I just saw an ad(not current) for a course in House Clearing for the Armed Civilian, and holy hoppin’ jalapenos it was expensive! So, I am going to save you a fortune, travel expense and 3-5 days of your precious time and explain it in this blog for absolutely free. Furthermore this course will contain all of the information and techniques 95% of you will need! I am completely confident that after reading this you will be able to perform this task in an expert fashion.

Scenario 1: An Unhappy Homecoming

So, you come home and there are signs that your house has been entered in your absence. First attempt to determine if the intrusion is unfriendly. If a car belonging to a friend or family member isn’t parked conspicuously nearby, odds are the intruder is hostile.

1. Get some distance from the house and maintain situational awareness.
2. Get out your phone and dial 9-1-1
3. Wait for the police
4. Watch the police search your house.
5. Enter only when instructed to after it is determined that there is no threat or a suspect is under the police’s control.

Scenario 2: Not business as Usual

So, you arrive at your place of business and there are signs that the premises has been entered in your absence. First attempt to determine if the intrusion is unfriendly. If a car belonging to a co-worker isn’t parked conspicuously nearby, odds are the intruder is hostile.

1. Get some distance from the premises and maintain situational awareness.
2. Get out your phone and dial 9-1-1
3. Wait for the police
4. Watch the police search the premises.
5. Enter only when instructed to after it is determined that there is no threat or a suspect is under the police’s control.

Scenario 3: A Bump in the Night

So, your are in bed asleep when wake suddenly and there are signs that your house has been entered as you slept. First attempt to determine if the intrusion is unfriendly. If a car belonging to a friend or family member isn’t parked conspicuously nearby, odds are the intruder is hostile.

1. Stay where you are and if necessary gather family members present to the same room. Maintain situational awareness.
2. Get out your phone and dial 9-1-1
3. Wait for the police and continue to talk to the dispatcher.
4. Listen to the police search your house.
5. Exit the room and speak to the police only when instructed to after it is determined that there is no threat or a suspect is under the police’s control.

The more perceptive among you may have detected a common thread here…

Critical Equipment

I’ve already specified you are an armed civilian, so we’ll assume a handgun or other suitable weapon. You also need a cell phone, and it may be prudent to carry a compact supplemental charger to make sure it operates.

You will also need a brain and common sense.

In Conclusion

OK, this article is obviously a little tongue-in-cheek, but I’m making a real point here. Most of us live in urban or sub-urban areas with lots of neighbors and a not-crazy police response time. Your taxes pay for those police; use them. It’s what they’re for.

I did a lot of building searches back in the day. Doing it with a partner is difficult and nerve-racking. Doing it by yourself was viewed as just plain dumb. I came off shift one night and arrived at my apartment to discover that there seemed to be someone in there. What did I, a trained, armed police officer do? Cell phones not yet being a thing I went to a neighbor’s and called the police. Fortunately the burglar went out a back window when they arrived and no one was hurt. My neighbors may have thought I was a coward, about which I give not one single shit. It was late, I was exhausted and, most tellingly, I was alone. My training told me that doing a search alone was dumb, and I was not about to risk dying for pride and to save face… because that would be dumb.

Look, 99% of us are just folks. We know our way around our gear and how to handle it safely. Hopefully we also know how, and more importantly when, to shoot. We’re not trained for this stuff, and trying to DIY it on the fly is liable to get someone killed. Unfortunately it won’t necessarily be the bad guy. The likelihood that we will need to do this is remote enough that it probably doesn’t justify the cost of a SWAT-type course… which if it’s any good at all will train you to not try to do this alone anyway.

The police are trained; in fact it’s their job. They will bring the right gear and enough people to do the job properly. Don’t worry that it might be nothing; it’s their job and they’d probably rather it was, in fact, a false alarm.

Note: I know some of you may live in situations where this advice is impractical for one reason or another, so obviously this doesn’t apply to you. You’ll have to make your own assessment of the risk and your needs and prepare appropriately.

Michael Tinker Pearce, 21 February 2021

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A lot of firearms have claimed the title of ‘The Gun That Won the West;’ the Colt Peacemaker, the Winchester rifle, even the one I consider the rightful holder of that title, the single or double-barrel shotgun.

While all of these weapons played their roles and we can argue their claims until we’re blue in the face, these were not weapons carried on a day to day basis by average citizens. They were carried mostly by outdoorsmen; cowboys, prospectors, Army scouts and lawmen. But most people were not of that ilk; shopkeepers, bankers, blacksmiths and all the myriad folks that make a society work would have looked mighty out of place with a full-sized belt pistol.

This is not to say they went unarmed, though many of them did. Those that did were simply more discreet about it. Derringers abounded, most having a single or double barrel, and there were a few 4-shooters as well. But the market seems to have been dominated by compact small-caliber revolvers. Colt’s first proper cartridge-revolver was in fact a pocket gun, and as soon as the Rollin White patent on bored through cylinders expired the market for such guns boomed.

Colt, Remington and others offered quite a few variations on the theme, and these were for the most part solid-frame , single-action revolvers that either loaded via a gate (like the Peacemaker) or by removing the cylinder; in either case reloading was a somewhat awkward process, and not generally a fast one.

S&W had a different solution- they introduced their top-break, auto-ejecting #3 revolver, and by the mid 1870s introduced pocket versions of these guns in .32 and .38 S&W.

Like their Schofield revolver these compact guns ejected their shells automatically when the mechanism was opened, and thus could be reloaded much, much faster than solid-frame gate-loading guns. While it is true that top-breaks are weapons are weaker than solid-frame guns this did not prevent them from being chambered in potent calibers like .44-40, and many of these guns work as well today as they did 150 years ago, so ‘weak’ is a relative term.

Shortly thereafter S&W introduced top-break double-action revolvers, and then hammerless variants of those. Other companies quickly jumped on that bandwagon, though none in my opinion equaled the quality of the S&W guns. Between the cheap solid-frames and top-breaks pretty much anyone could afford a pocket-revolver that would work at least long enough to save their life (provided they could shoot.)

Below are photos of some of these guns from a variety of makers. Solid-frame guns are sadly under-represented. I’ll need to work on that…

From the 1870s through the end of the century there were no shortage of concealed-carry revolvers, and they while their larger siblings grabbed all the glory these were the guns of everyday folk.

There are a great many still out there, and since such guns were carried (or sat in a night-stand drawer) far more than they were taken out and fired many of them are still in good, useable condition. Most are not too expensive, though prices are rising as better-known guns increase in value; a case of ‘a rising tide lifts all boats.’ You should of course have any such firearm carefully examined by an expert before firing them, and you should fire them if it’s safe; they’re a lot of fun to master. Of course you’ll probably want to reload your own ammunition; these old calibers can be hard to find and expensive when you do.

Michael Tinker Pearce, 17 February 2021

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I promise I’ll talk about something else for, uh, a while! But for now here’s the update. I have finally been able to make a decent amount of ammunition thanks to Brena Bock, who sent me 100 or so .30 Carbine cases. I have the conversion process pretty much down to a science at this point.

I finally managed to get to the range to try the gun out, and there was good news and bad news. The bad news is the 78gr. bullets nose-dive instead of feeding if you load more than five rounds in the magazine. The good news is the 100gr. bullets cycled 100%. Mind you, I fired about fifty rounds total, but it’s looking good.

Since I didn’t know where the gun was hitting I ran a blank target out to seven yards and played ‘Chase the Bullet.’ I fire a shot to a more-or-less random location on the paper, and that becomes my aiming point for the next shot. After that each new bullet hole becomes the aiming point. This pretty quickly tells me where the gun is hitting in relation to the point-of-aim; in this case slightly high and slightly left.

The gun is quite pleasant to shoot. The trigger isn’t special, but it’s OK, and recoil is very light indeed. It shoots like, well, it shoots like a semi-automatic pistol. While I wasn’t focused on accuracy it isn’t conspicuously inaccurate.

Loading with Unique turns out to be very simple. Load 3.5gr of Unique and put a 100gr. bullet over it. Pretty much any 100gr bullet, apparently. I tried the 100gr LFPs, 100gr. Speer HJLRN (Plinkers) and 100gr. XTP JHPs. All of them work fine over 3.5gr. of Unique.

Here’s how they stack up. I’m not listing the Extreme Spread (ES) because I fired relatively few shots, and they were all quite close in velocity. I want to get some more data before posting the ES.

100gr LFP, 3.5gr. Unique, CCI500 primer

914 fps. 185 ft./lbs.

100gr HJLRN (Speer Plinker,) 3.5gr. Unique, CCI500 primer

890 fps. 176 ft./lbs

100gr XTP HP, 3.5gr. Unique, CCI500 Primer

941 fps. 197 ft./lbs

I’m not sure why the Speer Plinkers were so much slower than the other bullets. The XTPs, as predicted, did not expand at all when fired through denim. All three bullets penetrated 13 to 14-1/2″ into the Clear ballistics 10% ordinance gel through four layers of denim.

That’s it for Unique, because 3.5gr. is about all that will fit in the case; in fact this is a slightly compressed load. So there we are, unless I can come up with lighter bullets that are long enough to feed reliably. I actually have an idea about that; I’ll have to try it and see if it works out.

That’s not the end of load development of course; Unique is only one kind of powder. I found a pair of videos on Youtube where Duelist1954 was developing loads for 7.5mm French Long, which is pretty similar to 7.8 x 19mm. In it he used Unique, Power Pistol and Blue Dot. I happened to have a tiny bit of Power Pistol on hand, but it was enough to run a few test shots over the Chronograph. The results were gratifying-

100gr LFP, 4.2gr Power Pistol, CCI500 Primer

1028 fps. 235 ft./lbs

This meets my original benchmark of a 100gr Bullet at 1000+ fps. The bullet penetrated 20″ of gel when fired through denim and the cases again showed no signs of excessive pressure. I’d like to test a different HP, a ballistic-tipped round and maybe the 90gr. Lehigh Extreme Defender, but with the current shortages that probably won’t happen soon. For now it’s time for another range trip to try the various loads for accuracy.

OK, Why is This Working?

It’s occurred to me more than once that these are running awfully hot for a straight blowback. It might simply be that this gun has significantly more mass in it’s slide than a typical straight-blowback .32 0r .380 ACP. It’s also possible that since the barrel moves about a 1/4″ to the rear before it stops and the slide continues on it’s own that maybe that slight delay is just enough? Or maybe it’s a combination of these two things, or some third thing I haven’t thought of. I just don’t know. Whatever is going on it works better than it has any right to, and I’m glad of that!

I’ll be taking a break from the 7.8 x 19mm for a while. Get to the range, test some more stuff etc., but that’s for another day. Other projects have languished while I fiddled with this and they are calling out to me.

Michael Tinker Pearce, 11 February 2021