There are Street Guns and Race Guns, and while there are areas where they cross over they are very different things.

Street Guns are for duty, concealed-carry and self-defense. These might be stock or customized to suit the user. Generally if modified the changes are things that will enhance rather than reduce it’s core function. Improved sights, weapon lights or lasers, improved trigger, modifications to enhance reliability. Changes where they make sense in light of the gun’s mission, but that don’t make the gun large, bulky or heavy enough to impede it’s ability to be carried and/or concealed. What gets changed and how is highly individual and depends a lot on personal preference, personal circumstances and platform. Increasingly production guns are incorporating many of these improvements out of the box.

Then there are ‘Race-Guns,’ purpose-built guns for competition. These are modified to maximize their assets in a specific use, typically speed-shooting or combat pistol competition. Many of the goals are the same as the Street Gun; the ability to deliver hits rapidly and accurately for one thing. Things like enhanced sights and improved triggers are important. Things like weapon lights, lasers etc. are not; they don’t fit the mission. Expanded magazine wells, special grip configurations like thumb-rests for the off-hand, muzzle compensators. Things increase the size, shape and weight of the weapon enough to compromise it’s ability to be carried for self-defense or duty. Reliability is important, but for some might not carry the overriding importance that it does in a self-defense pistol. Lightening cuts in a slide are great for a race gun, but are a no-no on a duty pistol because they can admit environmental gunk into the action. Race guns are optimized to excel in the specific conditions that pertain to their form of competition.

I haven’t been regularly competing in years, but pre-COVID I was getting interested in Action Shooting International matches. These are a casual, low-intensity version of combat pistol competition where the primary challenge is to yourself and your skills, not the other participants. Fun without a lot of pressure and competitive drive.

I was modifying a 1911 as a carry-gun, and thought about those matches. Now, I don’t often carry a full-sized 1911, and when I do it’s not duty-style carry where the gun is exposed to the environment for hours and hours every single day. Maybe what would best suit my needs was a hybrid; compact and reliable enough for EDC, but with some specialized enhancements aimed at competition performance. IOW a sort of ‘Street Racer.’

The Starting Point

Sometime around the dawn if history a friend of mine named Lee set out to built his ‘ultimate’ 1911a1. He got a Systema Colt frame (made under license in Argentina and very good quality) and a government surplus ‘match’ slide. He filled it with good quality parts, a beavertail, commander hammer, long trigger with an overtravel screw, Pachmayr grips… all the then-fashionable mods for a serious ‘fighting’ 1911a1.

To my mind he made only two genuinely questionable decisions about this pistol; he kept the GI sights, and he sent it out for a (then) high-tech Teflon coating in what I can only describe as ‘Baby-Shit Green.’ The picture above doesn’t do it justice; the color is truly hideous.

The coating is a pretty good finish, and was all the rage at the time but it took a while to get back to him. Lee needed a carry gun in the meantime, so he got a Glock 23 (Gen 2 I think) and he was off and running. By the time he got the 1911a1 back he was all about Glocks. The green monster sat in a box, completely disassembled for years. Then one night he brought it with him when he came to dinner and sheepishly asked if I could re-assemble it for him. In short order it was a gun again, and he gave it to me as a gift, along with extra magazines manuals and some accessories.

Lee has since passed away, all too soon, and the gun has been a memorial to his life and our friendship. Despite the crappy GI sights it’s a good shooter, but it never really did it for me; this was Lee’s idea of a fighting .45, not mine. I’d shoot it now and again, but mostly it languished in the safe. Linda asked me about this and I explained. She pointed out that I was constantly modifying guns; why not this one? Well, because it was Lee’s thing and I didn’t want to change it. “Honey,” she said. “Lee has met you. He’d have been fascinated to see what you would do to make it your own.”

Being Linda she was of course correct, so I had a donor-gun.

First Things First

Being a man of many interests and limited time (not to mention finances) it didn’t happen overnight. The gun was equipped with a Pachmayr arched mainspring housing, and I much prefer a flat one. Jim Bensinger was dropping by Caspian, so he snagged a flat stainless one for me. This immediately improved the gun for me, and I stippled it with a punch for texture.

Next was the slide and sights. The green is awful, and having the whole gun uniformly that color? No. I stripped the slide, and because it was an ugly tool-marked mess under the green I flattened the sides and’ for good measure, flat-topped it. I finished it with rust-blue then added a narrow bronze front sight. Then I attacked the GI rear sight with a 30 LPI checkering file to improve its visibility. OK, now we’re cooking!

The gun came to me, as you can see in the first photo, with Pachmayr wrap-around grips. I had, uh, ‘enhanced’ these by gluing a piece of eraser underneath to form a finger-groove which works fine, but I don’t prefer Pachmayrs on a concealed-carry gun. The ‘grabbyness’ of the material can stick to a light cover garment and cause the gun to print.

I made a set of smooth Goncalo Alves wood grips to replace them. They’re smooth because I don’t grip the sides of the gun; I grip front-to back with my thumb riding the safety. Speaking of which…

The gun came to me with a GI safety, which I’m OK with, but for carry and competition it needed an ambidextrous safety. I found a Remington factory one online for $25 and snagged it. It uses a forward projection of the safety under the grip to hold the left-hand safety in place, so the grip needed to be altered to accommodate that. A couple other small alterations and I was in business. Now the gun had Dumbo Ears.

The safeties came with a very aggressive shape and some sharp edges, but hey, I’m me. I narrowed the off-side and reshaped and smoothed the edges a bit. Now the safety is comfortable but hasn’t lost any function.

Of course now, with the plain grip frame at the front it wasn’t as ‘grippy’ as the Pachmayrs, so I stripped the gun and gently clamped it into my engraving vice. I grabbed a 20 line-per-inch checkering file and had at it.

The results are not perfect, but they are effective. Hey, it was only the second time I used a checkering file! I’ll get better. I colored the checkering with Oxpho Blue and moved on.

Now I had a gun with a checkered front-strap and a stippled mainspring housing. That wouldn’t do, so I sanded off the stippling on the belt grinder, then matched the contour of the housing to the frame and it was time for the 20 LPI checkering file again.

Practice may not make perfect but it makes better. I suppose I’ll have it coated at some point so it doesn’t stand out, but there’s no urgency there. Now it feels like when I grip the gun it grips me back. Best of all there are no hotspots or places where it pokes me; it’s comfy. I’ll shoot a comfy gun more.

Coming Soon to a Bubba Near You!

There’s more coming, but I’m waiting on some things to arrive. Mike Harris is sending me some high-visibility night sights to try out, so that’s one thing. Since the gun is currently chambered for .400 Cor Bon it needs to revert to being a .45. There’s a lot to recommend the .400 cartridge, but it’s going to be harder on the gun long-term and I already have match and defensive loads worked up for .45ACP. Besides, I just like it. It’s old, fat and slow; I can relate.

That’s it for now. Stay safe and take care.

Michael Tinker Pearce, 13 June 2021

A while back BBTI got ahold of me and said they had some Underwood ammo left over from their testing. Would I like to do some tests myself? Yes, yes I would thank you! What they very graciously sent me was two boxes each of 9mm Xtreme Defender and 9mm Hero ammunition. Both bullets are light-for-caliber at 65 and 70 grains respectively, and I was eager to try them out.

Light-for-caliber bullets propelled to extreme velocities is an idea that just will not go away. The idea has always been that a light bullet moving very quickly has a lot of energy, and that it will dump that energy rapidly. The thought was that this would cause a physical shock that would incapacitate the target. In reality there just isn’t enough energy there to cause that kind of shock, so the bullet simply under-penetrates badly enough that it can’t reliably reach vital structures. Unless it doesn’t expand, in which case the permanent wound cavity is quite small.

Energy is great, but momentum is your friend when it comes to penetration. Light-for-caliber bullets lack sectional density, which is the ratio of mass to cross section, and penetration is greatly enhanced by having a high sectional density. This is why tanks shoot long, narrow, heavy darts at each other these days. Because physics.

For my test gun I used my Sig-Sauer P6. This has a 3-3/4″ barrel, comparable to many mid-size EDC-style guns. Both of these bullets claim very high velocity for a 9mm, but are not +P rated. I expected that with the shorter barrel velocities would be below the claimed velocity for these cartridges, and I wasn’t wrong. I set up the Caldwell chronograph in front of blocks of Clear Ballistics 10% ordinance gel covered with four layers of denim. All shots were fired from approximately ten feet. Let’s start with the Heros.

Hero or Zero?

I confess to some doubts about this one. In previous tests light-for-caliber hollow-points usually exhibit spectacular expansion and poor penetration and, spoilers, these were no exception.

Claimed velocity is 1650 fps., which with the 70gr. bullet would yield 423 ft./lbs. of energy. From the P6 they averaged 1569 fps. for 383 ft./lbs. Not bad, and given the shorter barrel of this gun not wildly off.

Bullets expanded to an average of .68 caliber. Impressive!

Rather less impressive was their penetration. The two bullets fired into the gel both penetrated damn near exactly 9 1/2″. In fact bullets fired into bare gel also penetrated about 9-1/2″. Gold Star for consistency, then.

The Permanent Wound Cavity is reasonably impressive, with the bullets expanding immediately and creating a zone of significant disruption about 5″ long, and never fully streamlining. In the track above the bullet came to rest at 90 degrees from the direction of travel.

The FBI specifies a minimum of 12″ of penetration when fired into 10% ordinance gel through four layers of 16oz. denim, and this falls significantly short of that. I consider this a dubious choice for self-defense and would never recommend it for duty ammo. That being said I bet it’s awesome on pests and varmints!

Seriously, what do people have against ‘E’s?

Next came the Xtreme Defender ammunition. These also use a monolithic copper bullet, but they are about as different from a hollow-point as you can imagine. The bullet itself is produced by Lehigh Defense, who makes special purpose ammunition for the armed forces among other things.

The point has been described as being like a flattened Phillips screwdriver tip. The theory is the ogives cut into the bullet combine with the bullet’s rotation to displace tissue. It’s claimed that this produces a hollow-point-like permanent wound cavity, but is barrier-blind to clothing, windows etc. which can seriously affect the performance of conventional ammunition.

The claimed velocity for these bullets is 1700 fps., which produces 417 ft./lbs. of energy. The result I got was an average of 1660 fps. for 398 ft./lbs. Again, given the shorter barrel this isn’t far off at all.

Under-penetration was not an issue for these bullets. The sample went 16″ and was found on the table between the blocks of ballistic gel. It was difficult to get a good photo of this PWC; after several re-castings the Clear Ballistics gel as become Not Very Clear Ballistics gel.

The damage in the gel is very comparable to hollow-point ammunition. You can see the spiral created by the ogives as the bullet rotated. The bullet maintained a zone of disruption right up to about nine or ten inches, where it appears to have tumbled, then streamlined for the last three or so inches before it exited the gel. The wound track crosses the block at an angle because of me, not because the wound channel curves.

This bullet appears to have the chops for a self-defense round. Penetration is good but not excessive, and the Permanent Wound Cavity looks good. BUT… This is gel, not flesh, and gel is a comparative media, not a predictive one. Bullets that perform in gel usually, but do not always, perform well in flesh-and-bone targets.

If you want to carry these for self-defense or as a duty round I wouldn’t think you were nuts. All the indications are good and they don’t have excessive penetration, unlike ball ammunition. Plus they perform well against heavy clothing and barriers. In other tests I have seen they maintain an acceptable level of performance even after penetrating windshields, drywall and sheet metal. Personally I’m going to reserve judgement on this one.

The Takeaway

So, two LFC monolithic copper bullets, two different wounding mechanisms, both driven to extreme velocities for their cartridge. The ultra-light hollow-point works like they do; spectacular expansion, poor penetration. Works well against smallish critters, not so much on humans. The other…

Hell, we don’t even have a name for this type of bullet. It’s a very different idea, and it appears to work. It seems to have some advantages over conventional self-defense bullets as well, especially for law enforcement duty. The question is do these qualities carry over into the real world? Time will tell, I suppose.

So, for civilian self-defense and duty the Hero gets a big No. The Xtreme Defender gets a tentative yes; apparently it will at least not work worse than ball, and might work a hell of a lot better. I want more real-world data before firming up that yes.

Shout out to my supporters at Patreon for supplying the Clear Ballistics gel that will replace this murky stuff!

Take care and stay safe.

Michael Tinker Pearce, 10 June 2021

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We love to debate which caliber is best for a defensive handgun, and that’s been going on ever since practical revolvers became widely available. Endless testing, theories, fashion and ego drive these debates far more than real-world performance in actual gunfights. When such data is collated and presented the studies their results are too often disregarded in favor of cult-of-personality driven opinions, anecdotes cherry-picked to support a personal prejudice and a blatant disregard for factual data.

One of the most famous 20th C. gunfighters used a .38 special. Others used .45s, .357s, etc. A couple of these folks insisted that nothing but their personal choice worked worth a damn, yet somehow these fellows all survived multiple gunfights and came out on top regardless of their caliber-of-choice, weapon or the success of other contemporary gunfighters that made different choices.

These men were very often less well-armed than those they faced. Care to guess why they prevailed regardless?

A Dirty Little Secret…

When I served in the army in the early 1980s we used 1911a1 pistols, most of them still composed of WW2 leftovers. They were pretty sad and worn out. We did not think particularly well of them, but guess what? Nobody really cared. They worked well enough and in the grand scheme of things they were so unlikely to ever be used that no one fussed about them. We had much, much bigger problems.

Yes, the 1911a1 served for 70+ years, but this wasn’t because they were the best of all possible pistols. It was because it was going to be a huge, expensive pain in the ass to replace them and pistols just didn’t matter enough to be bothered until we had to replace them. The 1911a1s were worn out, we were running out of spare parts and we had a treaty obligation to standardize the 9x19mm that we couldn’t put off indefinitely.

The 1911a1 is an ingenious design and one of the all-time greats among service pistols. In updated form it’s still an excellent tool. But a military service pistol is literally the least important weapon system in the arsenal of any military force. Today there are lighter, more capable, more versatile, cheaper and more reliable platforms for that use.

…But We’re Not The Army

OK, some of you are, but most of us are civilians, and rather than an almost irrelevant last-ditch ‘Hail Mary’ a handgun is often our first line of defense as individuals or law enforcement. Our choice of weapon, caliber etc. is significantly more important. Yes, the odds that you will need a gun are pretty small, but if you do need it you will need it very badly indeed. You need an effective weapon that you are comfortable with and shoot well. So which caliber should you choose?

I think that it is possible, even likely, that all things being equal some service calibers may be objectively better than others. The problem is all things are never equal; there are a huge number of variables in a gun fight. Motivation, determination, skill, training, lighting conditions, clothing, numbers of opponents… the list goes on and on. Among the variables involved in a gunfight the caliber of your weapon may be one of the least important factors.

For us civilians the sole and only purpose of a gunfight is to make the other guy stop whatever he’s doing that makes it necessary to shoot him… and preferably survive, of course. With all the variables in play it’s not impossible that your choice of weapon or caliber will play a critical role, but it’s not likely to be a decider unless you choose very stupidly indeed.

There are a lot of very good guns out there in calibers that, in real life, all seem to work about as well as each other. Pick what works for you; a weapon you’ll actually have with you, a gun that is reliable and that you shoot well. Learn the gun and it’s manual of arms inside and out. Importantly you need to pick a caliber you will actually practice with. If you don’t reload your own ammo that means something commonly available. OK, obviously at this moment none of them are easily available, but that will change. Knock on wood.

Then, when all is said and done, remember that guns don’t win gunfights. People do. Setting aside luck, how do they do it?

Stop me if you’ve heard this one…

You Are the Weapon, the Gun is Just a Tool

Understanding the gun is only the beginning; you need to understand your primary weapon; know your own strengths, weaknesses and limitations. Have a realistic appraisal of your abelites, or what you can and can’t do with your weapon of choice. Plan to work around those limitations.

We all have very different lives and circumstances. Some of us can carry a full-size service pistol in our daily lives. Some of us can only manage to carry a very small pistol. That’s fine; carry the best tool you can that’s compatible with your needs and situation. Plan to minimize the effect of weaknesses and maximize your strengths.

If you know you can’t deploy your weapon quickly don’t try; instead focus on how to create opportunities where speed will not be a deciding factor. If you know you shoot poorly past a given range think about how you might get within that range in a variety of scenarios. Understand what you’ve got and what you can do, then plan accordingly.

Yep. Tactics, Training and Doctrine. If they’re bad you’ll probably lose. If they’re good you have a much better chance of making it through.

But What if That’s Not Enough?

Then it’s not enough. Look, there are situations where you just aren’t going to win, and anyone that tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something. A drunk driver plows into your café. A brick falls on your head. You get hit by lightning. Or maybe there’s just too many of them. Sometimes excrement occurs, and all your training and planning just isn’t enough. Get over it. There are things we can control and things we can’t… but chance favors the prepared mind, and having a plan is always better than not having one. Even if the plan goes sideways.

Nevertheless…

There’s a saying in certain circles, “If you ain’t cheatin’ you ain’t tryin.’ By all means cheat if you can, and do whatever you reasonably can to stack the odds in your favor. This isn’t a game; ‘playing fair’ is not only not required, it’s stupid. Another old saying is that, ‘A man that finds himself in a fair fight has made a serious error in judgement.’ Plan on how to not find yourself in that fight. Be aware of your surroundings, keep an eye on suspicious persons or activities. Try to see the fight coming so you can, if possible, get out of it’s way. Failing that seeing it coming gives you the best chance to be prepared.

The advice often given is to carry the largest, most powerful gun you reasonably can. Given the caveat that ‘reasonably can‘ includes being able to use it effectively it’s not bad advice. After all why wouldn’t you stack the odds? It’s life or death; you’d be a fool not to.

Same thing with modern defensive ammunition. Sure, if you do your part even ball will probably do the job, but if using good hollow-points will increase the odds in your favor, even a little, then you definitely should use them. Provided that they are suitable to your weapon of choice and it functions with them, of course. Every bit helps and any advantage is worth employing if it’s practical to do so.

Stop Worrying About Caliber

Anything in the range of ‘service calibers’ will do the job if you do yours. For civilian self-defense that means anything between .380 ACP and .45 ACP. Find what works for you and your life, then train with it. Learn as much as you can, think it through and decide what the best choice or choices are for you and your own unique circumstances. Be aware of the compromises imposed by your choices and incorporate them into your personal plans. Because that’s what going to keep you alive if anything can.

Michael Tinker Pearce, 10 June 2021