Thursday, May 28, 2009

Reloads for self defense?

With the skyrocketing cost of self defense ammo, I’m starting to re-think the issue of using reloads for carry ammo. The traditional mindset has always been that this is a no-no. Many years ago I had a long conversation with Massad Ayoob on this subject and he convinced me that it just wasn’t worth it to use reloads for a self defense scenario. His logic was that if you did happen to shoot someone, you did not want some prosecutor saying something like this: “Your honor, this crazed individual was not happy using standard, commercial ammo – no he had to concoct his own very own brand of super duper killing ammo”.

So I understand the argument, but does it really hold water? What if I carefully construct ammo that duplicates commercial ammo as best I can? My current favorite self defense ammo for the 9MM is the Cor-bon DPX with the Barnes all copper bullet. It penetrates deeply, expands reliably and defeats barriers better than anything else. The bad news is that it runs $35 to $40 per 20 round box – if you can find it. My cost to reload it is about $16 per box. I have developed a reload using this bullet that essentially duplicates the ballistics of the commercial load.

So my argument in court would be: “Your honor, because of the high cost of commercial ammo and the poor availability I chose to duplicate this load on my own. I would be happy to submit these reloads to whatever testing you deem appropriate to substantiate this claim”.

So what do you think? Am I being naïve and perhaps too logical, or am I on to something here?