knotquiteawake wrote:03Lightningrocks wrote:knotquiteawake wrote:Back to my question.
I've got a snub nose .38 that i plan to carry with me in my "escape" bag. I've read that wadcutter or flat nose type ammo is better for self-defense in a snub nose revolver than a standard round nose fmj round. Any thoughts on that? the flatnose or wadcutter rounds are definitely cheaper than hollow points so i was thinking of grabbing a box or two of flat or wads.
I have always read that in a survival situation, the 22 LR would be a good choice. It is cheap, light to carry and makes less noise when fired. For the caliber you speak of, in a survival situation, either would probably be better than none. I use to reload for wad cutters due to price. I never thought of them as self defense rounds but my thinking would lean torwards the lead possibly deforming better when it strikes flesh and thus making a bigger wound channel??? It would be interesting to see some ballistic gell comparisons... now that I am thinking about it.
This was the gist of what I reading, the wound channel was larger. The pointier round cutting through flesh like a knife and the blunt round caused more trauma.
To the topic..... Generally speaking, .22 LR would be the best choice for feeding yourself. You can carry a large supply, and like 03Lightningrocks points out, it is quieter. It's easy to find, etc. etc. From a SD perspective, .38 is better than .22 LR. But, if you can manage to have a semiauto, then I think that 9mm or .45 FNJ would beat .38 wadcutters for the simple reason that either caliber is likely to penetrate more deeply than .38, and therefore have a higher fatality rate. I can tell you from my ER days that .38 Special is nowhere near the lethality of 9mm or .45, primarily for that reason of penetration. The deeper a bullet penetrates, the more likely it is to cause a circulatory failure. A .38
can kill, but it is not as likely to do so as a 230 grain .45 FMJ. I can't give you hard numbers, but this is just from my personal observations of gunshot patients I saw. One thing I do know, a .38 wadcutter is not likely to deform unless it hits bone, and
heavy bone at that. For instance, a rib bone will not deform a .38 wadcutter slug that much, but a femur or humerus will. In fact, from the x-rays I remember seeing, it seemed like wadcutter/semi-wadcutters were no more or less deformed than FMJ bullets, regardless of caliber, and regardless of what they hit. This is pure speculation, but I would imagine that the sharp shoulders of a wadcutter, so long as it is not deformed, would possibly
cut through tissue rather than
poking through it, but I don't know that it would be that much of a traumatic difference to the gunshot person. So since there is no practical advantage to a wadcutter over an FMJ, I would buy whichever is available cheaply and go with it.
My wife shoots and carries a 9mm, so her bugout bag choices are built around 9mm. I typically shoot and carry a .45, so my bugout bag choices are built around that caliber.
seamusTX wrote:The Annoyed Man wrote:Words like "TEOTWAWKI,"......those are just "code words" for the larger idea of being prepared for whatever it is in one's power to prepare for....
Unfortunately they carry a bunch of ugly freight about race wars and garbage like that. I personally reject the idea that the United States is so fragile that society will collapse. People have been predicting it from as early as I can remember. They were wrong.
No civilian in the United States has had to fire hundreds of rounds in self defense at least since the range wars ended in the 19th century.
Civil violence (that is, rioting and looting) occurs at times. It has been quelled by the threat of an armed response. Dealing with it has never required mass killing. It tends to burn out like a forest fire.
- Jim
Maybe so, Jim. My rebuttal is that I cannot be responsible for other people's "ugly freight." I am neither a racist nor a race apologist. I am race-neutral. I expect ALL people to follow the angels of their better natures with regard to race, regardless of their melanin content or the shape of their facial features. In other words, I
believed Martin Luther King (and still do) when he spoke about judging a person for the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, and I own that deep down inside my being. You'll note that at no point until I responded to you just now with this post, have I ever mentioned race in this thread, and those words absolutely have no such freight for
me. So I can't help how others interpret them due to their own issues. If they have issues, they need to get over them, because I don't really give a cup of warm spit for the tyranny of political correctness. I'm not going to use racially derogatory terms, partly because it's nasty, and partly because it's wrong. But I'm still smarting over the left's coopting the word "gay," so that I cannot use it any longer to describe my own happiness without calling my sexual orientation into question. I can't read aloud the title of one of Joseph Conrad's great literary works "
The - - - - - - of the Narcissus" (
Wikipedia) because some troglodyte will say that I'm a racist, when actually Conrad was writing a beautiful novella about solidarity between the races and redemption. I can't even—as happened in Dallas shortly after I moved here—refer to a vanishing budget as having "disappeared down a black hole" without offending someone too ignorant to know what it means. I can't say that my mother was niggardly with my allowance (an old Norse term meaning "to fuss about small matters" -
Wikipedia) because some ignorant philistine will assume that it is a racial slur WHEN IT IS NOT! I can't even read Huckleberry Finn out loud, for crying out loud.
So no, I have no patience with false outrage over political correctness because it has dumbed down my language and robbed me of its potential for eloquence and beauty of expression—which I value highly. People need to get over themselves.
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”
― G. Michael Hopf, "Those Who Remain"
#TINVOWOOT
