Talk me out of this?

[CJS3]

I didn't think anyone made a SD round for the 38 Colt/38 S&W. Reloads may be the only way to get a self defense load for that caliber. Unless there is an emotional attachment to that firearm, I'd use it to trade for a 38spl or one of the 380 pocket pistols. If there is an emotional attachment (grandpa's police issue sidearm) why would you consider carrying it anyway?

[ericire12]

This is the best off the shelf ammo you are gonna get:

http://www.midwayusa.com/viewProduct/?productNumber=243344

[Walter45Auto]

Since I made the original statement I guess I am going to chime in here.  The experts who recommend against handloads probably can site caselaw but I can't.  I will ask...do you have insurance because you know you are going to get in an accident (I know the law in most states says you must have it)?  You probably have more auto insurance the law requires...why?  What about "homeowners insurance"? More than necessary?   Do you have a fire extinguisher and locks on your door?  Why do you have a CCW and carry in the first place?  I could go on but I will finish by saying I prefer not taking the chance and finding out the hard way.  I recommend you seek out an attorney in your area who can advise you.  Will it cost?  Yes, but so will trials and lawsuits.

JMHOFWIW

Richard

What he said sounds like the best reason to find an inexpensive alternative carry gun. Ammo availability is the biggest reason I wouldn't use the gun in the OP's question. You can Get a Taurus or  Charter Arms .357 snubbie for fairly cheap. 

[billt]

Yes a lawyer could. When has it been done?  Was is allowed?  Did it succeed?

No and no. I just read an article about this. I can't remember for sure, and I could be wrong, but I believe the author was Patrick Sweeney. The article stated that there has NEVER been a conviction, or an issue for that matter, about the type of weapon or ammunition that was used in a self defense shooting. Glocks, reloads, "devastator bullets", "hostile D.A.'s", Hi-Cap magazines, or any such things you read that are "bad" to be "caught with".

 This appears to be nothing more than Internet misinformation that just keeps rolling along without any substantiated legal support. If you are subject to a jury trial because of a shooting, it is your actions that are in question, not what you used, or what ammo you used in it. It would seem the worst ambulance chaser of an attorney could stop an in court assault on the type of weapon or ammunition you used. A firearm is considered by any court to be "lethal force". One type of bullet over another, or one brand of a gun over another, cannot kill anyone "deader". Dead is dead.  Bill T.

[NS2]

No and no. I just read an article about this. I can't remember for sure, and I could be wrong, but I believe the author was Patrick Sweeney. The article stated that there has NEVER been a conviction, or an issue for that matter, about the type of weapon or ammunition that was used in a self defense shooting. Glocks, reloads, "devastator bullets", "hostile D.A.'s", Hi-Cap magazines, or any such things you read that are "bad" to be "caught with".

 This appears to be nothing more than Internet misinformation that just keeps rolling along without any substantiated legal support. If you are subject to a jury trial because of a shooting, it is your actions that are in question, not what you used, or what ammo you used in it. It would seem the worst ambulance chaser of an attorney could stop an in court assault on the type of weapon or ammunition you used. A firearm is considered by any court to be "lethal force". One type of bullet over another, or one brand of a gun over another, cannot kill anyone "deader". Dead is dead.  Bill T.

Thank you Bill!

I was beginning to think I was alone on this one.

[Sponsor]

[Ulmus]

Wow!  Lot's of responces and a good drift on the defensive reloading.  I'm glad i asked this question.  Thank you all for your thoughts!

CJS3 asked if there was an emotional attachment to this particular firearm.  I gotta say yes.  It's the very first handgun I bought and it belonged to a former police officer who worked in Hamtramck, MI. which is the neighboring town of where I grew up.  What makes this even more amazing is that this gun found its way to me all the way down here in Florida.  Now if that isn't a sign to buy it, I don't know what is.

As to why I want to carry it besides what I listed at the beginning,  It's light, It packs very well, and I can't stand the thought of a gun in my collection not being used for something.  If the gun wasn't an old cop gun from the town next-soor, I'd've sold it a long time ago and not even gotten into buying different guns.

And you're right about the ammo being expensive.  I've paid $32.00 for lead ball bullets!  That's way too expensive for plinking, but If I use that for training, and then reload it with hollowpoints, then it becomes "properly priced" in my mind.  (My wife has a P3AT that she hasn't shot in six months because she can't find ammo for it.  At least I can find some for this gun.)

So yes, there are som fantastic handguns out there for great prices, but then this Colt ends up languishing in a musty old box.  Hardly a dignified use for it.

[PegLeg45]

Wow!  Lot's of responces and a good drift on the defensive reloading.  I'm glad i asked this question.  Thank you all for your thoughts!

Yes, good discussions.



Here is another debate that goes towards part of the 'drift' or tangent to this one.....10 pages of casual reading about ammo choice for SD...........

http://www.downrange.tv/forum/index.php?topic=10478.0


***EDIT***
From the above thread:

To get to PART of the argument, I went to the horse directly and sent Mr. Ayoob an email and asked about specific cases.
I received the following in an email from Mas Ayoob:


New Jersey v. Daniel Bias, problems with gunshot residue testing involving handloads. NH v. James Kennedy, allegation that use of handloads was indication of malice.

best,
Mas

Also, here is the bulk of the information and some other cases he linked me to where he had posted elsewhere:



As promised, here are the sources for records for any who feel a need to confirm the cases I have referenced previously where handloaded ammunition caused problems for people in the aftermath of shootings.

As I have noted in this thread earlier, and as the attorneys who have responded to this matter have confirmed, local trials and results are not usually available on-line. However, in each case, I have included the location where the physical records of the trials are archived.

NH v. Kennedy

James Kennedy, a sergeant on the Hampton, NH police force, pursued a drunk driver whose reckless operation of the vehicle had forced other motorists off the road. The suspect ended up in a ditch, stalled and trying to get underway again. Advised by radio that responding backup officers were still a distance away, and fearing that the man would get back on the road and kill himself and others, Kennedy approached the vehicle. At the driver’s door, the suspect grabbed Kennedy’s Colt .45 auto and pulled it towards himself. It discharged in his face, causing massive injury.

The reload in the gun was a 200 grain Speer JHP, loaded to duplicate the 1000 fps from a 5” barrel then advertised by Speer for the same bullet in loaded cartridge configuration.

This was the first case where I saw the argument, “Why wasn’t regular ammunition deadly enough for you,” used by opposing counsel. They charged Kennedy with aggravated assault. They made a large issue out of his use of handloads, suggesting that they were indicative of a reckless man obsessed with causing maximum damage.

Defense counsel hired the expert I suggested, Jim Cirillo, who did a splendid job of demolishing that argument and other bogus arguments against Kennedy at trial, and Kennedy was acquitted.

This case dates back to the late 1970s. The local courts tell me that the case documentation will be on file at Rockingham County Superior Court, PO Box 1258, Kingston, NH 03843. File search time is billed at $25 per hour for cases such as this that date back prior to 1988.

NJ V. Bias

This is the classic case of gunshot residue (GSR) evidence being complicated by the use of handloaded ammunition, resulting in a case being misinterpreted in a tragic and unjust way. On the night of 2/26/89, Danny Bias entered the master bedroom of his home to find his wife Lise holding the family home defense revolver, a 6” S&W 686, to her head. He told police that knowing that she had a history of suicidal ideation, he attempted to grab the gun, which discharged, killing her. The gun was loaded with four handloaded lead SWC cartridges headstamped Federal .38 Special +P.

Autopsy showed no GSR. The medical examiner determined that Lise Bias had a reach of 30”, and the NJSP Crime Lab in Trenton determined that the gun in question would deposit GSR to a distance of 50” or more with either factory Federal 158 grain SWC +P .38 Special, or handloads taken from his home under warrant for testing after Danny told them about the reloads. However, the reloads that were taken and tested had Remington-Peters headstamps on the casings and were obviously not from the same batch.

Danny had loaded 50 rounds into the Federal cases of 2.3, 2.6, and 2.9 grains of Bullseye, with Winchester primers, under an unusually light 115 grain SWC that he had cast himself, seeking a very light load that his recoil sensitive wife could handle. The gun had been loaded at random from that box of 50 and there was no way of knowing which of the three recipes was in the chamber from which the fatal bullet was launched.

We duplicated that load, and determined that with all of them and particularly the 2.3 grain load, GSR distribution was so light that it could not be reliably gathered or recovered, from distances as short as 24”. Unfortunately, the remaining rounds in the gun could not be disassembled for testing as they were the property of the court, and there is no forensic artifact that can determine the exact powder charge that was fired from a given spent cartridge.

According to an attorney who represented him later, police originally believed the death to be a suicide. However, the forensic evidence testing indicated that was not possible, and it was listed as suspicious death. Based largely on the GSR evidence, as they perceived it, the Warren County prosecutor’s office presented the case to the grand jury, which indicted Danny Bias for Murder in the First Degree in the death of his wife.

Attorney John Lanza represented Danny very effectively at his first trial, which ended in a hung jury. Legal fees exceeded $100,000, bankrupting Danny; Attorney Lanza, who believed then and now in his client’s innocence, swallowed some $90,000 worth of legal work for which he was never paid.

For his second trial, Bias was assigned attorney Elisabeth Smith by the Public Defender’s office. Challenging the quality of evidence collection, she was able to weaken the prosecution’s allegation that the GSR factor equaled murder, but because the GSR issue was so muddled by the handloaded ammo factor, she could not present concrete evidence that the circumstances were consistent with suicide, and the second trial ended with a hung jury in 1992. At this point, the prosecution having twice failed to convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt, the judge threw out the murder charge.

It was after this that I personally lost track of the case. However, I’ve learned this past week that the case of NJ v. Daniel Bias was tried a third time in the mid-1990s, resulting in his being acquitted of Aggravated Manslaughter but convicted of Reckless Manslaughter. The appellate division of the Public Defender’s office handled his post-conviction relief and won him a fourth trial. The fourth trial, more than a decade after the shooting, ended with Danny Bias again convicted of Reckless Manslaughter. By now, the state had changed its theory and was suggesting that Danny had pointed the gun at her head to frighten her, thinking one of the two empty chambers would come up under the firing pin, but instead discharging the gun. Danny Bias was sentenced to six years in the penitentiary, and served three before being paroled. He remains a convicted felon who cannot own a firearm.

It is interesting to hear the advice of the attorneys who actually tried this case. John Lanza wrote, “When a hand load is used in an incident which becomes the subject of a civil or criminal trial, the duplication of that hand load poses a significant problem for both the plaintiff or the prosecutor and the defendant. Once used, there is no way, with certainty, to determine the amount of powder or propellant used for that load. This becomes significant when forensic testing is used in an effort to duplicate the shot and the resulting evidence on the victim or target.”

He adds, “With the commercial load, one would be in a better position to argue the uniformity between the loads used for testing and the subject load. With a hand load, you have no such uniformity. Also, the prosecution may utilize either standard loads or a different hand load in its testing. The result would be distorted and could be prejudicial to the defendant. Whether or not the judge would allow such a scientific test to be used at trial, is another issue, which, if allowed, would be devastating for the defense. From a strictly forensic standpoint, I would not recommend the use of hand loads because of the inherent lack of uniformity and the risk of unreliable test results. Once the jury hears the proof of an otherwise unreliable test, it can be very difficult to ‘unring the bell.’”

Ms. Smith had this to say, after defending Danny Bias through his last three trials. I asked her, “Is it safe to say that factory ammunition, with consistently replicable gunshot residue characteristics, (would) have proven that the gun was within reach of Lise’s head in her own hand, and kept the case from escalating as it did?”

She replied, “You’re certainly right about that. Gunshot residue was absolutely the focus of the first trial. The prosecution kept going back to the statement, “It couldn’t have happened the way he said it did’.”

The records on the Bias trials should be available through:
The Superior Court of New Jersey
Warren County
313 Second Street
PO Box 900
Belvedere, NJ 07823

Those who wish to follow the appellate track of this case will find it in the Atlantic Reporter.

142 N.J. 572, 667 A.2d 190 (Table)

Supreme Court of New Jersey
State
v.
Daniel N. Bias
NOS. C-188 SEPT.TERM 1995, 40,813
Oct 03, 1995
Disposition: Cross-pet. Denied.
N.J. 1995.
State v. Bias
142 N>J> 572, 667 A.2d 190 (Table)


TN v. Barnes

The decedent attacked Robert Barnes and his young daughter with a large knife and was shot to death by the defendant with SJHP .38 Special reloads from a Smith & Wesson Model 36. The distance between the two at the time of the shooting became a key element in the trial, and a misunderstanding of that distance was a primary reason he was charged with Murder. The evidence was messed up in a number of ways in this case, and I do not believe the reloaded ammo (which the prosecution did not recognize to be such until during the trial) was the key problem, but it definitely was part of a problem in reconstructing the case. We were able to do that without GSR evidence, and Mr. Barnes won an acquittal. In this case, I believe the use of factory ammo, combined with proper handling and preserving of the evidence by the initial investigators, would have made the defense much easier and might well have prevented the case from ever being lodged against him.

The records of TN v. Barnes are archived under case number 87297015 at:

Criminal Justice Center
201 Poplar
Suite 401
Memphis, TN 38103

Iowa v. Cpl. Randy Willems

A man attempted to disarm and murder Corporal Randy Willems of the Davenport, IA Police Department, screaming “Give me your (expletive deleted) gun, I’ll blow your (expletive deleted) brains out.” Willems shot him during the third disarming attempt, dropping him instantly with one hit to the abdomen from a department issue factory round, Fiocchi 9mm 115 grain JHP +P+. The subject survived and stated that the officer had shot him for nothing from a substantial distance away. GSR testing showed conclusively that the subject’s torso was approximately 18” from the muzzle of the issue Beretta 92 when it discharged. Randy was acquitted of criminal charges in the shooting at trial in 1990. Two years later, Randy and his department won the civil suit filed against them by the man who was shot.

I use this case when discussing handloads because it is a classic example of how the replicability of factory ammunition, in the forensic evidence sense, can annihilate false allegations by the “bad guy” against the “good guy” who shot him. The records of State of Iowa v. Corporal Randy Willems are archived in the Iowa District Court in Scott County, Davenport, Iowa. Those from the civil suit, Karwoski v. Willems and the City of Davenport, should be at the Iowa Civil Court of Scott County, also located in Davenport, Iowa.


A final word: I did not research the above and place it here to placate lightweight net ninjas. I did it because three recent Internet threads led me to believe that a number of decent people had honest questions about the real-world concerns about using handloads for self-defense, and were possibly putting themselves in jeopardy by doing so. For well over a decade, certain people have been creating an urban myth that says, “No one has ever gotten in trouble in court because they used handloads.”

This is now absolutely, and I hope finally, refuted.

Respectfully submitted,
Massad Ayoob[/b]
http://www.thehighroad.org/showpost.php?p=2129976&postcount=140

[NS2]

Here it is:

Is is known as the  New Jersey v. Daniel N. Bias Trials.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0BTT/is_181_30/ai_n26806104/pg_5/



For several years, certain "Net Ninjas" have been spreading the false belief that no one has ever gotten in trouble in court from using handloads. Now you know better. The records of the N.J. v. Daniel N. Bias trials are archived at the Superior Court of New Jersey, Warren County, 313 Second Street, P.O. Box 900, Belvedere, NJ 97823. Those wishing to follow his appellate process can begin with the Atlantic Reporter at 142 NJ 572, 667 A.2d 190 (Table). The only reason handloads have not been a factor in more cases is that most people who go in harm's way are already smart enough not to use them for defense.


My apologies if this was perceived as drift.  Since the original question was posed to talk you out of using that weapon, I thought you should get a complete arguement.


Thank you to BikerRN and MasAyoob for the help in locating this!!!

[billt]

The only reason handloads have not been a factor in more cases is that most people who go in harm's way are already smart enough not to use them for defense.

This is the only thing I have an issue with, and that is only if I am perceiving it correctly. It sounds to me as if he is implying that the use of handloads is ill advised because of some type of reliability issue. I will say if that is the case I strongly disagree. Properly handloaded ammunition is every bit as reliable if not more so than it's factory loaded counterpart.

 In almost 40 years of handloading I have never had a misfire, or a "dud". This is not because I'm some type of fabulous guy who never makes a mistake, but rather because I'm extremely careful and dedicated to the process. In over 40 years of shooting I've had factory ammunition that wouldn't chamber because the cases were too long, (Western .45 ACP), more dud primers than I can remember, (in rifle, pistol, and shotgun shells). I even had a older box of Federal .30-30 soft points that had 2 of the primers seated backwards! Also, look back over the years and look at all of the various lots of factory ammunition that have been recalled because of the wrong powder, too high of pressure, and a host of other reasons.

This is bound to happen simply because of the sheer numbers of rounds these manufacturers provide. The careful handloader carefully inspects every single round, top to bottom. The factories cannot afford to do this, they would have to charge a fortune for their product. The fallacy of handloads not being "up to par" with the factory stuff has gone on for years. It is no truer now than it was then. I carry my own handloads for self defense simply because I trust myself better than I do someone else when it comes to the reliability I need in my ammunition to save my own life if called upon to do so.  Bill T.

[ellis4538]

I will add another bit of information to the mix.  On another forum there was a thread from a LEO asking for a representative sample of ammo for a murder investigation.  Didn't have to be the same lot # just the same mfg.  I posted earlier in another thread that I purchase several boxes of DA from the same lot and mark them just in case.  I prefer to have as many things in my favor as possible.  The response from Mr. Ayoob is appreciated.  Mr. Sweeney is a knowledgable individual also but I would like to have read his article.

Richard