Mine is Better than Yours

Everyone says they are tired of the 9mm vs. .45 debates. They say the same about arguments relating to the .270 and the .30-06. Tell a Barnes bullet fan that a Nosler Partition kills better than a Triple Shock and you’ll have debate on your hands just like you will if you mention the 9mm and .45 or the .270 and the .30-06.

I once told a Texas deer hunter that deer hunting in West Virginia was not like deer hunting in Texas. I told him that big bucks were harder to kill here. Figuring that since I had some experience hunting deer in both locations, I knew something about it. He argued that all I needed to do was put a corn feeder in a field. When I told him big West Virginia bucks rarely come to corn feeders in fields he said I was stupid. Course, he’d never hunted deer in West Virginia and took my opinion as an insult on his and his fellow Texan’s hunting prowess.

Sometimes facts are not insults, they’re just facts.

The problem with facts is that they are hard to argue with. Let me shoot two deer with a .270 and a .30-06 and then you try to determine which one was shot with which cartridge. I’m betting you can get it right about 50% of the time. The facts is, from a terminal performance standpoint, that a .30-06 will not kill a deer and better or deader than a .270. When you consider that a .223 Remington is totally adequate for killing deer, this is a little easier to accept and makes those who suggest you should deer hunt with a .338 Win. Mag. seem like the guy who believes you should drive finishing nails with a sledge hammer.

There is always more to it than caliber, cartridge or the bullet. I once responded to a shootout at a bar and was crawling out of the patrol car as empty cases were hitting the ground. The crowd was gathered around a young man who had a bullet hole in the center of his chest. A 9mm FMJ bullet had passed through him as well as a lot of stuff behind him. He expired before I could radio for an ambulance.

The interesting thing was the pistol at his side, which was also a 9mm semi-automatic, had a stovepipe jam. We were never able to determine with any certainty that his jammed pistol resulted in his death but it brings up a point my friend Sheriff Jim Wilson so often points out: Its not so much what you are carrying but what you can do with what you are carrying. This of course applies equally to defensive handguns and hunting rifles.

I don’t care what type handgun you are carrying, what caliber it is or what it is loaded with, you don’t want the Sheriff shooting at you with any gun he might have on his person, be it a .45 Long Colt single action or a Ruger LCP in .380. You’re going to get hit, probably more than once.

All this argument about minutia can be fun and can also serve to educate defenders of both positions. However, sometimes the parties involved are just too damned stubborn to take anything away from a discussion other than the insults they get for being pig headed.

A perfect example of this is when self-proclaimed experts like to pontificate on a new cartridge by saying, “It’s the answer to a question no one was asking.” They’ll argue that “we” didn’t need a new cartridge. What this really and most often means is that they do not understand why a new cartridge was invented or that they never thought of asking the question in the first place.

When the .327 Federal magnum and the .30 Remington AR were introduced there was a lot of this cartridge bashing going around and I’m sure that many of the folks doing the bashing just did not have a need for either cartridge. Never mind that the .327 Federal Magnum is the most powerful defensive handgun cartridge you can buy or that the .30 Remington AR offers the best balance of power / trajectory / recoil in the AR 15 platform.

That’s fine; if you’re not smart enough to ask the question then the question you should be asking is entirely something different.

There is however more to the story when it comes to all these opinions. You see, cartridges and bullets are very special things to shooters. In fact they may be the most special things. As someone who has written more about cartridges and bullets than any other topic, I get a lot of communications from readers who, most often, have hurt feelings because they think I hurt the feelings of their favorite cartridge or bullet. Maybe because I did not proclaim it the best or stopped short of saying it was the only cartridge or bullet you need.

I understand all that. I’m very partial to several cartridges that, while they are not the only cartridges I want or need, for some reason they just seem to fit my personality. I just by golly like them and most of the ones I really like are not all that popular with the masses and are also on the dirty end of the stick that often gets poked at cartridges.

This brings us to the point of this post. None of us are really tired of all those this vs. that arguments we read about in gun magazines and on talk forums and blogs. What we are tired of is that the arguments have not changed. We read them hoping for some new, earth shattering evidence supporting one side or the other. We are disappointed that all we get is the same old conjecture, opinions and clichés based many times on nothing but emotion and old wives tales

The 9mm vs. the .45, the .270 vs. the .30-06 and the Partition vs. the Triple Shock arguments will never be settled and they will never die. The only thing that is really going to die is a lot of stuff shot with all these cartridges and bullets.

So the next time you are in one of these arguments, express the only real opinion and fact that matters when you are confronted with someone who is using real life examples, ballistic research and color 8 x 10 color glassy photographs to support the notion that their cartridge or bullet is better than yours.

Look ‘em in the eye, and with all the conviction you can muster just plainly say, “So, what, I like mine better than I like yours.” That’s what all these arguments really amount to anyway. No matter how true it is, I’ll never convince you that my wife is better than yours. Well, at least until you catch yours in bed with that geek down at the gun shop who carries a 9mm.

Now, on the other hand, let me tell you why the .35 Remington is a better deer rifle than the .30-30 Winchester…