Friday, October 25, 2013

I shall now throw something into the cartridge wars

The ones that start with "What cartridge is best for self-defense?"  This is from the second Cerillo book, Tales of the Stakeout Squad, and abbreviated 'cause I can't type the whole thing:
The M1 Carbine was one of our favorite weapons.
...
You know what? The Carbine was one of our best stoppers.  Our gunsmith was real good; he was able to fix those magazines so they reliably fed pointy hollowpoint 110-grain WInchester ammo, an expanding bullet. ...  It was fast to shoot, light recoil, and you had 15 rounds.  It turned out that anybody that was hit with it, even if they weren't hit in the vitals, got dropped.

He'd noted in the first book that he'd seen people do some amazing things after being hit with everything from .38 Special roundnose bullets to 12-gauge slugs and buckshot; so for him to praise this means something.

And with the Speer Gold Dot and Hornady XTP ammo* now available for it as well as older hollow- and softpoint(Winchester, Federal and Remington all make some), I'd say you could do much worse for a home-defense rifle.


*And to any ammo guys out there, I'd be more than happy to try some of these out for you.

2 comments:

USCitizen said...

On top of that, the Carbine are very maneuverable and a lot of fun to shoot.

Gerry N. said...

I had no idea waddinell "Tactical" was when I made a block of wood with vee grooves on opposing sides to tape a penlight to the barrel of my M1 Carbine. I used it to kill meat. My roomie and I would drive up the Toutle Lake (there is no such lake) hiway until we saw deer eyes in the headlights of our '49 Studebaker pickup then stop and shut off the lights I'd clamp the stock of the carbine to my right hip with my right elbow and find the eyes with the penlight. Then move the muzzle straight down until the reflected eyes blinked off. That precipitated two quick shots. Then Roomie and I would quickle field dress the deer, usually a nice fat doe, toss her in the bed of the truck cover with a shelter half and make tracks for home where we'd finish up the butchering in the garage by the light of a single naked 60W bulb. All our friends would have meat for a couple or three weeks then we'd do it again. That summer we harvested five deer. It was illegal, but when you have friends out of work with hungry kids, you tend to find game regs a bit bendable. We got one elk that summer, she kept everyone in meat until logging started up again and the paychecks started coming.