Over at The Truth About Guns.

Pretty interesting. I was confused for a bit though, until I realized that by “excessive headspace” the author really means “excessive case length” which would result in inadequate headspace. Using the shorter 40 S&W cartridge in a 10 mm barrel results in excessive headspace, so it’s a sort of Opposite Day article in that regard. It’s a well-written and interesting article otherwise.

The greater implication, at least for Glock shooters, is that you can go ahead and trim your brass at or below minimum spec and the gun will run just as well and possibly better. This would explain some of the commercial ammo I’ve seen, which has what appears to be a roll crimp rather than the prescribed taper crimp. That COULD result in a dangerous situation, as the crimp opens up across the chamber shoulder. So long as the case is short enough though, that the case mouth never touches the chamber shoulder, everything’s fine and dandy.

I’m one of those people who regularly checks finished rounds by plunking them down into the chamber (barrel removed from gun) to check for headspace. That’s a fine idea for several reasons, but this article puts all that into a rather different light when it comes to Glocks.

I have some 40 ammo lying around, though I don’t own any guns chambered for it, so now of course I’ll have to try it in my G20.

As an aside; I wish we could get past the little, political/legal/social dance we often perform when it comes to disclaimers. The author of that article asserts that using 40 in a 10 is actually safer than using 10 in a 10 or 40 in a 40, but still feels the need to dance the “Don’t try this at home, Kids” dance. I understand how this social twitch came about (I witnessed the whole thing) but really you can stop any time you like.

Update: From the comments I discovered Miculek used a 400 yard zero for his revolver, not the 200 yard zero I hypothesized. I have updated the post accordingly.

The other day Say Uncle posted this video of Jerry Miculek shooting at a balloon from 1000 yards away with a 9mm revolver:

First off, as Rivrdog noted, he didn’t hit the balloon. He hit the steel and the splatter from the bullet fragments popped the balloon.

Second, I decided to run the numbers on those shots. Using Modern Ballistics, the bullet Miculek said he used, with a muzzle velocity of 1000 fps (Hornady factory ammo with a four inch barrel is 975 fps but I added some extra velocity because Miculek probably has a longer barrel and a custom load), with a standard deviation of 10 fps, a bullet delivering a five shot group size of 1 MOA under ideal conditions, a wind estimation error of 0.2 MPH, sea level, at 59F, and a 400 yard zero. We end up with the following results.

The bullet took 5.11 seconds to travel the 1000 yards. It reached a height of 110 feet at 583 yards from the shooter. It arrived at a velocity of 377 fps.

This first graph shows the height in inches from the point of aim. At the target the bullet is hitting over 2900 inches low. That is over 240 feet below the point of aim!

In this graph the rate of descent at the 1000 yard mark is shown. That is nearly 11 inches of additional drop for each yard of travel.

Here we have the odds of getting a hit if the shooter knew the exact ballistics and compensates perfectly for every shot. The random variation of the muzzle velocity, wind variation (Gaussian distribution with a standard deviation of 0.2 MPH), and inherent variations in the bullet contribute enough error that only about a third of the bullets would hit a target 30 inches wide and 50 inches tall.

The image below is what the shooter would see with a red-dot sight shooting a tracer bullet with the same drag. I added some wind to make the perspective a little better. At 1.6 yards the bullet crosses the near zero and you can see the red-dot of the sight just before the track of the tracer starts. The tracer ignites at 2 yards. Everything is to scale so change the size of the image such that the base of the 9mm bullet looks the same in the image as a 9mm bullet would at 1.6 yards and you can see what the 30 x 50 inch target would look like at 1000 yards.

Jerry is at the peak of human shooting ability but he had some serious luck on that shot.

My friends and I, as a natural matter of course, sometimes try our carry or service pistols at 100 or even 200 yards. It’s always seemed to me an obvious thing to try. Why wouldn’t you?

And so when Oleg and I were out “messin’ around shooting” at various rocks, dirt clods, sticks and whatnot at various random distances, we did some 100 yard pistol shooting with our carry pistols (a 9 mmP and a 10 mm Auto).

I haven’t commented on this phenomenon before, but I’ve noticed that the point of hold for 100 yards with a Glock 20 isn’t much different from that at 25 yards. It was when Oleg, without any prompting, made the same observation regarding his 9 mm carry pistol that it occurred to me to say so in a post. Well here it is.

Oleg was striking a roughly 8″ square plate at 100 yards with successive shots from his 9mm Glock.

I don’t know what utility this sort of pistol shooting might have in defense, but it is good to know you can do it.

I’d not heard of cut lead bar being used in lieu of ball. The use of “findings” in a fowling piece or a blunderbuss, sure, but not this. Interesting.

If you can melt lead or a similar metal or alloy (and who can’t?) and pour it into a slot between some boards, you have buckshot for your scattergun, or bullets for your “smooth rifle”.

I wouldn’t try it on the line at Boomershoot though. Well OK I might, but I wouldn’t expect any detonations, much less hits, from 400 yards.

Apparently I’m now “a respected Idaho based shooter and author.”

The background story is that I and several other bloggers were asked by the folks at AmmoForSale.com which of the three major calibers, 9mm, .40 S&W, and .45 ACP, was the best. I answered, via the blog post, and they just posted an article that incorporates some of my response.

I appreciate the kind words but I’m not sure I have all that much respect as a shooter compared to a lot of other people and I’m a “software author”, blogger, and occasional magazine article writer. I’m not really an “author” in the most common sense.

Still, I think they did a good job on their article even if they did give me more credit than I think I’m due.