ammo test

Overall, I am happy to say that reports of Glock’s death have been greatly exaggerated. I don’t know what happened with anyone else’s gun, but I do know what happened with mine. It ran like a sewing machine and looked mostly factory new after it did.

Today we are concerning ourselves with self-testing, and a new product I have been trying out. If you have been watching the channel over the last 8 months, you have seen me testing bullets in Clear Ballistic Gel, from clearballistics.com.

We got a chance this week to really wring out the new 224 Valkyrie loading from Hornady, the 88-grain special announced at the NRA show back in April. Valkyrie has been a strange animal over the last year. It has the potential to change how we think of small frame AR’s, and what they are capable of. But it has not been without controversy.

In addition to making tissue look like it went through a blender, G9 also touts an unparalleled ability to penetrate auto glass, and stay on target. This is a bigger problem than you might think if you have never spent any time blasting auto glass.

The 6.5 Creedmor isn’t a new round, it was introduced in 2008 by Hornady. But this will be remembered as the year it began its dominance in the market place. In reference to .308, I think the words of Winston Churchill say it best. “This is not the end, this is not even the beginning of the end, this is just perhaps the end of the beginning.”

Premium self-defense ammo can cost over a buck a round. With this in mind, we decided to run Remington’s HTP 9mm through the wringer. Going price is about $23 per box. However, that’s a box of 50 rounds, not the usual 20 for most self-defense ammo. That works out to about 45 or so cents a round, less than half the price of other self-defense ammo.

Taking the idea of “light and fast” model to new levels, the Civil Defense projectiles weigh in at well under half that same caliber traditional bullets. For example, the 9mm projectile weighs just 50 grains. Compare that to 115 or 124 grains for common 9mm defense rounds. The .45 ACP bullets weigh in at 78 grains as compared to a more traditional weight range of 185 to 230 grains. The result is blistering speed.

What do you do if you don’t feel that a 12-gauge slug doesn’t have enough stopping power? OK, so maybe if you ever feel under gunned with a shottie slug you’re fighting Godzilla, but, hey, it could happen. You could try to stuff a 40mm grenade in there, but that requires all sorts of complicated licensing. A more realistic option might be to use a fragmenting projectile design. That’s exactly what Winchester Ammunition has done with their PDX1 Defender Segmenting Slug.

While most premium self-defense ammo will cost you over a buck per round, Remington’s HTP line appeals to the more budget conscious crowd. Packed in boxes of 50, it sells for about the same as most self-defense ammo packaged in boxes of 20. Doing the fancy math indicates that it’s a little less than half the cost of the most expensive stuff.