"Do you carry that big pistol regularly?" - Springfield Armory Echelon 4.0FC shown, great for casual concealment.
I believe I got called out on social media for shooting a service-compact crossover for the annual retiree shooting soiree. The question? “– is that (gun) what you regularly carry?”
No. It’s a loaner. I normally carry the shorter service-compact, a GLOCK 19 Gen5.
But I’ve often shot smaller guns for the real, live qualification.
Getting called out for shooting a loaner service compact, like this G23 Gen5 from a few years ago, surprised me. I remember when one of our guys carried a Model 29 (similar to the 6" gun below) and shot qualifications with a M14 K-38.
The first time I recognized the idea of “cheating” at quals, I had only been in the job for 2-3 years. One of our guys – I’ve bored you with this story before – carried a 6 ½” S&W Model 29 44 Magnum. In the exposed cartridge loops on the belt-slide of the swivel duty holster, you could see his selected round, the Remington 240 grain SJHP – scalloped jacket hollow points.
Someone noticed that he shot a six-inch K-38 Masterpiece with 38 Special wadcutters loaded on the department Star Progressive loader. Someone (not me) called him out.
I’d already left the department, but heard about it later. It was one of those giving him a hard time about taking the easy way to shoot the (expensive) qual course – which was more of an endurance contest than a test.
I asked what happened. He apparently went out and got sixty rounds of his 44 Magnum “Rhino-rollers” (h/t, Richard Davis). Returning to the range, he cleaned the qual, not without some discomfort.
The jokers shut up and life went on.
I was in the group that believed that to “qual with wadcutters/38s and carry Magnums” was a bad idea. We had to make it more realistic, right?
In retrospect, I was full of crap; I eventually came to recognize that the qual was an artificial, administrative, “check the box” bit of fluff we did every year that had little to do with relevance in the fight – except for proof you could hit a target.
And that’s not nothing. It’s just not the whole story.
When I had the chance to “do my own,” just before the state imposed a “standard” qualification and we were in transition to new guns, I broke it down into two phases.
One showed you could hit a mark. The distance was fixed, the size of the target was such that you picked up a ream of targets at the copy machine in the station and you used only ten rounds.
Why 10?
Fewer meant you could “pass” with luck. More than that took ammo away from training: gun handling, cover and stoppage drills, stuff that means something.
Much later, I learned of the old Bakersfield Police Department qualification, somewhat contemporaneous with my entry into the job.
That took ten rounds total.
The transition to auto pistols – which require some level of power to operate, unlike the round guns of old – largely killed the “train with powder-puff ammo, carry howitzer ammo” concept.
I've shot the qual with smaller guns, like the Mossberg MC1sc (above) and the Ruger LCRx (below). The results were similar. The comfort level was sometimes noticeable.
But that had already died; the carry Magnums, shoot 38s carried the S&W Combat Magnum from the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s. Apparently someone found out that the newly arrived 125 grain JHP Magnums (at around 1,400 fps in four-inch service revolvers) demonstrated some issues.
One was that the empties could be hard to remove from the cylinder, an important consideration as they were in the way of incoming fresh ammo needed to stop the fight.
Apocryphal tales arose, telling of cops shocked by the blast of the Magnums stopping the fight to figure out if the gun blew up. Not incredibly, shooting fifty- and sixty round qual courses were rough on the nerves and scores dipped from those fired with the ca. 150 grain bullets at 750fps of typical training loads.
Had they only shot the Bakersfield PD 10-round course, we may not have gotten the S&W L-frame line of revolvers; those replaced the K-frame Magnums that were beaten by shooting light-bullet full-power Magnums up to four times a year.
Is it remarkably easier to shoot the state fifty-round qualification with, say, a Springfield Armory Echelon than with the same firm’s Hellcat Pro?
I’m not sure. The Hellcat Pro gave me the best group I’d fired in an agency retiree qual up to the time it arrived. I’ve beaten that, slightly, with GLOCK 19s, a Gen4 and Gen5.
There wasn’t enough difference to make a difference, pass or fail.
Shooting the Hellcat – or a SIG P365 or a GLOCK 43 – could wear you out, but they’re smaller than the “crossover”-longer grip frame micro-9mm pistols.
Honest, I wasn’t cheating this year. And I’ve shown my practice here.
– Rich Grassi