I need to buy a few boxes of proper defensive .223 ammo. Never worried about it in the past, but my rural area is gaining houses at a rapid rate, and overpenetration is now officially a thing.

I haven't researched this yet, but the last time I did so was probably 15 years ago, and I am sure things have changed.

Please let me know your recommendations, or what your agency is using.

I am less concerned with long range accuracy or "stopping power," than I am with overpenetration through both walls and bad guys.

Thanks for sharing your expertise.

A

I'm issued 62 grain Gold Dot soft points, which is what I stock at home too, alongside 62 grain Federal Fusion.

(Fusion and Gold Dot use the same bonded bullet tech.)

Always been issued:

Federal TRU 62 grain
https://www.bereli.com/t223l/?...7VF9UWeCWRbi0.PcfdLm

I buy this and I buy Winchester Ranger. Looks like I’ll be buying some of that Fusion Rogue suggested.

My gun stays loaded with a mag of the 62gr Gold Dots or the 75’s if I cannot find the 62gr. POA/POI is basically the same out to 100yds.

The Gold Dots and the Fusion are excellent choices, as is Winchester's Ranger line, but supplement these expensive rounds with lots of M193. Winchester and IMI make very good M193.

A man could get by just fine on M193 alone. It's what's loaded in my home defense AR. M193 is capable of defeating some body armor.

quote:

Originally posted by parabellum:
The Gold Dots and the Fusion are excellent choices, as is Winchester's Ranger line, but supplement these expensive rounds with lots of M193. Winchester and IMI make very good M193.

A man could get by just fine on M193 alone. It's what's loaded in my home defense AR. M193 is capable of defeating some body armor.

I have thousands of these. I just want HD rounds that (mostly) stay in the bad guy, or don't keep going through walls if I miss.

My opinion is that any gun that makes a loud noise will convince most home invaders that they chose their target poorly—and especially if it fires a projectile of any type.

I did notice, though, that you mentioned penetration concerns. If that is something you’re worried about, I chose Speer 62/64 grain Gold Dot ammunition for my agency precisely because in my personal testing they penetrated some barrier materials better than M193 or M855. That was mostly a test of automotive windshield penetration, but the loads did well with vehicle sheet metal, although M193 seemed to do slightly better against a couple of sheets of the metal.

In my limited testing, both the M193 and M855 loads tended to tumble more readily in barrier materials than the expanding, bonded bullet Gold Dots. That was evidently what limited their penetration as compared with the GDs.

A light, thinly-jacketed bullet will usually have less penetration than a bonded bullet like the Gold Dot or a FMJ projectile. One that’s specifically intended for minimum penetration is the Hornady TAP Urban load. From the Hornady site:

“The Hornady® 223 Rem 55 gr. TAP Urban® is the preferred choice for use in SBRs, carbines, and rifles when the probability for barrier penetration is low. Rapid expansion provides dramatic wound cavities, massive fragmentation, and prevents over penetration on non-barrier engagements. These factors make this bullet a great choice when collateral risk is high.”

There are other loads intended for small animals that expand rapidly and penetrate to the least degrees.

All that being said, there are people who are aghast at the idea of using a “varmint” load on people because they believe that to be effective at convincing a BG to stop being a BG it’s necessary to destroy enough internal body structures, and those loads don’t penetrate adequately to do that as well as many others, such as the Gold Dot or Fusion types.

We are issued 75gr TAP SBR for our HK416's with 11" barrels.

Federal 5.56x45mm XM556FBIT3M 62 gr Tactical Bonded "FBI Load" as I live alone in a brick home.

If my living situation ever changes, I have a bunch of choices already "in stock" - MK262 (i.e. 77-grain Open Tip Match 5.56x45mm round), Hornady TAP Urban 60 gr, M193, and M855 so I have a lot of choices.

Black Hills tipped with 50gr V-MAX. I also worry about over-penetration.

Heavy (long) open tip bullet loads for 223 Remington have the reputation of tumbling quickly in fleshy targets, and that limits their penetration (in fleshy targets). Tumbling and depositing their energy quickly was evidently why special operations forces requested development of loads using such bullets while avoiding the expanding bullet bogy. Several years ago I did some limited informal testing of the Hornady 75(?) grain open tip For Personal Defense load and although my test medium was primitive (soaked newsprint), when I recovered the bullets they were a mangled mess and did not penetrate deeply. I don’t know how such bullets perform on things like building materials.

Fantastic information. Thanks. This is exactly what I want to know.

Frangible rounds seem to get the job done too.

The most common “frangible” rounds whose projectiles are made of a matrix of (usually) copper powder and some sort of binder are intended to break up when striking steel or other hard targets rather than ricocheting more or less whole. As projectiles they would be as effective as some—but only some—other bullets for discouraging bad behavior, but they don’t offer major low penetration advantages. They don’t break up and stop in a wooden board, for example. Frangible bullet loads can produce malfunctions if the bullet breaks when the cartridge is chambered. That’s not likely, but not impossible.

I conducted a limited experiment with 357 SIG and 223 Remington frangible bullets some time ago:

https://sigforum.com/eve/forum...450052894#9450052894

Oops. 357 SIG because that was the frangible handgun ammunition I had, not 9mm.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: sigfreund,

I have a few cases of BH 77gr OTM from shooting a couple classes, that would do the trick for me.