The Satuit Nimrod

The Rationale for Defensive Hollow Points

by Massad Ayoob | Published in The Armory Life, February 22nd, 2024

Editor’s Note: The statements reflected in this piece are the author’s opinion and do not constitute legal advice.

Ever since hollow point handgun ammunition became readily available in the 1960s, anti-gun and anti-police groups alike have been antagonistic to the concept. In the 1970s, the liberal magazine The Nation published an article titled “The Vietnamization of Main Street” which decried American law enforcement’s rapid adoption of hollow point duty ammo. The article contained every shibboleth imaginable, with terminology such as “dum-dum bullets” and “bullets shaped like the nacelles of jet engines” and gross exaggerations like “the bullets don’t explode…you do!”

That bunk has been a template for the “antis” ever since. You can find the classic article “Defending the Self-Defense Case” online that appeared some years ago in Champion, the journal of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. It was written by Attorney Lisa Steele, who is generally considered the leading appellate lawyer who specializes in self-defense cases that went wrong at the trial level and resulted in unmeritorious convictions.

In the article, Steele points out that often, prosecutors who were either clueless or unscrupulous tried to paint the use of expanding bullets as “indicia of malice,” designed to “rend and tear and cause unnecessary pain and suffering and greater lethality.”

Shown in this digital image are four cartridges for revolvers. Each uses a different projectile which is the point to the illustration. From left to right, they are a lead round nose, semi-jacketed soft point bullet, a semi-jacketed hollow point bullet and a lead semi-wadcutter. A special note about the LSWC bullet — some effective hollow point bullets are made with semi-wadcutters. They have an open front, deep cavity and use soft lead to increase the probability of expansion.

Can this be a problem in court after a legitimate self-defense shooting? Of course it can. Does that mean you shouldn’t load them in your defensive firearms? No!

It means that you should be able to explain why you chose that ammunition, and explain it in a way that a jury selected by the other side for their lack of knowledge of guns and ammo can understand!

Read the complete article here.