Winchester W Train & Defend Ammunition
Lewis Creek Shooting School 03.06.14
As a shooting instructor, I constantly stress the importance of practice. I also advocate using a practice handgun that’s the same or very similar to your carry or defense handgun. In situations where the need for self-defense arises, you must be confident that you can perform and that confidence can only be achieved with repetition. In order to be effective in a life or death situation, you must be able to shoot accurately without having to think through the process and this ability only comes with practice and familiarization.
Practice comes with a cost, both in time and money. Many new shooters are shocked at the cost of quality defensive ammunition, but when your life is on the line, you don’t want to scrimp on price. Of course, there’s cheaper ammunition available, but I’ve always told my students to make sure their practice ammunition shoots to the same point of impact as their defense ammunition. Because of recoil, a handgun moves before the bullet leaves the barrel. Different bullet weights move the gun differently and therefore affect point of impact. Normally, lightweight, high-performance, high-speed bullets shoot lower than heavier, low-velocity bullets used for economical practice. For confidence-building practice, your practice load should have the same impact as your defense/carry load.
By providing the same bullet weight and velocity, the new Winchester W Train & Defend line provides the same point of impact with its training ammunition as with its defense-oriented ammunition. The big difference is in bullet construction. The “Training” part of the line is a full metal jacket, low-cost bullet constructed for reliability and accuracy with lead-free priming for indoor range use. The bullets in the “Defend” side of the product line are hollow point bonded bullets designed for combined penetration and expansion. This assures that if, God forbid, you have to use your defensive pistol or revolver against an assailant, you’ll have both accuracy and maximum stopping power.
Train & Defend comes in .380 ACP, .40 S&W, 9x19mm, and .38 Special. Appropriately, these cover all the most popular defense/carry calibers. I tested the 9x19mm, .38 Special, and .380 ACP loads in aSmith & Wesson M&P9, Smith & Wesson Model 637 CT, and Glock 42, respectively. Accuracy levels of both the Training and Defend loads are excellent: from a standing position at 10 yards, 10-shot composite groups of five rounds of each load ran less than once inch.
The Training loads come in boxes of 50 rounds while the Defend loads come 20 to the box. With so many new firearms owners interested in concealed carry and home defense, this is a great idea whose time has come.
Dick Jones is an award winning outdoor writer and a member of the Southeastern Outdoor Press Association Board of Directors. He writes for four North Carolina Newspapers as well as regional and national magazines. He’s hunted and fished most of his life but shooting has been his passion. He’s a former High Master, Distinguished Rifleman, and AAA class pistol shooter. He holds four Dogs of War Medals for Team Marksmanship as shooter, captain and coach. He ran the North Carolina High Power Rifle Team for six years and the junior team two years after that. Within the last year, he’s competed in shotgun, rifle and pistol events including the National Defense Match and the Bianchi Cup. He’ll be shooting the Bianchi, the NDM, the National High Power Rifle Championship, The Rock Castle AR15.com Three Gun Championship and an undetermined sniper match this shooting season.
He lives in High Point, North Carolina with his wife Cherie who’s also an outdoor writer and the 2006 and 2011 Northeast Side by Side Women’s Shotgun Champion. Both Dick and Cherie are NRA pistol, rifle, and shotgun instructors and own Lewis Creek Shooting School.
