Carry Ammo

[Snowgun]

Do you ever worry about loading your own carry ammo? There has been cases where that has burned people (since they couldn't do ballistics to prove the innocence of the guy shooting in self defense).

Just wondering about your take on it....

[Evad]

Do you ever worry about loading your own carry ammo? There has been cases where that has burned people (since they couldn't do ballistics to prove the innocence of the guy shooting in self defense).

Just wondering about your take on it....

What? They can't do ballistic tests on reloads? Why not? Seems to me it would be possible.

[goalie]

Do you ever worry about loading your own carry ammo? There has been cases where that has burned people (since they couldn't do ballistics to prove the innocence of the guy shooting in self defense).

Just wondering about your take on it....

I am either justified in my use of deadly force, or I am not. What I deliver that force with is a non-factor.

Then again, I believe in avoidance and do EVERYTHING to avoid conflict while armed.

I also choose not to worry about things like Earth-shattering meteors, zombies, or what ammo I carry, as they are so unlikely to ever be a factor that my time is better spent.

[Snowgun]

Do you ever worry about loading your own carry ammo? There has been cases where that has burned people (since they couldn't do ballistics to prove the innocence of the guy shooting in self defense).

Just wondering about your take on it....

What? They can't do ballistic tests on reloads? Why not? Seems to me it would be possible.

The guy had no more reloads of that type. So they had no ammo to test with.

[Snowgun]

I am either justified in my use of deadly force, or I am not. What I deliver that force with is a non-factor.

You must have limited experience with our justice system...

I don't think it should be an issue either...but who knows.

[goalie]

I am either justified in my use of deadly force, or I am not. What I deliver that force with is a non-factor.

You must have limited experience with our justice system...

I don't think it should be an issue either...but who knows.

I've been in enough gunfights to not GAS about paying for a good lawyer if I live through another one.

YMMV

[jshuberg]

If you shoot someone in self defense and it goes to trial, the prosecution can ask the crime lab if they were able to verify your statements to the police with the physical evidence. They are less likely to be able to do that if you were using hand loads rather than factory loads. Its also unlikely that the prosecution would trust you (the accused) to produce equivalent ammo as evidence for your own defense. They could also try to paint you as some kind of mad scientist gun nut who spends his free time in his basement making his own bullets. All of these things would be bad if you were sitting behind the defendants table in a courtroom.

As often as a person needs to shoot their carry ammo, it's just not worth the minor savings when there's even the slightest possibility that doing so could be used against you if everything goes terribly wrong.

$0.02

[Snowgun]

I am either justified in my use of deadly force, or I am not. What I deliver that force with is a non-factor.

You must have limited experience with our justice system...

I don't think it should be an issue either...but who knows.

I've been in enough gunfights to not GAS about paying for a good lawyer if I live through another one.

YMMV

No need to pull the operator card, just curious about your view on what jshuberg and i were talking about.

[Beretta96CT]

Goalie,
I know someone who has Hornady 124 and 147 grain XTP's of I think were 9mm on his shop bench. Should I ask him if he can spare some? I am considering asking him to teach me how to reload as he says he reloads everything he shoots, but mainly big rifles. He has one rifle that makes a god-awful boom when he shoots it in his back yard into hillside of my cornfield, which he has my permission to do.

[FJ540]

So what if you reload your carry ammo? Who would admit that to the investigators anyway?

"Here's my gun" - that's the extent I'm talking to anyone about it without Marc giving me permission first.

[goalie]

If you shoot someone in self defense and it goes to trial, the prosecution can ask the crime lab if they were able to verify your statements to the police with the physical evidence. They are less likely to be able to do that if you were using hand loads rather than factory loads. Its also unlikely that the prosecution would trust you (the accused) to produce equivalent ammo as evidence for your own defense. They could also try to paint you as some kind of mad scientist gun nut who spends his free time in his basement making his own bullets. All of these things would be bad if you were sitting behind the defendants table in a courtroom.

As often as a person needs to shoot their carry ammo, it's just not worth the minor savings when there's even the slightest possibility that doing so could be used against you if everything goes terribly wrong.

$0.02

Show me a case where it mattered: where deadly force was legally justified, but the person was convicted of a crime based on the use of handloads.

After any self-defense shooting you're going to need a lawyer, even if you do it right. Get a good one and it won't matter. Arguing that the type of ammo you used has some effect on whether or not the requirements for deadly force were met is actually kind of funny. The same argument could be used against someone who uses a .45 instead of a 9mm. Obviously you were a bloodthirsty killer just looking for trouble since you carried such a big caliber weapon...

As for your last sentence, if the people of MGT (and gun owners in general) applied that logic to their health and fitness like they do their carry ammo, the shooting community would be the fittest, most in-shape demographic around. The fixation on minutia about what ammo to carry based upon the slightest possibility while ignoring factors in your life guaranteed to bring negative results has never ceased to amaze me.

Again, YMMV

[goalie]

No need to pull the operator card, just curious about your view on what jshuberg and i were talking about.

Actually, I meant the opposite, but, re-reading it did come out in a smartass/"I'm a badass" way. My point was that my long-past real world experiences, coupled with the fact that I am much older and train a whole lot less now than I did back then, have me much more worried about simply surviving if something happens than about irrelevant minutia that has been hashed around in gun-rags and on the internet forever, but has no significant data to even back it up as being a real threat to one's liberty after a justified shooting.

By reloading I can afford to actually shoot my carry ammo often. That positive, to me, far outweighs any hypothetical negative, that, even if it exists, would be neutralized by hiring a good lawyer as long as your actions were justified by MN law.

[tman]

The best reason for using factory loads versus hand loaded ammo is reliability.

Will it go bang when you pull the trigger? Is it likely to be a squib? etc.

[Snowgun]

Cases Where Handloads Caused Problems in Court
Massad Ayoob

As promised, here are the sources for records for any who feel a need to confirm the cases I have referenced previously where handloaded ammunition caused problems for people in the aftermath of shootings.

As I have noted in this thread earlier, and as the attorneys who have responded to this matter have confirmed, local trials and results are not usually available on-line. However, in each case, I have included the location where the physical records of the trials are archived.

NH v. Kennedy

James Kennedy, a sergeant on the Hampton, NH police force, pursued a drunk driver whose reckless operation of the vehicle had forced other motorists off the road. The suspect ended up in a ditch, stalled and trying to get underway again. Advised by radio that responding backup officers were still a distance away, and fearing that the man would get back on the road and kill himself and others, Kennedy approached the vehicle. At the driver’s door, the suspect grabbed Kennedy’s Colt .45 auto and pulled it towards himself. It discharged in his face, causing massive injury.

The reload in the gun was a 200 grain Speer JHP, loaded to duplicate the 1000 fps from a 5” barrel then advertised by Speer for the same bullet in loaded cartridge configuration.

This was the first case where I saw the argument, “Why wasn’t regular ammunition deadly enough for you,” used by opposing counsel. They charged Kennedy with aggravated assault. They made a large issue out of his use of handloads, suggesting that they were indicative of a reckless man obsessed with causing maximum damage.

Defense counsel hired the expert I suggested, Jim Cirillo, who did a splendid job of demolishing that argument and other bogus arguments against Kennedy at trial, and Kennedy was acquitted.

This case dates back to the late 1970s. The local courts tell me that the case documentation will be on file at Rockingham County Superior Court, PO Box 1258, Kingston, NH 03843. File search time is billed at $25 per hour for cases such as this that date back prior to 1988.

NJ V. Bias

This is the classic case of gunshot residue (GSR) evidence being complicated by the use of handloaded ammunition, resulting in a case being misinterpreted in a tragic and unjust way. On the night of 2/26/89, Danny Bias entered the master bedroom of his home to find his wife Lise holding the family home defense revolver, a 6” S&W 686, to her head. He told police that knowing that she had a history of suicidal ideation, he attempted to grab the gun, which discharged, killing her. The gun was loaded with four handloaded lead SWC cartridges headstamped Federal .38 Special +P.

Autopsy showed no GSR. The medical examiner determined that Lise Bias had a reach of 30”, and the NJSP Crime Lab in Trenton determined that the gun in question would deposit GSR to a distance of 50” or more with either factory Federal 158 grain SWC +P .38 Special, or handloads taken from his home under warrant for testing after Danny told them about the reloads. However, the reloads that were taken and tested had Remington-Peters headstamps on the casings and were obviously not from the same batch.

Danny had loaded 50 rounds into the Federal cases of 2.3, 2.6, and 2.9 grains of Bullseye, with Winchester primers, under an unusually light 115 grain SWC that he had cast himself, seeking a very light load that his recoil sensitive wife could handle. The gun had been loaded at random from that box of 50 and there was no way of knowing which of the three recipes was in the chamber from which the fatal bullet was launched.

We duplicated that load, and determined that with all of them and particularly the 2.3 grain load, GSR distribution was so light that it could not be reliably gathered or recovered, from distances as short as 24”. Unfortunately, the remaining rounds in the gun could not be disassembled for testing as they were the property of the court, and there is no forensic artifact that can determine the exact powder charge that was fired from a given spent cartridge.

According to an attorney who represented him later, police originally believed the death to be a suicide. However, the forensic evidence testing indicated that was not possible, and it was listed as suspicious death. Based largely on the GSR evidence, as they perceived it, the Warren County prosecutor’s office presented the case to the grand jury, which indicted Danny Bias for Murder in the First Degree in the death of his wife.

Attorney John Lanza represented Danny very effectively at his first trial, which ended in a hung jury. Legal fees exceeded $100,000, bankrupting Danny; Attorney Lanza, who believed then and now in his client’s innocence, swallowed some $90,000 worth of legal work for which he was never paid.

For his second trial, Bias was assigned attorney Elisabeth Smith by the Public Defender’s office. Challenging the quality of evidence collection, she was able to weaken the prosecution’s allegation that the GSR factor equaled murder, but because the GSR issue was so muddled by the handloaded ammo factor, she could not present concrete evidence that the circumstances were consistent with suicide, and the second trial ended with a hung jury in 1992. At this point, the prosecution having twice failed to convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt, the judge threw out the murder charge.

It was after this that I personally lost track of the case. However, I’ve learned this past week that the case of NJ v. Daniel Bias was tried a third time in the mid-1990s, resulting in his being acquitted of Aggravated Manslaughter but convicted of Reckless Manslaughter. The appellate division of the Public Defender’s office handled his post-conviction relief and won him a fourth trial. The fourth trial, more than a decade after the shooting, ended with Danny Bias again convicted of Reckless Manslaughter. By now, the state had changed its theory and was suggesting that Danny had pointed the gun at her head to frighten her, thinking one of the two empty chambers would come up under the firing pin, but instead discharging the gun. Danny Bias was sentenced to six years in the penitentiary, and served three before being paroled. He remains a convicted felon who cannot own a firearm.

It is interesting to hear the advice of the attorneys who actually tried this case. John Lanza wrote, “When a hand load is used in an incident which becomes the subject of a civil or criminal trial, the duplication of that hand load poses a significant problem for both the plaintiff or the prosecutor and the defendant. Once used, there is no way, with certainty, to determine the amount of powder or propellant used for that load. This becomes significant when forensic testing is used in an effort to duplicate the shot and the resulting evidence on the victim or target.”

He adds, “With the commercial load, one would be in a better position to argue the uniformity between the loads used for testing and the subject load. With a hand load, you have no such uniformity. Also, the prosecution may utilize either standard loads or a different hand load in its testing. The result would be distorted and could be prejudicial to the defendant. Whether or not the judge would allow such a scientific test to be used at trial, is another issue, which, if allowed, would be devastating for the defense. From a strictly forensic standpoint, I would not recommend the use of hand loads because of the inherent lack of uniformity and the risk of unreliable test results. Once the jury hears the proof of an otherwise unreliable test, it can be very difficult to ‘unring the bell.’”

Ms. Smith had this to say, after defending Danny Bias through his last three trials. I asked her, “Is it safe to say that factory ammunition, with consistently replicable gunshot residue characteristics, (would) have proven that the gun was within reach of Lise’s head in her own hand, and kept the case from escalating as it did?”

She replied, “You’re certainly right about that. Gunshot residue was absolutely the focus of the first trial. The prosecution kept going back to the statement, “It couldn’t have happened the way he said it did’.”

The records on the Bias trials should be available through:
The Superior Court of New Jersey
Warren County
313 Second Street
PO Box 900
Belvedere, NJ 07823

Those who wish to follow the appellate track of this case will find it in the Atlantic Reporter.

142 N.J. 572, 667 A.2d 190 (Table)

Supreme Court of New Jersey
State
v.
Daniel N. Bias
NOS. C-188 SEPT.TERM 1995, 40,813
Oct 03, 1995
Disposition: Cross-pet. Denied.
N.J. 1995.
State v. Bias
142 N>J> 572, 667 A.2d 190

TN v. Barnes

The decedent attacked Robert Barnes and his young daughter with a large knife and was shot to death by the defendant with SJHP .38 Special reloads from a Smith & Wesson Model 36. The distance between the two at the time of the shooting became a key element in the trial, and a misunderstanding of that distance was a primary reason he was charged with Murder. The evidence was messed up in a number of ways in this case, and I do not believe the reloaded ammo (which the prosecution did not recognize to be such until during the trial) was the key problem, but it definitely was part of a problem in reconstructing the case. We were able to do that without GSR evidence, and Mr. Barnes won an acquittal. In this case, I believe the use of factory ammo, combined with proper handling and preserving of the evidence by the initial investigators, would have made the defense much easier and might well have prevented the case from ever being lodged against him.

The records of TN v. Barnes are archived under case number 87297015 at:

Criminal Justice Center
201 Poplar
Suite 401
Memphis, TN 38103

Iowa v. Cpl. Randy Willems

A man attempted to disarm and murder Corporal Randy Willems of the Davenport, IA Police Department, screaming “Give me your (expletive deleted) gun, I’ll blow your (expletive deleted) brains out.” Willems shot him during the third disarming attempt, dropping him instantly with one hit to the abdomen from a department issue factory round, Fiocchi 9mm 115 grain JHP +P+. The subject survived and stated that the officer had shot him for nothing from a substantial distance away. GSR testing showed conclusively that the subject’s torso was approximately 18” from the muzzle of the issue Beretta 92 when it discharged. Randy was acquitted of criminal charges in the shooting at trial in 1990. Two years later, Randy and his department won the civil suit filed against them by the man who was shot.

I use this case when discussing handloads because it is a classic example of how the replicability of factory ammunition, in the forensic evidence sense, can annihilate false allegations by the “bad guy” against the “good guy” who shot him. The records of State of Iowa v. Corporal Randy Willems are archived in the Iowa District Court in Scott County, Davenport, Iowa. Those from the civil suit, Karwoski v. Willems and the City of Davenport, should be at the Iowa Civil Court of Scott County, also located in Davenport, Iowa.

A final word: I did not research the above and place it here to placate lightweight net ninjas. I did it because three recent Internet threads led me to believe that a number of decent people had honest questions about the real-world concerns about using handloads for self-defense, and were possibly putting themselves in jeopardy by doing so. For well over a decade, certain people have been creating an urban myth that says, “No one has ever gotten in trouble in court because they used handloads.”

This is now absolutely, and I hope finally, refuted.

Respectfully submitted,
Massad Ayoob

Source - http://www.thehighroad.org/showpost....&postcount=140

[smurfman]

For me, the most important reason for using factory ammo rather than reloads is for my heirs in the event of the ammo misfiring. If I am using reloads they will not get much from my estate.