BillCA and Bacon, thanks for the tips on newer 44 Spec. ammo that's out there. I'm a little bit 'out of the loop' where it comes to the 'state of the art' factory/defense loads for handguns because 100% of my recreational shooting is done with handloads. I bought a bunch of seemingly expensive fancy tailor-mades for my personal defense guns quite some time ago, and confess that I'm still packing the same stuff, probably early 90s vintage. After reading a number of columns by gunwriters who admonished us to never use handloads in a personal defense gun for fear of that fact being used to crucify us if we shot someone and subsequently were sued by the shootee or his survivors, I thought it wise to go that route. The writers claimed that a good prosecutor or plaintiff's lawyer would try to make a big deal of the fact that we concocted an extra nasty round with which to shoot his/her poor criminal client. In any case, made sense to me. I live in a part of the country where high heat and humidity is not a problem and have fired rounds that were decades old. I realize that many gun writers advocate recycling defense ammo periodically, like annually, shoot up the old stuff and get new, but I've not done that. Maybe I ought to even though it might cost a few $, it would (a) be fun, (b) good practice, and (c) help me stay more up-to-date on what are the better available loads on the market.
