What is the best handgun round for home protection?
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 at
6:00 am
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The very best handgun round for home protection is the 45 acp.
The main reasons are: Feet per second. A .45 caliber pistol fires a 230-grain bullet around 800 feet per second. The exact speed will depend on the bullet. This comparatively slower rate will potentially eliminate the round from piercing walls and killing someone else unintentionally. Like your own family member!
With the best loads, my opinion is .45 acp is a better "man stopper" than 9mm with its best loads.
When both of these rounds are fired into calibrated 10% ballistic gelatin, now considered the gold standard for expansion/penetration testing, the following results are usually the norm when 4" 9mm pistols are compared to 5" 45′s.
The 124-gr. Speer 9mm Gold Dot averages about 13" penetration and expands to approximately .57".
The 230-gr. 45 ACP Gold Dot averages approximately 13.5 – 14" and expands to right at .70".
It makes a bigger hole and has more knockdown power!
The one you can shoot well. The rest is just numbers.
Hollowpoint.
You probably just opened up a can of worms, lol. I would say the biggest caliber you can shoot accurately, and comfortably would be your best bet. Personally I like .45acp for auto, and .357 for revolvers.
It depends who is using it. A 9mm or .40 works well.
The tried, true, tested, and proved to be the Best No-nonsense Man Stopper is the 357 Magnum using the 125 grain grain jacketed hollow point bullet.*
revolver i would advise a .357 magnum with hollowpoints, those will do a nasty number, we all carry 40S&W handguns at the gun store i work at, those have great stopping power, but some people favor 9mm’s or .380′s because of the lower kick, personally theres not enough of a difference in kick, Ive heard great things about the taurus Judge being great for home defense since it uses .410 shot shells, i shot one and the kick isnt too bad its def managable, but for any kind of self defense, you have to be comfortable with the weapon, avoid small rounds like like .22lr or .25acp, and anything with high velocity like the 5.7×28, you want something that will disable the attacker, not slice right through the person, also as stated always use hollowpoints, those do more tissue damage (theyre gonna hurt alot more) and theres little to no chance of them going through the attacker. I personally keep a .45acp with winchester SXT hollow points in my nightstand for home defense, and im told thats overkill even for home defense but hey, 1 shot is all i need
It’s almost as simple as saying, "The biggest one you can handle effectively." Since it does little good to fire and miss or to shoot an attacker with a caliber too small to stop them, what’s best depends on your abilities.
A big slow bullet, particularly a hollow point, will transfer more of it’s energy to the target and reduce the possibility of shooting the bad guy AND killing your neighbor in his home with one shot. For this reason I’d recommend any semi auto in 9mm or .45 cal, or one of the .45 Colt guns loaded with .410 buck shot [Tarus Judge]. For an experienced shooter, a snub nose revolver in .38 special is a good choice. A novice should consider either a shot gun or getting some professional training.
More important than which gun is how safely you handle / store it. These are safety rules to live by…
http://www.nrahq.org/education/guide.asp
I would say a 230 grain Federal Hydra-Shok JHP .45 ACP round fired from a 1911 pistol. Very deadly indeed.
I’d say use a round that the most federal agents and police use, 40 S&W. Not sure why it’s been proven to be the best round for federal agents, but I’m guessing it doesn’t over penetrate like the 9mm and doesn’t under penetrate like the 45 acp, it’s a mixture of both rounds, not to slow, not to fast, not to big, and not to small, almost perfect.
I think high expansion hollow points do the best for home protection, they can easily take out a human being, but doesn’t pierce walls very good, so you don’t have stray bullets going through your house, possibly injuring innocents in other apartments, in your house or even neighbour’s houses.
You need the proper caliber and bullet. If you want an automatic, I would recomend anything above a 9mm to a .45ACP. You need to go to a range frequently. If someone breaks into your hous at night, it’s dark your scared, adrenaline pumping, it can’t be the first time you have shot the weapon in a year. Obvoiusly you want to us hollow points, use a brand name. Make sure hollowpoints feed properly in your weapon. Don’y buy anything exotic. I would recomed a .45, you can have 13 rounds in the mag, and if yoj hit someone with a hollowpoint, it’s prettymuch over.