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shotgunshooter3
Posts: 6,112 Senior Member
Quick Range Report: Glock 34 w/ RMR
shotgunshooter3
Posts: 6,112 Senior Member
Due largely to work, hunting season, and the limited availability of ammunition, I haven't been able to go to the range in the past month or so. I was finally able to rectify that today with a short trip to my local range with my Glock 34 equipped with Trijicon RMR. I'm saving my ammo stocks for two upcoming matches, so I kept the session to just over 60 rounds. I did the following drills:
- From the holster: draw, fire one shot, reload, fire one shot. Keep all shots in A Zone at 10 yards
- From the holster: Draw, fire one shot. All shots in A Zone at 10 yards. Done for time.
- From the holster: (Bill Drill) Draw, fire six shots rapid. All shots in A Zone at 7 yards. Done for time.
Not much to report, on two of the Bill Drill strings I dropped a single shot out of the A Zone. Most importantly, I set a baseline for improvement in the future. I haven't tracked times in awhile.
- From the holster: draw, fire one shot, reload, fire one shot. Keep all shots in A Zone at 10 yards
- From the holster: Draw, fire one shot. All shots in A Zone at 10 yards. Done for time.
- From the holster: (Bill Drill) Draw, fire six shots rapid. All shots in A Zone at 7 yards. Done for time.
Not much to report, on two of the Bill Drill strings I dropped a single shot out of the A Zone. Most importantly, I set a baseline for improvement in the future. I haven't tracked times in awhile.
- I am a rifleman with a poorly chosen screen name. -
"Slow is smooth, smooth is fast, and speed is the economy of motion" - Scott Jedlinski
"Slow is smooth, smooth is fast, and speed is the economy of motion" - Scott Jedlinski
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"Slow is smooth, smooth is fast, and speed is the economy of motion" - Scott Jedlinski
I had an experience this last week that made me go "hmmmm" with regards to 9mm. Winchester's indoor range ammo, known as "Win Clean" LOOKS for all the world like a jacketed soft point. The idea is they wrap the jacket from the back to the front so that there is no exposed lead to vaporize against hot powder gasses and go airborne. The 147 grain 9mm version even has cuts in the jacket from the final crimping together process that look for all the world like they're designed to split and allow a mushroom.
So I decided to test and see if they would. They don't. . .BUT. . . the nine milk jugs I had in the stack did not stop it.
So this has me thinking. . .the white box USA9MM1 147 grain flat point FMJ has the potential to be a miniaturized dangerous game solid, and your longslide Glock far faster at delivering follow up shots than the finest English double. Would I hunt Cape buffalo with it? No. Would I hunt pigs with it? Oh yeah!
"Nothing is safe from stupid." - Zee
I still think my familiarity with the Glock trumps the extra knockdown power of a .44 Mag or similar.
"Slow is smooth, smooth is fast, and speed is the economy of motion" - Scott Jedlinski
One of the cooler things I've observed in my gel and milk jug fiddling over the years is watching the trade off between expansion and penetration. It's been especially illuminating when you're comparing rounds that are identical in all aspects except bullet design. A good 147-grains-at-1000-fps duty load will give you about 14"-15" in bare gel or about 4 milk jugs, and will probably finish up somewhere around .70 caliber for diameter. Nine milk jugs didn't stop the same load with a non-expanding bullet. That's about six feet of water folks, and it kept going.
The party line in the FBI ballistics theory is that most meat-based tissues are elastic enough to not suffer displacement damage (AKA hydrostatic shock) until the impact speed exceeds about 2000 fps, which makes the notion of "energy transfer / knockdown power" largely a false concept. I feel they have this MOSTLY right, and that handgun rounds are only going to damage the tissues the bullet comes into physical contact with. On an animals with mass less than that of a large man, the expanding duty rounds are UNQUESTIONABLY going to destroy more tissue and cause a bigger/more rapid bleed within the chest cavity depth given to work with. As the critters get larger and the angles more, ummmm. . .quartery?. . .we have to start thinking about what will make it to the important stuff.
This then becomes a larger scale version of the problem we're faced with the .32 and .380 ACP pocket pistols - you have enough energy available to penetrate sufficiently within the animal in question, or expand, but not both. If they don't expand, they deliver plenty of penetration. The one that most opened my eye on this was my hard-cast flat nose .45 hardball equivalent load that took nine milk jugs to stop. It's always worth remembering that until fairly recently, a main military handgun consideration was that it had to be effective against not only men, but also horses. You do that with heavy-for-caliber, non-expanding bullets.
Sooooo. . .I'm not advocating that we start trying to fill our elk tags with specialty ammo in police duty autoloaders, but I DO think that we've suffered from being served the Energy Transfer and "OMG! WHAT IF IT EXITS?!?!?" flavors of Kool Aid for the last 70+ years. While expanding bullets ARE an extremely useful tool, those thought processes have somewhat locked our brains into the box of thinking the capabilities of THOSE bullets are the limiting factor of the rounds that fire them.
As such, I no longer think it's nuts to carry a 9mm into grizzly country, but the caveat is that you have to be smart about what you put in it.
Now that I've entered into the (ahem) "wonderful" world of trifocals, iron sights on pistols are going to require either the "old guy head tilt" or specialty frames (study ongoing) that allow me to adjust lens height for the task at hand. I'm still coming to grips with that, but the writing on the wall is that red dot sights may be necessary for any application in which I have to shoot a handgun quickly. It's not feasible to red dot every single handgun I'll ever own, so I have to look hard at expanding the capabilities of the handguns I CAN red dot. Keeping an extra mag of heavy FPFMJ on hand would seem to do that nicely.
"Nothing is safe from stupid." - Zee
and after you open the wrapper it’s too late to back out 🤣🤣🤣
"Slow is smooth, smooth is fast, and speed is the economy of motion" - Scott Jedlinski
"Slow is smooth, smooth is fast, and speed is the economy of motion" - Scott Jedlinski