Why I Don't Like "Hyper" Ammo

[Music] hi we're out on the range today so please bear with gunfire you hear in the background but fair warning just about all I'm going to do today is talk now I've got an array of the premium or boutique or what I'd call hyper a munitions and over here I've got a selection of the typical off-the-shelf regular ammunition and if you've seen very much of my work you've seen me compare these two genres for power accuracy a couple of other things and although there are some exceptions I am generally not a fan of the hyper ammunition quite a few people have asked me why the answer I usually give is that to give an in-depth explanation of why I do not like hyper ammunition would take an hour recently some people have told me they'd like to hear the hour-long version so here we are be careful what you ask for you just might get it this comes with a litany of caveats the first one being that I have a disdain for lecture and you're going to have to put up with my Shatner s pauses and my very annoying habit of tripping over words and transposing syllables and letters side note although I like to keep these presentations family-friendly they are really made for adults so if you're a grade schooler that has nothing better to do than make fun of me because when I try to say words like barrel it sometimes comes out as Berle then perhaps you should watch something more in tune with your intellectual development quite proper room but to get back on task everything I'm going to say today are my conclusions and my opinions my opinions are based on my training my education in my experience different people have different experiences so they have different opinions I make no claim that my opinion has its origin in the mind of greatness and if someone does make that claim it should severely strain your credulity another very big caveat is that as we go along there are going to be some punchlines that come along later there are going to be some yhhh Abbot's so if you turn this off in the next couple of minutes cuz you're bored fair enough but before you send me any hate mail telling me how much you disagree with me or how wrong I am you really do have to watch the whole thing there are some exceptions and some punchlines coming so all of that having been said let's get started there are seven reasons why I dislike hyper ammunition number one is the cost now here I've got some regular ammunition and here's a couple of boxes of what I'd call hyper ammunition all of these are nine by nine all of them were 115 grain projectiles and they're all hollow points except this one which is an FDF projectile like a ballistic tip now in terms of cost I paid $22 for this 21 for this 2450 for this it's more money and remember this is a box of 25 rounds these are boxes of 50 rounds it's over twice as expensive this box only paid 16 for but it's only a box of 20 rounds prices may vary in different areas and the disparaging amount of difference between this genre and this genre can be quite a bit depending on what type of ammo you're talking about but this is a good example of how this type of ammunition can cost over twice as much it certainly isn't twice as accurate or twice as powerful obviously I'm being hyperbolic but you get the point it's a lot more expensive and in a bang for your buck sense its exorbitant right now some of you were thinking that it's not really intended that you're just gonna go out target shoot with it it's intended to be carried used only for serious shooting and then when the time comes to cherried out your ammunition you're gonna trade it out or just shoot it up and that is a very good point and that's one of those Yabut that we're going to come back to in a few minutes point two on my list is sometimes this ammunition has problems with accuracy wait a minute it's supposed to have higher levels of quality control and be more accurate let me show you what I mean now I've got two reactionary targets and my beretta model 92fs caliber 9 by 19 and I'll shoot these from 15 yards with two different types of ammunition the sights on this pistol are only partially adjustable I can hit the rear sight with a mallet and adjustable windage but I cannot adjust for elevation the ammunition I used to zero it was Remington green and white box hundred and fifteen grain jacketed hollow-point but that's not the ammunition I'm shooting today at the upper target I shot winchester white box 115 grain jacketed hollow point and although the group isn't all that great you can still see that it's centered this pistol can shoot a wide variety of 9-millimeter ammunition with only minimal variation from the original zeroing so what happened with the lower target I was shooting this knob X engagement extreme self-defense ammunition it has a 65 grain projectile which is far enough outside the parameters of what would be considered typical for 9-millimeter ammunition that you can see that it changes our point of impact significantly even though I did get a pretty good group with it it's still not hitting where the other ammunition hits and this type of ammunition is expensive enough that for most people it's going to be cost prohibitive to use it as both a carry and practice ammunition most people are going to need a less expensive practice ammunition and it does you no good if your carry ammunition and your practice ammunition don't hit in the same place so when I say failures in accuracy I don't necessarily mean your groups are going to get bigger I mean that your carry ammo might not hit in the same place as your practice ammo however with the right combination of ammunition and gunner perhaps the wrong combination sometimes you will see larger groups and right now some of you were thinking that's an easy fix if you try a type of ammunition that doesn't work try another and by the time you've gone through two or three you are almost certainly going to find something that works for you and that is a very good point and it's one of those yab 'its that we're going to come now point three on my list are failures of reliability and when I say failures of reliability I do not mean when your hammer Falls and your firing pin strikes the primer that the round fails to go off what I'm talking about is the failure of this ammunition to reliably cycle in autoloading pistols let me show you a close-up of some of this ammo now here's a few types of 9 by 19 ammunition on your left is a typical 115 grain full-metal-jacket round nose and here's to what I'd call regular ammunition that are both 115 grain jacketed hollow points and you can see that they're still fairly rounded in their projectile appearance here's three types of hyper ammunition this is your guard dog hundred and five grain flat nose here's your r.i.p ammunition with its radically invasive projectile hollow-point and here's the no vex engagement extreme self defense nine-millimeter round with its 65 grain projectile so with some types of this hyper ammunition based on the weight of the projectile or the shape of the projectile they can be far enough outside the parameters of what would be considered typical that some types of ammunition in some guns can cause some problems with reliability and a lot of you were thinking that's an easy fix you can test accuracy and reliability at the same time and if you try a type of ammunition and it doesn't work try something else and by the time we've gone through two or maybe three types of ammo you're going to find something that works for you and again that's a very good point and again it's one of those y Abbot's that we're going to come back to now number four on my list is availability a lot of gun stores don't stock all this different type of ammunition they're just going to have a few and a lot of times they only have a couple of boxes of it on hand because they don't really sell that much volume of it so when it comes time to trade out your ammunition and you go to the store to buy a box of whatever only to find out that that morning somebody bought the last box of it you're kind of stuck also some types are not really available in some areas this guard-dog ammunition people tell me that it's at the stores all over the place not any stores that I've been to in the part of country that I live in so sometimes our problems with availability of this type of animal mail ordering can to some degree alleviate that problem what availability can still be a problem now you've heard me talk about trading out your ammunition the idea is that as an ammunition gets old and it's been exposed to hot and cold weather and moisture that it can become less reliable and that's a very good point and you should trade out your carry ammunition every so often it's a matter of a great deal of debate how often you should trade out your ammunition and there's a lot of different opinions on that let me show you something this is my beretta model 30 32 Tomcat caliber 32 acp and I've got it loaded with winchester white box 32 acp 71 grain Full Metal Jacket round nose let's see how it does [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] now give me a second reload my magazines and we'll shoot some more now let's try two more magazines [Applause] and give me a minute to reload my magazines again and this time I'll only shoot six rounds because that's all that was left in that box now there's something very interesting about this ammunition I fired 34 rounds of the sanma because that's all that was left in the box but what makes this ammo specialist that I acquired it in the early 1990s it's about 25 years old and you saw that it functioned flawlessly I wouldn't hesitate a minute to carry 25 year old ammo if it had been stored under ideal conditions which this has included dr place but the conditions under which your carry ammunition are stored or anything but ideal you're carrying the gun on your person exposed to your heat your moisture you're out in the weather in the hot the cold the rain the humidity sometimes you'll go places where you can't take your gun so the gun and the ammo are left in the car when it's 110 degrees or left in the car when it's 10 degrees when people go to the range they will empty their magazines of their carry ammunition to load in their practice ammunition so a lot of times this stuff gets cycled through magazines or cycled through the chamber of a pistol quite a few times before you trade it out these are not ideal conditions so how often should you trade out your ammo some people will say every three months I think that's excessive I think a good rule of thumb is once a year perhaps less often maybe once every two years if you work in an air-conditioned office maybe a little more often if you work outside and you're constantly exposed to the weather the only person that can decide what's right for you is you but I think a good rule of thumb is once a year so what does this have to do with the reasons why I dislike hyper ammunition 0.5 on my list quire's my ring now this ring has elfin writing on it and if I read this correctly it reads one ring to rule them all one ring to find them one ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them it's the Lord of the Rings ring and yes when I put it on you can still see me but this ring is also called the precious and that is point five on my list is the precious factor because of the cost and sometimes problems with availability this ammunition becomes so precious that people won't do the testing as far as accuracy and reliability that they need to do they won't trade it out once a year they'll carry this ammunition for ten years twenty years and they're still using it never having tested it not going to using it just carrying it and they don't test it because it is so precious now that might sound ridiculous this is the part where I have to give the speech about the difference between the things we should do and the things we really do while I give the long version of that speech and presentation on spring compression so I'm not going to repeat it here but the short version is life is full of things we should do that we don't really do and one of the things that happens with this type of ammunition is they don't get tested for accuracy don't get tested for reliability and they are carried far longer than they should be because they are so precious now that might sound ridiculous but this is the part of the presentation where I tell you a few anecdotes to illustrate my point friend of mine decided he wanted to carry Glaser safety slugs well Glaser safety slugs are very expensive at that time they came in a package of six rounds which usually cost more than a box of 50 rounds of common ammo and so he got a few of these and he carried them and I gave him the speech about because of the way they're designed they're outside the parameters and what be considered typical he's really got to test them and I think he fired two shots as part of his testing process and he carried this stuff for seven or eight years and when he finally traded it out it wasn't because it was old he just decided he had better options and he still didn't shoot up the M or get rid of it he just put it in a box and put it on a shelf and to the best of my knowledge he still has it over 20 years later because it's so precious another friend of mine he was going through a divorce so he was between permanent residences so I was storing some guns and ammo for him and then all of his stuff I found a box of ammo that looked exactly like this one now his was 45 this is nine-millimeter but other than that he's exactly like this and I got to looking at this stuff and it was all high-performance ammunition and there was about 48 rounds in the box and as near as I could tell it represented eight different types of ammunition what he had done is he bought a box of whatever type of hyper ammo and then carried it for two five eight years and over that time he would lose around here or damaged around there or shoot a couple of shots not in a life-or-death situation just an impromptu shooting and so the 20 round box that he had became six or eight rounds so he'd go to the store and buy another box of ammunition just whatever was available and then that process would start over so he had a whole bunch of different types of ammunition in this box well I thought this would be a good opportunity for some testing so I took one of my 1911 platform handguns and for every type of family where he had over five rounds I took it out and shot it I shot a target with five five shot groups and I had five really good groups in five totally separate distinct different places on the target even if he had tried to shoot up this ammunition he couldn't have counted on any of it to hit in the same place beyond five or six rounds and he had carried all this ammo for all this time never having tested any of it except in impromptu shooting one shot at a soda jug here or there in this box of ammo I actually noticed a particular type of ammo that's really hard to obtain but I had gotten some and I had given it to him over 20 years before and he still had it and had this muckety gun box of ammo because this genre of ammunition is so precious let me tell you one more anecdote and this is a Joe story and for those of you who are not familiar with it yes Joe is a very real person I just change his name also in telling this story some people erroneously infer that I'm saying that the ammunition in question was a poor quality ammo that's not what I'm saying at all so I'm gonna change the name of the ammunition to just so I don't inadvertently cast aspersions on anyone Joe mail ordered this particular type of nine millimeter ammunition and again it was outside the parameters of what would be considered typical and I'm giving him the speech about testing it he assured me that he didn't need to test it because he knew that it was quote to an ammo well I'm sure it was but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to function reliably or shoot accurately in his individual handgun but he didn't think he needed to test that and he carried this stuff for years and there was a time when we were out in the field and I did some impromptu target shooting and I was shooting something that was against the dirt bank and I said to him hey Joe see if you can hit that and he tells me he doesn't want to shoot that why not because I'm loaded with my hurtin burger busca Darrow tyke on does and I don't want to shoot my tyke on does on another occasion we went Jackrabbit hunting and our rifles in the back the other hand guns on us we drive about 10 miles out of town parking the sagebrush as soon as we got out of the car a jackrabbit comes loping by as close to a walk as a jackrabbit in bandage and Joe Ames is best to let this rabbit in he aims any aims and he aims and finally the rabbit wanders off into the bushes and Joe what were you waiting for I didn't want to shoot it obviously why not because I'm loaded with my hurtin burger busca Darrow tyke on does and I don't want to shoot my icon does well he then explained to me that he only brought that ammunition because he anticipated hunting with our rifles and he figured he ought to bring the tie conda's just in case we ran into the boogeyman in the 10 miles between town and where we went rabbit hunting and of course you can't shoot a boogeyman with the ammunition you use rabbit on it now there are times when I say I could bore you for an hour about whatever I could bore you for an hour with just stories about this type of problem with hyper ammunition I could probably bore you for half an hour just with stories about Joe and the busca Darrow tyke khandhas but what really got me worried about that was that he's training himself not to shoot there's going to come a time where he really needs to shoot and when he does instead of thinking about silent sight picture trigger control threat assessment collateral damage he's going to be thinking do I really want to shoot might icon does this is a problem with this genre of ammunition and these problems occur because it becomes so precious now before we go on to point six and seven let's have an intermission let's all go to the lobby let's all go to the lobby let's all go to the lobby to get ourselves a treat delicious things to eat the popcorn can't be beat the sparkling drinks such as dandy the chocolate bars and the candy so let's all go to the lobby to get ourselves a treat let's all go to the lobby to get ourselves a tray well if you didn't sneak out during the intermission that was impressive but let me get to point six which is what I call legendary status now there are events in history or more often people in history that really existed and really did things but their story gets told and retold so many times and it become so fictionalized that they take on legendary status a good example is Abraham Lincoln he was certainly a real person many people would consider Abraham Lincoln a great man who did great things but I doubt very much that he ever really hunted vampires legendary status hyper ammunition takes on legendary status it never ceases to amaze me the characteristics and capabilities that people a tribute to this ammunition but it just doesn't have or even if it does have that characteristic it has it to a much smaller degree than people claim it does and even when it has such characteristics they're not necessarily advantages one is the topic of muzzle flash people will make the blanket statement dead hyper ammunition is better than regular because it has less muzzle flash well we have a presentation on that topic and I found that some types of hyper ammunition do have a lot less muzzle flash but again the blanket statement is only partially true and even if it has less muzzle flash is that really an advantage well a lot of muzzle flash can give away your position but in citizen involved shootings that people are usually pretty close together and giving away your position is just not part of what's going on there's also the concept of a lot of muzzle flash can rob you with your night vision at least temporarily that is also quite often not part of what's going on and even if it can rob you of your night vision if I'm pointing my pistol at my adversary and there's a lot of muzzle flash I'm pretty sure he's getting the worst end of that deal than I am there's also a technique for low light level shooting called flash firing and we have a presentation on that too you'd like to watch it but it's based on the idea that when you fire your pistol the muzzle flash will illuminate your sights for just a fraction of a second allowing you to see them and adjust with enough practice it can be very effective but it becomes far more difficult to do if you don't have at least some muzzle flash so again we have the blanket statement that's only partially true and even if it is true it's debatable if it's really advantageous another example is people will say hyper animals better than regular ammunition because it has nickel-plated casings regular ammo dozen necklaces iStent to corrosion well it is true nickel-plated casings are more resistant to corrosion but is that really an advantage I've found that even under the most adverse field conditions I've never really had a problem with corrosion and just straight brass casings and again the blanket statement is not necessarily true or at least only partially so a lot of these do have nickel-plated casings but here's zombie max ammunition it has straight brass casing and if zombie max isn't hype what is here's some Remington green and white box this is about as regular as regular ammo gets but in some calibers like this 38 super amoled it has nickel-plated casings so again the blanket statement is only partially true and I could go on and on about many other subjects on this particular concept but one of the reasons I dislike this ammunition is its legendary status and people tend to hype this stuff up more than its already hyped 0.7 on my list is a subject I do not like talking about it causes me a great deal of discomfort to talk about this particular subject however I think the information is more important my comfort level one of the reasons I do not like talking about this subject is because there's some guy with a shaved head and a beard and a foul mouth who likes to go on about how you have no right to disagree with him because you haven't seen what he's seen or some whatever it is he says this subject puts me in a position where I have to at least in part agree with that guy something I do not like doing remember that everything I'm about to tell you are my opinions my opinions are based on my experiences if you dissent from my opinion I would have to ask you on what experience is your opinion based that having been said what I'm talking about is the effect that hyper ammunition can have on criminal profiling as a citizen with a concealed handgun license or if you don't even have a license you just have a firearm in your place of business or in your home if you're put in the position where you have to use that your actions will be very closely scrutinized and things that you think wouldn't or think shouldn't have any bearing on the case quite often have a great deal of bearing on the case things like your hairstyle how much melanin is in your skin whether or not you have ear rings your fashion choices what kind of car you drive the list goes on these things on a conscious or subconscious level can affect how law enforcement officials interpret the real evidence things like how many shots did you fire how far you were from the target that list goes on at infinitum police officers tout themselves as highly trained professionals and more often than not they are when they come into a situation they bring their training their education their wisdom their altruism but there are also human beings and when they come into a situation they bring their lack of training their ignorance prejudices their bigotries sometimes their political agendas also remember that when a police officer comes into a scene where there's been a shooting the first thing he knows is someone got shot and you shot him everything he does starts from that line you got to keep that in mind and all of those things about you will affect sometimes on a subconscious level how he interprets the real evidence and your firearms and ammunition choices are absolutely part of that let me show you a type of ammo this is winchester white box ammunition in most calibers I've found it to give very satisfactory performance it's high-quality low-cost and in selecting ammunition for concealed carry you're talking about personal protection it's easy to explain why you chose this because it reads personal protection right on the box you might have a little more difficulty explaining something like this r.i.p ammunition rest in peace like you really wanted to kill somebody and it comes in this box that's kind of decorated with a tombstone motif it also has the declaration on here that our IP actually stands for radically invasive projectile sounds like the title of a porno movie this is the kind of thing that is going to cause you to get looked at with a very jaundiced eye it's going to affect either consciously or subconsciously the way of law enforcement officials both the police and the district attorney interpret other evidence right about now is when someone says the DA can't go into court and argue that you're guilty of a crime because of the ammunition you carried as long as that ammunition was legal in your jurisdiction and if he did argue that a good defense attorney could shred his case I've had quite a few people telling me that and I can only say in reply that I dissent from that opinion I've seen personally with my own eyes a court case where someone didn't have to fire a shot but he'd used a gun to fend off some criminals and the district attorney was arguing before the judge that this man was guilty because quote most people don't go around carrying two guns well you tell me the district attorney can't make that argument he did and you can't on ring that Bell and the idea that a good defense attorney could shred that argument that presupposes that you had the fifty seventy five hundred thousand dollars to hire a good defense attorney and even if you prevail you've still kind of lost because you still have an arrest record that even though you can have it expunged it's always still kind of there and because you had to spend the fifty seventy five hundred thousand dollars to make the truth come out and things like your hairstyle and your firearms and ammunition choices do affect all of that well right about now is when someone says the way to avoid this unfair scrutiny on your ammunition choices is to figure out what kind of firearm and what kind of ammunition your local police use and then carry that now that sounds logical and let me say again I dissent from that opinion here's a book on criminal profiling written by a retired FBI agent named John Douglas and co-written by mark ol shaker John Douglas and his crew primarily his partner Roy Hazelwood they pretty much created pretty much invented modern criminal profiling as we know it today and some of my crew are current or retired police officers one of my crew who is a retired police officer actually got to attend a seminar conducted by Roy Hazelwood I personally have read for Douglass's books so I'm fairly familiar with the material I can tell you that throughout the United States all police officers received some kind of training and education how much they receive can vary a great deal from one jurisdiction to another what subjects they're trained on can also vary a great deal but for the police officers that I've worked with they have all received training on things like criminal profiling and part of that is training on the idea that it is a sign of criminal behavior of anti-social behavior it's a sign that you're a serial killer if you have a weird fascination with police equipment and police work Douglas in his books mentions many times over that serial killers like to drive retired police cars that they got at auction or at least drive the same make and model as local police with that in mind imagine the way they might interpret that piece of evidence if you have the same gun and ammunition they use when they've been trained that having the same things they have is a sign that you're some kind of kook something to think about and so point 7 on my list of why I dislike hyper ammunition is the way it can affect how you are perceived by the police so to recap cost accuracy reliability availability the precious factor legendary status and criminal profiling there are some exceptions one exception is caliber 380 acp I found that in typical off-the-shelf ammunition like the Winchester white box and remington green and white box it can provide good performance but I have not found a regular ammunition in Calibre's 380 acp that will provide good performance in the really short barrel of guns for those I will resort to a hyper ammunition but in those cases I think things like Sig Sauer elite performance and hornady critical defense are better choices than our IP ammunition or zombie max so if you've watched this entire presentation thank you for your patience and thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: Paul Harrell

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Keywords: paul harrell, paul harrell home defense, home defense, home defense ammo, personal protection, paul harrell personal protection

Id: ayd4sxW_RUA

Length: 32min 48sec (1968 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 19 2018