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

The introduction of the 10mm Auto gave magnum power to the 1911 platform, but as the Colt Delta Elite demonstrated it just wasn’t up to the task. Heavy-bullet loads with their high pressure and recoil caused cracking of the frames and rails. The platform can be beefed up to handle it, but stock guns? The best you can hope for is a seriously curtailed service life.

In 1997 Peter Pi, the founder of Cor Bon, designed a 10mm that would avoid these issues and with light-bullet loads would equal the 10mm’s power. His reason for doing so was that hollow-point bullets require velocity to expand, and bottle-necked cartridges tend to feed well in semi-automatic pistols.

To make a long story short, it worked. Mostly. Both cartridges can comfortably push a 135gr. bullet to 1450fps. for 630 ft./lbs., or a 155gr. bullet to 1250 fps. for 538 ft./lbs. of energy. But as the bullet weights increase .400 Cor Bon lags behind. It’s a matter of pressure; .400 Cor Bon has a lower maximum pressure than 10mm Auto, and you run up against that limit trying to push heavier bullets to 10mm velocities. Many experts in the field say 165gr bullets are pretty much the limit for high-performance loads in this cartridge. People have run 180gr. loads, but these resemble .40 S&W more than 10mm.

People have reported varying degrees of success using drop-in barrels in 1911s, and if you plan to shoot a lot a heavier recoil spring might be a good idea. I’ve read several reposts of people tearing up their 1911s firing this cartridge, but when I looked into these cases the symptoms were exactly what I’d expect from an improperly-fitted barrel in a .45-caliber 1911, so this is hardly conclusive. If you are not intimately familiar with the platform fitting any replacement barrel is probably best done by a professional.

A few guns have been produced in this cartridge, but for the most part it has been an aftermarket modification for 1911-pattern guns. The 135gr bullets have significant authority when used on small game, and the heavier bullets have been used successfully on medium-sized game at limited ranges.

Cor Bon, Underwood and others still produce .400 Cor Bon ammunition, but by and large it is viewed as an answer for a question no one asked.

Why .400 Cor Bon?

So, what attracted me to this cartridge? Mostly the fact that I was going through Pinto’s Guns discount section and there was a set of reloading dies for $10. I thought, ‘Hell, why not?’

I played around with it a bit, and forming brass is dead simple; run .45 ACP brass into the resizing die and .400 CB brass emerges. I had the best results by inserting the shell-holder in the ram, running it all the way up and screwing the die in until it made contact with the shell-holder. I had a few 10mm bullets on-hand, so I looked up load data and made up some cartridges. 155gr. JHPs at 1250 fps. making 538 ft./lbs. at the muzzle seemed a good place to start.

I looked up replacement barrels, which are not unduly expensive, and filed it as a ‘to do’ and forgot about it for several months. Recently I remembered and ordered a barrel from SARCO for about $60. It claims to be ‘drop-in,’ and while early barrels from them were poorly reviewed it was generally agreed that they had largely rectified those issues. For the price I decided to take a chance on it.

When it arrived it actually looked better than their picture on the web-site. It came without a link, so I removed the one from the gun’s current .45 ACP barrel and used that as a starting point. I hesitantly re-assembled the gun and checked the fit…

OK, understand this: when my eyes see ‘drop-in’ my brain sees ‘gunsmithing required.’ So I was quite surprised when the barrel fit and appeared to function perfectly. Huh. OK, that bent my reality a bit but I was willing to roll with it. Tentatively. I took it to Champion Arms with the ten rounds I had on-hand and…

It worked. Flawlessly. Perceived recoil was similar to .45 ACP, accuracy was fine and when I took the gun home and disassembled it everything looked… fine. OK then. Bob Rogers sent me some 155gr. TMC-FP bullets and Jim Bensinger sent me some Gold Dot hollow-points. I loaded these over 8.0gr. of Unique with a CCI 300 primer and headed back to the range.

Shooting it

At the range I discovered some interesting things, not the least of which was that the magazines I had brought suck. These are something I’ve had lying around and have been meaning to try out, and because I’m an idiot I thought it would be a good idea to test them and the ammo at the same time. They weren’t catastrophically bad, but the first round out sometimes nose-dived and they don’t lock the slide open.

OK, two different bullets, same weight, similar profiles, same load. You’d expect them to perform similarly, right? You must be new here…

Starting with the 155gr. TMC-FP I discovered, to my dismay, I was having trouble producing a respectable group at seven yards. I tried some rapid-fire and got these results:

OK, Normally I would blame me, but the eagle-eyed among you may have noticed something…

Yep, about half the bullets are yawing badly, and there’s a couple of full keyholes. This caused immediate paranoia; it hadn’t happened on my first test. Had something gone wrong?

Nope, not with the gun anyway. Five shots in five seconds with the 155gr. Gold Dots went just fine. Not sure what’s happening, but the TMC bullets do not like this load.

Shooting this round is not at all unpleasant. Recoil is notably snappier than .45 ACP, but recovery time between shots is unaffected, and further efforts produced similar results. So with the right bullet and load it seems to work a treat. Powerful, easy to shoot and should have a nice flat trajectory.

Reloading

There’s plenty of load-data for jacketed bullets, and I didn’t really find any for cast bullets. I’ll be working on that…

Reloading .400 Cor Bon isn’t all that tricky. Since the cartridge headspaces on the shoulder trimming the brass isn’t a major concern. Care must be taken with the seating die so as not to crush the shoulder. The case can also balloon slightly when the bullet is seated. The SARCO barrel’s chamber is tight, so I’ve found running the loaded rounds into the resizing die (with the de-capping pin removed, obviously) solves any issue with getting the first round out of the magazine to go into battery. Aside from that, though, reloading is a doddle, and the rounds feed very well out of a good magazine.

.400 CB’s Place in the World

It’s not unreasonable to ask, “OK, why?” Damned if I know. Self-defense? The cartridge’s extra power is unlikely to have a profound effect on ‘stopping power’ over other service cartridges. Hunting? The lack of the ability to get serious velocity out of heavy bullets seriously limits the cartridge in that regard. Competition? Under current rules it holds no advantage over existing cartridges like .40 S&W, which can fit more rounds in the magazine. Small-game hunting? Ought to be grand, but again not better than existing, more readily available options.

Honestly, it just doesn’t stand head-and-shoulders above other, more common calibers in any respect. .357 and 10mm Auto can both use bullets with higher-sectional density which ought to give them an edge in penetration, making them more suited to big game hunting or dangerous game defense. Lighter calibers work fine on small game.

Yes, it ought to be as good as anything out there for self-defense, but there are more practical choices available. Still, it works and I’m having fun, so I guess that’s reason enough.

I’ll be doing chronograph and ballistics testing soon, and we’ll see what’s what. Stay tuned…

Be safe and take care.

Michael Tinker Pearce, 31 May 2021

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…it’s complicated, because sometimes bigger isn’t really as ‘bigger’ as you might think.

Proponents of the larger calibers point out that a bigger hole does more damage. A bigger hole also means blood pressure drops faster. Seems like a no-brainer, right? But the collected data from actual gunfights doesn’t support this conclusion.

Research in recent years has shown little significant difference in the real-world performance of different calibers between .380 ACP all the way through .44 Magnum when multiple shots are fired. Service calibers (.38 Special, 9x19mm, .357 magnum, .40 S&W, 10mm and .45 ACP) actually perform surprisingly similar shot-for-shot too.. This is baffling; there’s a lot of variation there.

Here’s an experiment that may help explain this: get a thick piece of rubber and shoot it with a .380 ACP and a .45 ACP then look at the holes. The difference between the holes isn’t obvious. That’s because the material is elastic and stretches around the bullet as it passes through, then snaps back. The trick is that human flesh is also elastic and tends to do the same thing.

Regardless of the specific cartridge we’re looking at bullets between .355″ and .451″ in diameter. The difference is 1/10″. That’s not much, and as it turns out it’s not enough to overcome the elasticity of human flesh. Coroners and emergency-room personnel report that they often cannot tell what caliber produced a gunshot wound from a handgun until or unless they find the actual bullet that produced it. This is because flesh is elastic. We’re stretchy.

In other words the ‘hole,’ called the Permanent Wound Cavity, of a .45 ACP isn’t actually significantly larger than the one produced by the .380.

Surprisingly hollow-points don’t change the equation as much as you might expect. Modern hollow-points expand quite a bit, and if you’re relying on blood-loss to stop an attacker the extra damage of a large-bore expanded hollow-point is likely to speed things up slightly. Maybe not enough to make a difference though; an attacker that still has time to kill you isn’t ‘stopped’ in any meaningful sense. Neural Shock from shockwaves transmitted through the body may or may not have an effect, but this seems to be unreliable at best as a stopping mechanism.

The simple truth is that the way you stop an attacker with a handgun (quickly enough to do you any good) is to hit the central nervous system or major elements of the circulatory system, specifically the heart and major arteries. Any bullet that penetrates deeply enough to break the things you need to break can do the job. Any bullet that doesn’t hit these things relies on other methods like gross physical damage to non-vital structures, which is generally a pretty slow way to stop an attacker. In those cases a larger expanding hollow-point bullet is likely to do at least a slightly better job, but that might not be enough to make up for slower follow-up shots.

This may in part be because there are two kinds of ‘stops;’ the Soft Stop and Hard Stop. A Soft Stop (often called a Psychological Stop) occurs when the person consciously or unconsciously, simply gives up or runs away. A Hard Stop (called a Physiological Stop) occurs when an attacker is physically incapable of continuing their attack. A hit in the hand from a .25 Auto can produce a Soft Stop. A hit from a .44 magnum that misses everything immediately relevant can’t produce a Hard Stop. The only way either caliber produces a Hard Stop is to hit the central nervous system, which either caliber can do, or cause catastrophic damage to the circulatory system. An expanded .44 magnum JHP is a lot more likely to cause the latter than a .25 ACP, but .25 isn’t really part of this discussion.

Any bullet that hits the CNS or major elements of the cardio-vascular system is likely to stop someone pretty quickly. In the chaos of a gunfight you are shooting at a relatively small target that you can’t necessarily even see; more chances to hit those targets might be a good idea. Also if the situation is bad enough that you legitimately need to shoot someone you need them to stop as quickly as possible, so being able to put repeated hits on the target as quickly as you can manage is important.

This is why the FBI went back to 9x19mm. It has enough penetration, and recoil is light enough that the average agent can learn to put multiple hits on target fast. On the balance they feel it works better for their needs than a more potent caliber, even if it could be demonstrated that round was significantly more effective. Which, based on the data available, it can’t.

Then there are the variables. The attacker’s physiology; large small, skinny, heavy, fat; these things all make a difference. As does the attacker’s psychology and mental state. How committed are they? What is their goal? An attacker that wants your wallet is going to be a lot easier to achieve a Soft Stop on than one that is absolutely determined to take you down with them. While we’re at it let’s talk about chemicals; are they drunk? Stoned? How much and on what? Is an attacker likely to be in light clothing or bundled up like an Arctic explorer? There’s also movement, environment, barriers, innocent bystanders… the list goes on and on.

So we can all just pack a pocket .380 and call it good? Probably not. For a person living in an urban environment where the principle threat is a full-frontal confrontation with a mugger or perhaps a car-jacking attempt that might well do fine. But someone living in a rural area that might encounter hostile wildlife might reasonably think a 10mm is better suited to their needs. In an apartment building over-penetration is a serious consideration; in a sprawling suburban neighborhood rather less so and in rural environments it could be a non-issue.

I’ve also talked before about the difference between police use of deadly force and civilian needs. The civilian is much less likely to encounter a committed attacker, less likely to need to penetrate barricades or engage in a protracted fight, less likely to have to fight at any significant range and is more likely to have the option of disengaging if circumstances allow. Caliber and weapon selection is different for civilians based on the most likely threats, and there’s a balance each of us has to find based on our individual lives, skills and circumstances.

All this being said ammo selection is not irrelevant; whatever caliber you choose modern, proven defensive ammunition should be employed in whatever caliber you select. Maybe it’s just stacking the odds in your favor, but that’s definitely worth doing when lives are on the line.

I think it is possible that some calibers are somewhat more effective than others, but with all the variables involved, real-life shootings seem to indicate that difference between calibers alone is not decisive. Consider your own physique, skills, abilities, style of dress and circumstances and choose based on that rather than some dubious thought that a given caliber is a better ‘stopper.’

Michael Tinker Pearce, 26 May 2021

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