NOTE: USCCA Customer Engagement team members get a lot of questions, and they pass a good number of them along to Concealed Carry Magazine Senior Editor Ed Combs. If you have a question, you can either ask it below or email it to editor@usconcealedcarry.com. We, of course, cannot guarantee answers to all questions — Ed’s a pretty busy guy — but we’d love to help you out with whatever’s stumping you.

Jared Blohm
Managing Editor
Concealed Carry Magazine

What Is the Best Concealed Carry Ammo?

I’ve been meaning to get to this one for a while.

“The best” ammo is a lot more complicated than it sounds. And some of that complication comes from advice instructors have repeated for decades. It’s good advice, but the closer you look, the more difficult you realize it is to implement.

Many instructors tell their students to carry the same ammo law enforcement officers in their area carry. The idea is that if you’re forced to defend yourself with your firearm, your ammunition selection will prove you opted for the most legally prudent choice: “official” ammo, which had already been “officially” approved by your local representatives of the legal system.

This is a flawless concept but putting it into practice can get spotty.

What Does Law Enforcement Use?

Let’s say you live in a rural area with no local police department. But your county sheriff’s deputies carry Hornady Critical Duty, which is outstanding ammo. And let’s say that the specific rounds those deputies carry are 175-grain .40 S&W, and they carry them in Glock 22s.

That’s a full-size duty gun with a 4.5-inch barrel. But maybe you carry a Ruger MAX-9 or a Mossberg MC2sc, which are both chambered in 9mm and both have barrels that are an inch or so shorter than a G22’s. All of a sudden, we’re talking about the same premium-quality Hornady ammo, but in a different chambering with different bullet weights and being sent through different-length barrels. And that can impact accuracy, sometimes substantially.

Compounding matters is the fact that there are more than 15,000 state and local law enforcement agencies in the United States. The chances of the department in the jurisdiction in which you reside picking the one brand and load of ammo that is “best” for the pistol or revolver you carry every day are pretty close to zero.

Think that’s a recipe for confusion? Dig this: your local agency may not have “official” ammo at all. Shoot, some agencies don’t even have an “official” gun. Some agencies are small enough, with small enough budgets, that pretty much whatever gear any state-credentialed individual is willing to show up with becomes the “official” loadout of the day.

How Law Enforcement Chooses Ammo

It can get even weirder, though.

It might be that your local agency uses a specific type of ammo because they get a good deal on it, or because someone assured the sheriff or chief that it was “the best” and that was all he or she needed to hear. Your local agency might use a specific type of ammo because that’s what the department is authorized to use per municipal or county policy — a policy that might have been written back when its officers were carrying revolvers. Think I’m kidding? That’s how decisions like this are made sometimes. Anyone who doesn’t believe me can ask anyone who’s worked for a city or county whether they’d consider any of those scenarios outlandish.

A harsh reality is that though a lot of sheriffs and chiefs of police are what you would consider Gun People, a lot of them really aren’t. Carrying the type of rounds your local PD or county sheriff’s office uses is a legally safe move for all of the reasons everyone cites. But unfortunately, you aren’t going to know how accurately that “official” ammo performs in your EDC until you get it out to the range. And during a self-defense incident, in the interest of your and the public’s safety, the defense-specific ammo you’re using has to perform as accurately as possible in your personal firearm.

So, All of That Said: What Is the Best Concealed Carry Ammo?

The best concealed carry ammo will almost certainly be a jacketed hollow-point from a major American manufacturer that consistently shoots accurately out of your specific sidearm. (We can have the “don’t buy ammo with a skull and crossbones on the box” discussion later.) As for ball ammo and wadcutters? Under certain very specific circumstances? Maybe.

Shaking all this out will take time and money. Run a few online searches for which rounds other people have had luck with in pistols like yours. Bum a few rounds off of a training partner or go in on a few different boxes with some friends or family members. You might be stunned by the variation in accuracy from one brand and one load to another in your carry gun.

And if you see no difference in accuracy?

That means you may need to work on your shooting fundamentals (because you aren’t holding the muzzle steady as you fire). Or you somehow managed to blindly choose three or four different loads that all perform identically in your sidearm (which I can all but guarantee is not going to happen).

Either way, it’s a win-win: you’re either reminded that you need to beef up your training regimen, or you’ve won the galactic ammo lottery and are all set on carry rounds for the next few cycles.

I don’t see a downside.