifted slightly in my hands. I would have to deliberately re-align the sights before my next shot rather than letting my grip do all the work subconsciously.

I haven’t fired either of these guns in a long time. And as you can see, they’re very unforgiving. If you don’t grip a lightweight 9mm just right, the recoil is difficult to manage. Even tiny shifts in how the gun sits in your hand will often lead to erratic shot placement on target.

.380 ACP Blowback vs. Locked-Breech Felt Recoil

Let’s look at a different kind of comparison: blowback versus recoil operated pistols. Last time, I mentioned that I’m working on a review of this gun – the new Beretta 80X Cheetah. It’s an all-metal double stack chambered for .380 ACP. The recoil is not at all difficult to manage, but it’s also not insignificant. A lot of people use the word “snappy” to describe how this gun shoots.

That’s in stark contrast to something like the .380 version of the Sig P365. It’s a bit smaller and lighter than the Beretta, but the perceived recoil is very mild by any standard. That’s because the Sig is a recoil-operated or locked-breech pistol while the Beretta 80X is a straight blowback design.

A while back, I did a video on the difference between these pistol types in case you want the detailed explanation. For our purposes today, all you really need to know is that blowback pistols have a stationary barrel – only the slide moves. With a locked breech pistol, the barrel does move. It’s locked to the slide and they move together for the first couple of millimeters of travel, and then they unlock and separate.

You might have heard before that blowback pistols feel like they recoil more than locked breech pistols of the same size, weight, and caliber. But why is that, exactly?

I’m going to put the two side by side, but for now, focus on the Beretta. Let’s pause right there. At this point, the Beretta’s slide is completely open. So far, the frame and my hands are in exactly the same position they were at the beginning. Then that recoil force travels from the slide to the frame all at once and you can see my hand react.

I’ll play that again, but watch the Sig this time. We’re paused here at the same point. The Beretta slide is completely open but the Sig’s slide is not there yet. It takes a little longer, probably because the barrel was locked to it at the beginning. They’re not together for long, but it would be like if you had a ten year old riding piggyback for the first five feet of a hundred meter sprint – that’s gonna slow you down. We also can already see some muzzle rise at this point. The gun is not level anymore. If we go frame by frame, you can see movement begin in the pistol frame and my hand just after the barrel unlocks.

Since the slide is moving slower, it opens with less force than the Beretta slide. That results in less muzzle rise. Watch it one more time and pay attention to the back of my hand on the Beretta when the slide opens. That little ripple in the skin is probably what we’re feeling when we say a gun like this is “snappy.”

So we have two pistols firing the same cartridge. You’d expect to feel more of the recoil with the Sig because it’s a few ounces lighter. But because it’s a locked-breech design, that recoil is spread out over a longer period of time, which we perceive as less recoil. This principle has limits. For example, the Beretta 80X is far easier to manage than a locked-breech pocket pistol like the Ruger LCP. Not only is the LCP much lighter than the P365, the grip has very little surface area, which concentrates the recoil force and is not much fun to shoot.

.380 ACP Blowback vs. 9mm Locked-Breech

How about if we compare the Beretta to a locked-breech 9mm of similar size and weight? Something like this 9mm Sig P365 XL. That’s the gun I was reminded of after my first range session with the Beretta 80X. But then I shot them side by side, and they felt very different. The Beretta has a snap while the Sig has more of a push, which is what you might expect. But it also seemed like the Beretta’s sights returned to the target a little quicker than the Sig’s. It’s similar to what we saw with the GP100.

The 9mm Sig recoils like the .380 version, there’s just more of it. The impulse moves to the frame and the shooter earlier than with the blowback gun. But now watch the slides close. From fully open to fully closed, the Sig’s slide takes 33% longer than the Beretta’s. Like the 1911, The Sig slide appears to linger in the open position. That has an impact on my ability to recover from recoil. And then when the slide finally does close, the muzzle starts to come down, but also causes the frame to jerk forward in my hands a little, which I have noticed when I’m shooting.

In the meantime, the Beretta muzzle is already on its way back down from grip pressure alone, even before the slide is completely closed.

Does Any of This Matter?

Now, if we watch these guns in real time, this all seems pretty academic. And it is, depending what you want to do with the gun. With a halfway decent grip, they both seem to snap back onto target pretty much instantly. Any proficient handgun shooter should be able to manage the recoil in either of these guns well enough for practical purposes.

But if you go through ammo by the case instead of the box or if you’re chasing some high performance shooting goals, these little quirks in the perceived recoil do make a difference. Either consciously or subconsciously, we learn how to compensate for the unique recoil characteristics of each gun when we spend a lot of range time with it. If we then try to shoot a different gun, it might take a while to kind of recalibrate our technique. Of course, recoil is not the only factor. But if all handguns had zero recoil, switching from one to another would be relatively trivial.

Like I said last time, watching these clips may or may not have any practical value for you. But if nothing else, shooting is fun and so are high speed cameras. Hope you guys enjoyed it. If so, be sure to subscribe to our channel and the next time you need ammo, get it from us with lightning fast shipping at LuckyGunner.com.

The post Recoil: Let’s Talk About Feelings appeared first on Lucky Gunner Lounge.

Details are in the video below, or scroll down to read the full transcript.

Hey everybody, I am Chris Baker from LuckyGunner.com and today I’m going to talk about handgun sizes. Specifically, I want to share some thoughts on how those sizes are categorized and then I’ve got a few tips that might be helpful whenever you’re evaluating a pistol’s dimensions and you’re not physically holding that gun in your hands.

This is a topic I bring up fairly often and that’s because size is important. A handgun’s physical dimensions – its size, shape, and weight – largely determine how well it will fit our hands and whether we’re likely to find it comfortable and concealable as a carry gun. The number of handgun models on the market has exploded in recent years. Even a well-stocked gun shop is unlikely to have a sample of every model you might want to look at. So we do a lot of our comparison shopping online.

Handgun Hero is an excellent resource for basic size comparisons. You can pick two handgun models and it’ll show you correctly-scaled images side by side. That helps a lot, but you still have to take it with a grain of salt. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to get a true sense of a handgun’s overall size just from seeing it on a screen or reading the specifications.

Pistol Size Categories

This has all been made a lot more complicated by the way pistol sizes have evolved in the last decade or so. For a long time, most semi-autos were based on full size or duty size pistols, usually with a double stack magazine. A compact was basically a duty pistol with two or three quarters of an inch chopped off the slide and the grip. Shave off a little bit more and you get a subcompact. Smaller calibers got their own unique designs called pocket pistols.

There have always been exceptions and guns that blurred the lines between the categories, but things really started to change around 2011-2012. That’s when the polymer single stack 9mm pistols like the Smith & Wesson Shield began to dominate the concealed carry market. It was nice to have all of these new options, but it did complicate our conversations about carry guns. We couldn’t just say “compact” and “subcompact” anymore. We had to specify “single stack” or “double stack.”

That wasn’t really a problem until the 2017 release of the Sig P365. It was a bit smaller than most of the single stack nines, but it had a double stack – or more like a one and a half stack — magazine with higher ammo capacity. That started another industry trend with every gun company trying to figure out how to cram double digit capacity into guns the size of their old single stacks.

We needed a name for this new category, and the one that seems to have stuck is “micro compact.” What’s the difference between micro compact and subcompact? Do the single stacks also count as micro compact? Nobody knows, and we’re all just making this up as we go along.

The latest evolution is exemplified in the Sig P365 XL. A micro compact with a longer slide and grip, followed by the P365 XMacro with an even longer grip. A few other companies have jumped on board with larger versions of their micro compacts like the Springfield Hellcat Pro. I’m not sure we have a name for these yet. I’m going to go with “longslide micro compact.”

What Does “Compact” Even Mean?

But maybe we don’t need a name for these because some of them are virtually the same size as the old style compact double stack pistols. And if you weren’t confused already, this is where things really get weird.

Why does Sig have the P365 XMacro and the P320 XCompact? On paper, they look like they would fill the same role, so how would you choose one over the other? Why does Smith & Wesson have the Shield Plus 4-inch and the M&P 4-inch Compact? Or how about the Springfield Hellcat Pro and the XD-M Elite Compact?

I don’t think the gun companies planned it this way. They already had the compacts in their lineup. Then the micro compacts got popular but some people wanted them to be a little bigger. Now there’s overlap.

In any case, we’ve got a ton of options now, and many of them, even when they come from the same manufacturer, appear to be roughly the same size. But a lot of these similarities are only superficial. So let’s take a look at how we can spot some subtle but very important distinctions.

Beyond Basic Dimensions

We’ll start with those two Sigs I just mentioned. At a glance, the most significant difference appears to be length. The XCompact is about four tenths of an inch longer. That’s probably not going to make a huge difference in terms of comfort or concealability. What’s going to be more noticeable is the overall bulk. To some extent, we can see that in the width measurement. The XCompact is two tenths of an inch wider. Another trick we’ve used to visualize this in some of our past reviews is to overlay the two profiles and give them different colors.

Look at the distance from the top of the slide to the bottom of the trigger guard. That is a significant difference. The XMacro has a much smaller footprint. A holster made for that gun will take up less room. That gives you more flexibility in where you place the gun on your waistband to find that concealment sweet spot.

Also take a look at the grip from front to back. Again, the XMacro is shorter in that dimension. That’s less gun that has to be concealed by your cover garment. However, it also means less surface area for your hands, so the Compact might end up being easier to shoot, depending on your hand size.

You can actually try the overlay trick yourself in Handgun Hero if you scroll down to where it says “tabletop comparison” and click the color palette switch. That’ll give you a better sense of overall size.

Footprint, Width, and Bulk

I’ve got another comparison to consider. After my review of the Beretta 80X, I got several requests to compare it to the Beretta PX4 Compact. That’s not a comparison I would have thought of, but when I looked at the specs on Beretta’s website, the two guns are within a tenth of an inch of each other in terms of height, length, and width.

But while I was making these graphics, I actually discovered that Beretta’s numbers are not quite right. Here’s what I got when I measured these guns myself. The main issue was the height. Beretta lists the 80X as one tenth of an inch shorter than the PX4 Compact. With a magazine in both guns, the 80X is actually three tenths shorter. So that’s another thing to keep in mind. The data you find online might not actually be correct.

If we do the overlay trick, we can see that the 80X has a smaller overall footprint. Even though it’s based on a design from the 1970s, the footprint is similar to a modern longslide micro compact.

Beretta lists both the 80X and the PX4 Compact as 1.4 inches wide, but that’s a little deceptive. That’s the width at the safety/decocking levers. The slide and the grip measure about 1.1 inches on both guns. But when you handle them in person, the 80X just doesn’t feel as wide. It has much more variation in its contour. The PX4 is wide everywhere. The 80X tapers in at the center of the frame. It’s got the open top slide. It’s not just the footprint that’s smaller, the 80X occupies less volume overall and that kind of thing is noticeable when you’re carrying it every day for several hours.

Or maybe it’s not noticeable for you. All of this is pretty subjective.

Let’s look at one more comparison: the Glock 26 and 43 – an old-style double-stack sub-compact and a single stack nine (which is also a subcompact, or possibly a micro compact, depending on who you ask). The profiles here are functionally identical. They look like basically the same gun except that the 43 is a quarter inch thinner and holds four fewer rounds. But I wouldn’t be quick to dismiss that quarter inch width reduction. When we’re looking at width, a little bit makes a big difference.

If you grip these two guns, you can tell they’re really night and day. Neither one of them are great, ergonomically speaking. I find the 43 to be a bit more difficult to control, but that’s going to be highly reliant on hand shape. In a holster, the 43 pretty much disappears for me, but the 26 is really awkward to conceal because of the width to length ratio. You wouldn’t necessarily guess any of that from looking at pictures online. Sometimes there’s just no substitute for hands-on experience.

You Have to Start Somewhere

Not too long ago, we had maybe a dozen or so decent options for reliable carry guns. You just had to pick something and figure out how to make it work, which is where we got the whole idea of “dressing around the gun” and other cliches that, I think, turned off a lot of people to the whole idea of concealed carry altogether.

Today, we are really spoiled for choice. There is a handgun out there to suit just about every need or preference you can imagine. We’ve gone from “make it work” to having the luxury to choose what’s optimal for our individual situation. But sometimes that can lead us to that whole problem of “analysis paralysis.” Hopefully, the stuff I talked about today will help you avoid that trap. Or maybe I actually made it harder to decide. I hope not.

Either way, keep in mind, there are no perfect solutions and there are plenty of options that are probably good enough for you. Just pick something. Buy a high quality holster. Get out to the range and practice, and be sure to buy some ammo from us with lightning fast shipping at LuckyGunner.com.

The post Crushing the Confusion About Pistol Sizes appeared first on Lucky Gunner Lounge.

Details are in the video below, or keep scrolling to read the full transcript.

Hey everybody, I’m Chris Baker from LuckyGunner.com and today I’m going to tell you why pistol caliber carbines (or PCCs) are silly and pointless. And then I’m going to make a case for why you might want to consider one anyway.

The Rifle-Pistol Performance Gap

In our last video, we looked at the basics of terminal ballistics and the huge gap in effectiveness between rifle and pistol cartridges. That’s mostly due to the large temporary cavity created by a rifle. There’s just no contest. If you need to take down an animal, or you need to make a human stop doing bad things right now, you’re going to get more reliable results with a rifle (or a shotgun).

Even if all you care about is target shooting, rifles are still superior. Rifle cartridges have much longer usable range than pistols. And they’re inherently more accurate, even at short range.

The only reason pistols exist at all is because they’re more portable and concealable than rifles. They are a compromise solution. Long guns are easier to shoot than handguns. They’re quicker to learn how to shoot well. They require less practice to maintain a decent level of proficiency. That goes for rifle or pistol caliber carbines.

But if you’ve already decided to use a long gun, why would you get one chambered for the weaker cartridge of a pistol? Pistol caliber carbines are the worst of both worlds. They are feeble and anemic like pistols but carry the size penalty of a rifle.

Pistol Caliber Carbine Barrel Length Misconceptions

You might argue that a carbine-length barrel grants the pistol cartridge some additional velocity, thereby increasing its effectiveness on target beyond what is capable with a handgun. And I would argue that you’re wrong.

Well, maybe not 100% wrong. A magnum revolver cartridge fired from a lever action rifle can gain significant velocity. For example, we’ve measured some .357 and .44 Magnum loads at over 2000 feet per second out of 17.5-inch barrels. That was roughly 50% faster than what those loads were doing out of a 4-inch revolver. That’s not quite true rifle velocity, but it’s probably close enough to make that extra barrel length worthwhile.

But usually, when we talk about pistol caliber carbines, we don’t mean lever actions. We’re talking about 9mm semi-automatic carbines. Or maybe .45, or something weird like 10mm. Ballistically speaking, these cartridges benefit a lot less from the added barrel length.

Going from a full size handgun to a 16-inch carbine, semi-auto cartridges see an average velocity gain around 100 to 200 feet per second, which is 10-20%. You get severely diminishing returns with anything longer than about a five inch barrel.

That 100 to 200 feet per second is simply not enough to make the pistol bullet do anything remarkable. It’s still just a pistol round. And hollow point loads are not typically designed for those increased velocities anyway. Most modern loads will still do okay, but in some cases, the bullet might actually perform worse out of a carbine than it would out of a handgun. It might expand too much and under-penetrate.

Penetration Issues

Occasionally someone will suggest that pistol calibers are better for home defense because they’re less likely to penetrate through interior walls compared to a rifle cartridge. Actually, the opposite is true, at least in the case of 5.56.

Some 5.56 loads will tumble or fragment after going through a couple of walls and quickly lose velocity. Most pistol bullets will sail right through ten or more layers of drywall before stopping. Any projectile that’s capable of reliably stopping a human attacker will also penetrate at least two or three interior walls, and that’s enough to be a danger to anyone else in your home. There are other ways to mitigate that risk besides ammo selection. But if wall penetration is a major concern, a pistol caliber is among the worst possible options.

So why do pistol caliber carbines even exist? We’ve got a plethora of AR, AK, and other carbines chambered for intermediate rifle cartridges like 5.56 NATO, 7.62×39, and 300 Blackout. They are affordable and come in all shapes and sizes. They have proven, time and again, to be more effective on target than anything chambered for a pistol cartridge. What good is a PCC other than as a range toy?

Ammo Cost

Well, it’s because terminal performance isn’t everything. What PCCs lack in that department, they make up for in several other areas. Today, I’m going to focus on four of those advantages.

First, it costs less to feed a pistol caliber carbine. Right now, .223 range ammo costs roughly 75% more than 9mm.

Ammo prices fluctuate quite a bit over time, so that price difference might grow or shrink, but historically, 9mm has always been at least a little bit cheaper. Depending on how much you shoot (or want to shoot), that might be a major advantage.

Less Noisy

Second, pistol caliber carbines are less noisy. This is an easily overlooked advantage. It might even seem like a non-advantage, assuming you always wear proper hearing protection at the range. But less noisy guns have a few side benefits.

Intermediate rifle cartridges, especially 5.56, deliver very little felt recoil to the shooter’s shoulder. The difference between an AR-15 in 5.56 and a 9mm carbine is negligible. However, 5.56 is much louder and that can create the perception of recoil, especially for a novice shooter, or for anyone at an indoor range. Even with decent hearing protection, it’s a less pleasant experience, and has the potential to induce a habitual flinch response.

Gunfire Noise and Home Defense

I also would not totally disregard the advantages of using a quieter gun in a home invasion emergency. If you’ve ever been exposed to gunfire indoors without hearing protection, then you know any caliber is extremely loud. Under life-threatening stress, you may experience the phenomenon known as auditory exclusion – the gunshots will sound muted, or you may not notice any noise at all. But whether or not you’re conscious of it, that noise is 100% guaranteed to permanently damage your hearing. Possibly severely.

Exposure to loud noises doesn’t affect every individual the same way. A mild case of noise induced hearing loss and tinnitus might end up being merely inconvenient. A moderate case will cause a significant reduction in your quality of life. It’s a gamble, but the less loud gun will tip the odds in your favor a little bit. I’m not saying it’s the first thing you should consider when choosing a gun for home defense, but it’s probably worth factoring in.

Of course, if you really want to avoid damage to your hearing, you can always keep a set of electronic earmuffs next to your gun, and hope that you have enough time to put them on. Or, if they’re legal in your state, you could use a silencer. That opens up a whole can of worms about how a silencer might be perceived by law enforcement, prosecutors, and juries. But that’s a discussion for another day.

We’re still just on advantage number two. All of that falls under the heading of “less noisy.”

Shooting Range-Friendly

Let’s move on to number three. And I kind of alluded to this one a minute ago: pistol caliber carbines are more shooting-range friendly. Especially indoor shooting ranges. That’s partly because of the noise thing. Nobody likes to be next to the guy shooting 5.56 or an AK at the indoor range. Because of that and, I’m sure, other reasons, lots of indoor ranges prohibit the use of rifle cartridges altogether. I’ve even seen some outdoor ranges that only allow pistols and shotguns, or restrict rifles to certain designated areas. A lot of outdoor gun clubs are run by angry retired guys who still look down their noses at evil black rifles. But usually, if they have an area where pistols are allowed, pistol caliber carbines also get a pass.

I know plenty of shooters who own rifles, but have had a really hard time finding a range where they’re actually allowed to shoot them. A pistol caliber carbine can go a lot of places other long guns cannot.

Ideal SBR Option

And the fourth and final advantage of pistol caliber carbines is that they are fantastic candidates for registered SBRs (or short-barreled rifles). Thanks to the ATF, the pseudo-SBR pistol brace party is over, so this might not have as much appeal as it did a couple of years ago. But if you’re willing to jump through the hoops and get a tax stamp, SBRs still have advantages. They are more portable, more maneuverable indoors, and balance better with a suppressor attached.

SBR barrel lengths typically range from around eight to twelve inches. The downside is that those reduced barrel lengths also reduce the bullet velocity, and for a rifle cartridge, that can really tank your ballistic performance. You have to be a lot more picky about caliber and load selection. SBRs are also significantly louder with more muzzle blast. And they have a bit more felt recoil.

Technically, you get the same disadvantages with a short-barreled pistol caliber carbine – decreased velocity, increased noise and recoil – but on a much smaller scale. You don’t lose much, if anything, in terms of terminal ballistics. The bullet will actually be closer to the velocity window it was designed for. You can go all the way down to a five-inch barrel without giving up much. A rifle cartridge out of that barrel length is really going to struggle to perform.

What’s Best for Home Defense?

We could go around in circles all day about what type of firearm is best for home defense. There’s really no right answer. But I think PCCs often get left out of that discussion. One case where I do think they are often the best option is for the inexperienced shooter who is unlikely to pursue regular training and practice. I have often suggested the Ruger PC Carbine in particular. It’s not necessarily the best PCC on the market, but it’s affordable, reliable, easy to use, and widely available.

One other advantage that I didn’t really talk about is that pistol caliber carbines are a whole lot of fun to shoot. Whether you pick up the Ruger or some other PCC, you’re going to have a blast with it at the range. But only if you have enough ammo. So when the time comes, be sure to get that ammo from us with lightning fast shipping at LuckyGunner.com.

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