I was reading a post on one of the gun forums that asked the question, “What is ‘enough’ gun?” The OP explained that he was referring to civilian self-defense. People tossed around their personal preferences, opinions and aired their prejudices. Then one fellow said he wouldn’t carry less than a high-capacity handgun with several reloads. What if he was faced with an armed gang? What if he was attacked by multiple men with rifles wearing armor and all he had was a J-Frame?

Seriously, you are more likely to be struck by a meteor than find yourself in a situation like that as an average citizen going about your business. His argument for this scenario was that you have to plan for the absolute worst-case. The thing is that we do not live in a Hollywood action movie. If you find yourself in that situation and try to fight with any handgun you are going to die if your attackers are not complete idiots.

As it happens I agree with him- you need to have a plan for even unlikely scenarios. But that plan should be based on reality, and in reality it’s not always smart to fight. Not to mention something that most people seem to forget- it’s not your job. You carry a gun for self-defense. Job one is to survive. Job two is to help as many other innocents as is feasible to survive. You are not obliged to single-handedly take on and defeat the baddies- your purpose is to live through the situation, and a gun might or might not help you do that.

You do possess a weapon far more important than your gun- your brain. Use it effectively and it will make the rest easier.

If you find yourself in a situation where you don’t have enough gun to fight your way to victory then focus your efforts on fighting your way clear. Or better yet getting clear without fighting. I’ve commented on mass shootings before. These typically happen in crowded venues, and if you engage the shooter any bullet that doesn’t hit them will hit something. If there are a lot of people running around in a panic it’s reasonably likely to hit one of them.

You are not a cop. you are not a super-hero, and I hope that you are not a vigilante. In a mass shooting situation it is your job to extract yourself and ideally any other innocents that you can. If you are armed your gun is literally for self-defense while you extract yourself from the situation. The same can generally be said of bank robberies, drive-by shootings and other such incidents. It is not your job to take down the bad guys and trying to is likely to get you shot, either by the baddies or responding police.

This is not to say you should never intervene; situations can arise where where it is sensible and legitimately within the realm of ‘use of deadly force’ guidelines to do so. The classic convenience store robbery could be an example if you are reasonably sure that the perpetrator is going to harm you or another. That’s the bottom line, really; generally speaking you are allowed to use deadly force if you or another innocent are in imminent danger of loss of life or grave bodily injury.

Real life is not a movie or TV show, and things are often not as simple as they appear. You need to make sure that you understand the situation. Is the woman menacing that guy with a gun a victim fighting back or a deranged ‘ex’ looking for revenge? Is that person with a gun in their hand chasing someone a baddie, or an undercover cop?

Another thing to consider is what to do when the police arrive. You are most likely to survive if you do exactly what they tell you to do when they tell you do it. An officer just arriving on scene doesn’t know who you are or what you are doing, and they are likely to treat you as a suspect first and sort things out later. Don’t argue and for the love of God don’t resist. Just do as you’re told. Not getting shot by the good guys is also part of self-defense!

A lot of this comes down to basic firearms safety- make sure of your backstop, never point your firearm at anything you are not willing to shoot, keep your finger off the trigger until you intend to fire etc.

The most important thing is to think. Your mind is your first, best and most effective weapon- use it!

Michael Tinker Pearce, 14June17

Ran 25 rounds through the Taurus m905 today- accurate, low recoil and no sign of trauma to the brass. Calling this one a win!  Next- load some more for Linda to shoot and start ratcheting up the power to see how much oomph the brass will take. I’d like to get up to .38 Special pressures, but with the tapered 9mm chamber bulging might become an issue.

I’m quite pleased with how this is working out.

Michael Tinker Pearce  9 June 17

A few years back Linda told me, “We should both have 9mm.s.” I said that was fine with me; perhaps she could get me one for my birthday? She did, and it was not exactly what I was expecting- a Taurus m905 9mm snub-nosed revolver. It’s a nice little revolver; you’ve seen it in range reports. The problem is that it has a very sharp recoil impulse- even with range ammo. Linda likes the gun, but it’s too unpleasant for her to shoot; it hurts her dodgy wrist.

The obvious thing to do, since I am reloading now, was to make some very light loads so that she can enjoy the gun without hurting herself. I saw no reason not to simply load my .38 S&W load- a 148gr. HBWC- in 9x19mm brass. These loads will not cycle a 9mm semi-auto, but the protruding wadcutter made them visually distinct so we would not accidentally fire them out of autos. Problem solved.

OK, not quite. It turns out that the chambers in the Taurus’s cylinder are really tight- so tight that the .358 diameter wadcutters won’t chamber. I don’t have a good way of swaging them down, so I was going to need to use a .355 diameter bullet. OK, admittedly having one of the autos fail to function from a low-powered load was a tragedy of limited scope, but my paranoia kicked in. What if the bullet lodged in the bore and it chambered another round? This was a recipe for badness. Unlikely though it might be, it provided an excuse to tinker, and I did.

So, I wanted low-power loads with a .355 bullet diameter that would chamber in the revolver but not an automatic. I seemed to recall that someone had invented a 9mm Rimmed specifically for use in revolvers, but that seems to have died a rapid death; there just aren’t enough 9mm revolvers, and metal clips that hold the rounds just aren’t a big enough bother to make 9mm rimmed viable.

Taurus M905 revolver with a ‘star clip’ of 9x19mm rounds

I admit, my worry about accidentally using under-powered rounds in one of our autos bordered on the ridiculous, but it made a fine excuse to let my inner Mad Scientist out to play. So I made a simple jig to uniformly shorten .38 Special cases to 19mm. Having just bought a box of 500 9mm 115gr. TMJ bullets it was easy to choose what to use in them.

Typically a load of 5.1gr. of Unique behind a 115gr. bullet is adequately powerful to cycle most semi-auto pistols, but we’re not worried about doing that. In a short-barreled revolver that load actually feels pretty stiff, about the same as shooting .38 Special +P, which is a lot more recoil than desired for our purpose. Since this load is not for self-defense, hunting or anything like that it need not be nearly so powerful. In fact this is strictly a target load; if it will punch holes in paper at twenty yards that’s good enough.

Accordingly I selected a load of 3.5gr. of Unique. I mounted a .38/.357 shell holder in the press and used 9mm dies to de-prime the shortened cartridge and tried it for fit in the Taurus’s chamber. It headspaced a bit deeper than 9x19mm but the primer ignited just fine. The primer also backed out of the cartridge a bit but didn’t interfere with the function of the gun. I guessed that the pressure of firing a loaded round would force the base of the cartridge against the breech and prevent this, so I proceeded to load a round. After adjusting the dies a bit I got satisfactory overall length and a strong, slightly rolled crimp.

A test shot revealed no issues with the primer backing out and the gun was able to cycle properly with further trigger pulls. The shell ejected easily, so it looked like I was in business. Recoil was very mild, similar to a .38 S&W. Fired from the 1-3/4″ Taurus the round penetrated nearly through two kiln-dried Douglas Fir 2x6s, slightly superior to my standard .38 S&W load using a 148gr. HBWC loaded over 2.5gr. of Unique. I judged that to be a satisfactory level of power for a light target load and loaded up a box for the next range trip. If it functions as well as the test shot we have a new cartridge and Linda can enjoy shooting it. If the head spacing proves to be an issue then I can always shoot them out of a .38 Special.

I’ve come up with a couple of Wildcat cartridges over the years, but they never did more than duplicate the performance and/or characteristics of an existing cartridge so I never pursued them. This one will be a record- I actually loaded fifty cartridges. Mind you, this is not a cartridge that is going to change anything for anyone but me; it is not going to ‘catch on.’ I feel perfectly safe in saying that we should not expect Ruger to chamber their next iteration of the LCR in it, nor is S&W going to be on fire to chamber their new offerings in this cartridge. I would be very surprised if the vast majority of the hand gunning community at large did not remain blissfully unaware of it. It is a singular, special-purpose cartridge that fills a personal need that very few, if any, will share.

It is not impossible that in the future I will develop a load for it that pushes a 115gr. self-defense bullet at .38 Special velocities. This would allow the use of speed loaders, which on the whole seem a great deal more reliable than the provided ‘star clips’ which can shed rounds or even become bent in a pocket.  Load factory 9mm rounds in a star-clip in the cylinder, and reload (if needed) with these rounds from a speed-loader or strip. This mimics my practice with the Chiappa Rhino, where I use the clips only to insure positive ejection of the first cylinder and speed-strips for the reload.

So, the name- .355/19R. It’s a .355 diameter bullet in a 19mm long case with a rim. Hey, I had to call it something, right? At least this is descriptive. I considered 9mm TIAG (Tinker is a Genius) or maybe 9mm AUW (Another Useless Wildcat) but on the whole I think I’ll stick with my first choice. Look for further developments in the next Range Report.

Michael Tinker Pearce   07 June 17