This is another one of those cases where you have a picture in your mind of how things are going to go and I may or may not share that picture. My picture of the world is one where I won't have time to remember whether or not I've gone through all my hollowpoints. The over penetration that everyone worries about is not completely mitigated by the use of hollowpoints anyway. The likelihood may be reduced but do remember that thousands of suspects have been shot with modern hollowpoints over the years and some of those bullets were never recovered from the suspects' bodies. If you are really that worried your bullet won't stop, take a clue from the movies and try beating the snot out of the suspect insteadFriscoKid wrote:Does any one else change up ammo in the middle of your magazine stack?
When I was an LEO, I carried a 15+1 9mm and two extra clips. The top 8 rounds in my gun were HydraShok, and everything from there down was ball ammo. The extra clips were all ball ammo.
My reasoning was this: In the vast majority of situations you're going to fire half a clip or less. Probably in over 95%. For the other 5%, the further you get into your ammo supply the more likely you're going to need penetration as opposed to expansion. Unless you're in the middle of the desert, the bad guys are going to have headed behind cars, walls, trees or something else by the time you get into your second clip for sure.
I was the only person in my department who carried ammo this way. Most of the old guys just carried all standard self-protection hollowpoints, and the younger guys all had three clips of Black Talon.
I don't carry the extra clips now, but I do still stack a half clip of expansion and a half clip of penetration ammo.
It's probably not all that important to change up if you're only carrying 6 or 8 rounds total.
Thoughts?
Back in the real world, try to remember that if the suspect is currently trying to kill you, you have a more immediate problem that demands a lot more of your attention than any potential civil or criminal trial after the fact.Besides that, modern hollowpoint ammunition is designed and tested over and over again with hard barrier penetration in mind. That means, it's been fired through glass, wallboard, plywood and may be even thin autobody panels with the thought that it may be necessary to shoot through all of these. I personally have fired enough 9mm, .357Sig, .40 and .45ACP ammo through various types of clothing, windshields, car doors as well as various elements of residential structures that I'm confident in the ability of a modern hollowpoint, particularly the bonded designs, to get to my target on that one in a billion chance I even need to use a pistol to defend myself or someone else.