Nanuk said:
MoArk Willy said:
IF you reload your own self defense ammo and
IF you shoot someone with it the prosecutor lawyer will have a field day with you.
He will claim that your actions showed INTENT and that by reloading your own ammo you intended to make it more deadly than factory loads.
And that will extrapolate to you LOOKING for someone to shoot.
It is not worth the headache to save $10 for what you chamber in your weapon.
How many cases has that happened in?
What evidence would would you have to indicate such malice and intent?
Once deadly force is authorized you can run them over with a Mack truck.
In reality, none, to both questions.
Incorrect.
Daniel Bias. Yes, it was a murder case, not SD. No, that doesn't matter. Yes, it was eventually overturned, but he still spent several years in prison and was destitute when he got out.
This whole string of posts sort of (but only sort of) goes off on the wrong direction in the analysis. It's not just about some evil, overzealous prosecutor claiming that you made ammo "more deadly" than factory ammo. To be honest, when it comes to reloads in SD, that would be the least of my legal worries. While the "deadlier ammo" argument has been made, I'm much more concerned about evidentiary issues, disputed distances and GSR. IMNSHO, that's the real problem with using handloads.
Now, for the whole "show me the cases" crowd, I'm going to run through a couple of things one more time. In this day and age of internet, it's easy to believe that if you can't find it on the internet, it's not true or does not exist. Right, wrong, or indifferent, that's actually not the case. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of courts in the US, only some of which make their documents available online. In fact, up until a few years ago (and this may still be the case in some jurisdictions), only certain appellate cases were designated for publication. The most important cases I look for in this arena, naturally, are appellate cases, but here's what I've said about those in the past.
Still, let’s take a brief look at how The Case might conceptually come into existence. In order for there to be a useful opinion out there, The Case has to have been tried and appealed, and an appellate court has to have issued an opinion on that issue. Those are the very broad strokes. More specifically, here’s the necessary chain of events to produce The Case for purposes of The Handload Debate:
1. Someone has to:
a. use handloads
b. in a shooting.
2. As a result of that shooting, either a civil case or a criminal case (or both) has to have been initiated;
3. The case(s) initiated in step 2 have to go to trial without a settlement or plea deal being reached;
4. In the course of those cases, there must be a dispute over evidence related to the handloads (otherwise, the appellate court likely won’t talk about that evidence)
5. The case has to have been appealed by someone (and in criminal cases, the State rarely gets to appeal);
6. In that appeal, someone has to claim that the trial court’s ruling on the admissibility of the handload-related evidence constituted reversible error; AND
7. The appellate court has to actually discuss the issue of the admissibility of the handload-related evidence in its opinion.
If any one of the above is lacking, there’s no useful appellate opinion for us to dissect. This constellation of necessary events has left us in a position that there is, in fact, very little in discoverable case law to illuminate the pitfalls of using handloads for SD. My Westlaw account allows me to search all federal and state courts in the U.S., and I’ve run a bunch of searches over the years.
There's a very particular set of circumstances which must be present for handloads to be a problem in an SD case. If they become a problem, though, they can become a very big and very expensive problem. More specifically, those circumstances read something like this: (1) If you have to use your gun in SD; and (2) you fire handloaded or reloaded rounds; and (3) the distance at which you fired is miscalculated or contested; THEN someone might have to try to recreate GSR patterns, and that's a problem. Even if you win, it can be a very long, very expensive process. Even if you eventually "win," like Daniel Bias did, the process if "winning" could ruin you.
Threads on reloads in SD typically draw some of the same comments, so I'll wrap this post up by just going ahead and responding to "the usual suspects."
1. Using reloads for SD is not illegal. Not in any state of which I'm aware, anyway.
2.
Nobody is saying that death is preferable to the legal risks posed by handloads. If an axe-wielding maniac charges from the woods while you're at the range, practicing with handloads and attacks you with the aforementioned axe, stop the threat. Shoot him. I would, and I'm the guy constantly saying "don't use handloads."
3. I'll freely admit that the odds of handloads becoming a contentious issue in any particular case are pretty low. Then again, the odds of my having to shoot someone in SD are pretty low, too. I still carry a gun, so I must be more worried about the stakes than the odds.
4. It's always puzzled me that folks spend so much time preparing for worst case scenarios, getting just the right gun, asking about the best ammo, belt, first aid kits . . . but refuse to consider this aspect. If we're going to prepare for a worst-case scenario, the odds of which it will come to pass are very low, why would we care about the odds of reloads coming up in the legal cases that follow? Aren't we obviously more worried about the stakes than the odds?
5. Reloads are great for practice.
If I were giving advice, here's what I'd suggest: Get a factory carry load that works well in your gun. Work up a load that mimics it. Use up LOTS and LOTS of reloads in practice, but carry factory ammo.
