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When I worked in an ER back in the 1980s, I saw a lot of people shot dead with .22s....maybe 75%-80% of them. The problem with the .22 isn't whether or not it is an effective killer, it is whether or not it is an effective stopper.......and it is not.

You will learn here on the forum, and in your CHL class, that the purpose of shooting someone isn't to kill them, it is to stop the threat. You don't shoot to kill, you shoot to stop the threat. If the attacker dies as a result, the moral burden for his death is on him, not on you. He initiated the attack; you defended yourself. Self-defense is a fundamental right; assaulting someone is not. This is a moral issue. If your motivation is to kill, then you are no better than your attacker. If your motivation is to stop his threat (either to you or a 3rd party for whom you feel responsible), then it establishes that you are on the moral high ground; and that is important because the law is founded on moral precepts. In this case, it is the moral difference between killing for its own sake, and killing in self defense. If your actions are in line with those precepts, then you will have less difficulty in justifying your actions before the law than if you are acting outside of those moral precepts.

With those moral precepts in mind, picking the highest power caliber that you can shoot reasonably well is where you should concentrate your efforts. After you have settled on a couple of caliber choices that meet both of these requirements, then it makes sense to find the gun(s) chambered in those calibers that meet your personal defense requirements before you actually spend the money on one. Many ranges have rentals that you can try out, and don't hesitate to ask friends who have other guns if you can try their gun out. (Range days with friends are a great way to spend time.) While there is nothing wrong with small pocketable guns in well-recognized self-defense calibers—my own carry collection contains two such examples—you should consider what your primary means of carry will be before you invest in the gun. For example: if you have chosen 9mm as your favored carry caliber, a pocketable gun will be someone more difficult to shoot because of a stouter recoil-to-weight ratio than a heavier compact model that you might carry in a holster or in your purse. My own wife made this calculation. One of my pocket guns is a Kahr PM9 in 9mm, which is a tiny little 9mm by most objective standards. My wife liked it, but she preferred a similar model in a slightly larger frame with more weight, so she bought a Kahr CW9. But if you plan on holster carry, then a somewhat larger pistol might be even better because of better ease of shooting and higher ammunition capacity.

Personally, I'm not a fan of .380, but many people on this forum carry them. Given my age and physical condition, I don't feel like I can afford to rely on it. With the previous paragraphs on killing vs stopping and the morality of defensive shooting in mind, you should consider both shot placement and penetration, and beyond that, load choice. Stopping the threat depends upon incapacitation. The .22 actually has excellent penetration, but it severely lacks incapacitation. In fact, I've seen plenty of people shot in the chest with a .22 (multiple hits) with complete pass through of each bullet.........and they were neither killed nor stopped. In other words, short of a direct hit to brain, descending aorta, or cervical spine, the .22 almost never stops someone outright....and sometimes even hitting those vital areas directly will not immediately incapacitate the foe. The .380 is the same approximate diameter as the 9mm, the .38 Special, and the .357 magnum, but it is a poor penetrator because it lacks the grunt to reliably push the bullet deeply enough into the attacker's body to produce incapacitation.

So what causes incapacitation? The obvious ones are circulatory and CNS collapse. If you rupture the descending aorta, the attacker will suffer catastrophic loss of blood pressure and bleed out into their chest or abdomen in a matter of seconds. Hits to the brainstem, and spinal cord (particularly the cervical spine) will cause near instantaneous incapacitation. But while shot placement is king, even the best shooters in the world may not be able to reliably hit targets in a way that will produce instantaneous incapacitation, when the target is moving, or may even be shooting at you. So, you shoot for center of mass because it is easier to hit the COM than to specifically hit the heart (even a gunshot wound in the heart may not stop, let alone kill your assailant). In the real world, shooting lots of big, deep, holes into your attacker is what you're going to be relying on to stop his attack. And this leads to the other three factors in incapacitation: Mechanical (skeletal) incapacitation, Pain, and Psychology.

Barring some kind of prophylactic pharmaceutical intervention, getting shot hurts. It hurts a LOT. But if your attacker is high on something or amped up on adrenaline and has severely dulled pain responses, one shot may not produce enough pain to do the job, where 5 or 6 hits will.........or not......there are plenty of documented cases of police dumping upwards of 15-20 rounds into a bad guy who simply will not stop. If you shoot them in a supporting structure—like breaking the pelvis or femur—you might mechanically disable the attacker......or not.....an attacker with a broken leg and two good arms with a gun in one hand is still a formidable opponent (not to mention that trying to hit a moving target in the pelvis or femur is a lot more difficult than shooting for COM). So in the end, the only way you have of reasonably reliably stopping an attacker is to throw lots of bullets into their COM, and you want those bullets to A) penetrate deeply enough to hit vital organs, and B) leave a large enough wound track for blood to leak out.

That is why you keep shooting until the attacker has stopped his attack. A tiny round like a .22 or .25, or anemic rounds like the .32 and .380 simply lower the odds in your favor. More powerful cartridges including .38 Special, .357 magnum, 9mm, .40 S&W, and .45 ACP raise the odds in your favor. In the end, it's a numbers game.

Each of us has to make a personal calculus balancing stopping power, ease of carry, personal skills, and confidence when arriving at which gun/caliber combination one will carry. Fortunately, we probably have more choices in carry guns/calibers today than ever before in our history; but guns are not cheap (although they are MUCH cheaper than a hospital bill or a funeral), and so it is worth it to consider and spend wisely.

Welcome to this world.