doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Need to pick firearm please help with big dilemma

The S&W will work out fine for you. For a few years I've had a Taurus 905 with full moon clips. This revolver gets shot monthly and has yet to give me any problem. My other 9mm that I carry is a Springfield RO Compact.

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You make up some super-duper inverted bullet home-defense loads and use them on an intruder, and you will be convicted. You would be handing the prosecuting attorney your behind on a platter.

Frankly, my first suggestion for home defense is a large, loud dog. Dogs are more alert than you'll ever be, and know who belongs and who doesn't. And my second would be a 20 ga pump loaded with a standard trap load. Tape a flashlight to it. Everyone recognizes the sound of a pump shotgun being racked, and it's a useful warning.

"Stan," et al. your logic or knowledge underlying and supporting your statements, respectively, escapes me. For example, your emotive statements regarding personal liability or legal jeopardy when a person employs what the person believes to be the most effective cartridge / firearm to defend himself or herself in their abode or otherwise is uninformed. You have the right to lawfully defend yourself. Should the local district attorney and the grand jury disagree and indict, you hire a defense attorney to defend you. Bear in mind you have nothing to prove and no onus to prove yourself innocent; on the other hand, the prosecutor 'must' prove his case beyond a reasonable doubt.

Should a defense attorney put his defendant on the witness stand, or yet allow his client to even take the stand, in a criminal case, that demonstrably incompetent attorney would be committing malpractice of the first order. It could form the basis of an appeal if there is a conviction. This is to say you as a defendant will not be taking the witness stand to defend yourself. Remember, you hired a qualified attorney to do that.

Now, you could take the witness stand and testify, which is your right, of course, but your defense is your attorney's job, not yours, and the professional defense attorney hopefully has the knowledge, training and experience to defend you. Otherwise, why hire a defense attorney? Should the scenario of taking the stand eventuate, you as defendant would unnecessarily expose yourself to withering cross-examination and it would be a remarkably stupid decision to do so, and very likely one taken against your own attorney's best advice. The question of guilt will revolve around whether the shooting and taking of life were justified, not on the matter of equipment that caused the death. Questions of intent are not as important (and very difficult for the prosecutor to prove) as questions concerning the totality of the circumstances that led to the shooting, and not what may have been anticipated as needed by the shooter. So, the scenario you paint for yourself is highly unlikely to ever occur.

Second, why do we buy soft nose or hollow point ammunition with which to load our designated self-defense firearms, and how do we come to select the same? The makers advertise their effectiveness to kill and massively at that, or perhaps I just have not seen those that advertise wounding loads or those strictly meant for that purpose. The adverts I have seen, and assuredly everyone else on this forum has too, demonstrate the effectiveness of their company's projectile by showing the viewer how the projectile displaces large amounts of ballistic gelatin and how far it penetrates. Though perhaps I have just missed the ballistic demonstration where the projectile is meant to disable.

If I -- or for that matter anyone else -- find myself in a circumstance where I must point my defensive firearm at an individual and requires that I fire my firearm, I am not going to be thinking of defending myself by use of some trick or chancy wounding shot. I am going to aim for or point at the chest area and pull the trigger, which shot will most likely kill my assailant. If the situation indeed warrants the need to pull trigger, then it is going to be a justifiable act to law enforcement or the courts.

I think you have it right with respect to the preference for a shotgun as a defense weapon. Though I believe that such would be rather impractical as a tool to simply disable or wound an assailant. Should the need arise, I intend to place my shot in the chest area and will hope to survive the attack and / or the armed home invasion. Of course, if the assailant or invader is willing to dispense with his aggression, I would naturally take him into personal custody because of a change in circumstance, which then could also be justified.


Regards,

Edwardian

Seems to me you either have the right to utilize deadly force to protect yourself, your loved ones, or the sanctity of your home or you don't. How deadly the force you use is should be irrelevant. Better just be sure what authorizes deadly force in your jurisdiction...Geo

25+ years of practicing law tells me to tell you what I wrote above. You probably haven't been around courthouses and courtrooms enough to know that using your super-duper home-brewed inverted bullet home defense loads is a prescription for litigation disaster (even bigger than putting your client on the stand). However correct your moral arguments about using what you like to protect those near and dear to you are, they are not winning legal arguments.
You may have noticed in your life that what is moral and/or morally justified does not necessarily coincide with what is legal and/or legally justified. This is one of those situations. You can dislike that all you want, but you are highly unlikely to change it.

Edwardian, I have to agree with Stan and Dave in Maine on this one. For quite a few years, I kept my .357 Magnum charged with 148 gr. Speer hollow base wadcutters loaded backwards. It was a devastating defensive load with enormous expansion, even with mild powder charges that were very easy to control and get back on target. Most important to me was that my wife could easily manage the recoil, and the limited penetration gave me some assurance that if she ever needed to shoot an intruder, she had a better chance of stopping them without a miss going through walls to hit an unintended target.

Then I read several accounts of what people had to go through after they used handloads to shoot, and either wound or kill a bad guy. As stated, they were charged by ambitious and often anti-gun prosecutors, and they were made out to be the villain for having the brains to use an effective handload. They may have been right. In fact, I'm certain they were right. But they still had to endure arrest, trials, and enormous legal costs... and sometimes they would lose the case.

So, I went out and bought a box of Winchester 158gr. hollow points that had a good reputation for effectiveness, and spent some time with the wife teaching her how to first, use a Remington 870 pump shotgun, and second, how to handle the significantly greater recoil of the .357 Magnum with factory loads.

None of this is meant to help Jagermeister, who proudly voted for Obama twice, and who comes here to do anti-gun trolling and doesn't even own a double gun. He actually rents guns, so his choices here are presumably dictated by which handguns are available for rental. He should go with his vice-president Joe Biden's advice, and simply shoot his short barreled Ithaca model 37 out of his window to frighten away any intruders. In fact, I think he ought to do that right now... just in case any may be lurking outside.

Cops, lawyers, courts, judges. Seems like a big headache to me. Just move to Nova Scotia. They don't even lock their doors.


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Or just chop the sumbitch up and throw 'im to the gators.

I'm with you 100%, Colonel. (0-5 or 0-6?) I carried and used the 1911-A-1 .45 ACP in Vietnam, a life saver many times, so I tend to think that what saved my USMC ass back then, more than once, is still the best tool for the job today. I shoot handguns (the Colt Combat Commander and the Para-Carry Kimber with the same loads at the indoor range club that I would use if the SHTF in self-defense on the street, or in my home. But in the dead dark of Zero-dark-thirty hours, first choice will always be my M25 Winchester in guard-riot configuration, 20" cyl, barrel (no turkey hunting sights to get hung up on God knows what) and stuffed to the innards with 2&3/4" 00 buckshot- Guaran=damn-tee you, anything gets in front of that muzzle in a CQC scenario in my house will be blown to pieces, and lose their intent to do me and my family harm in a New York Minute.

Best way I can think of to stack the odds against yourself in case of a prosecution for unnecessary force is a history of social media remarks like some we're getting here...Geo

In non-lawyer speak, fox, go with the gators.

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Or the slag pot at the steel mill.