Some people opine that handloading is not worth the time. For some cartridges, I get that, you can buy factory ammunition that fully meets your needs. Having said that, in many cases, you can’t. In the overall scheme of things, there really aren’t that many factory loads. It might seem like there are, but the more exacting your requirements, the less likely it becomes you’re going to find precisely what you need among factory offerings. At that point, it becomes time to roll your own.
A good example of this would be tuning your ammunition to deliver a specific sort of recoil impulse for a handgun to be shot fast and accurately in “combat” pistol matches. There are cartridges, .45 ACP for instance, where the most common and affordable load, hardball, really does have more recoil than is ideal for truly good shooting, when “good shooting” starts meaning “putting multiple bullet holes into a target, with the holes close to each other, as fast as you can pull the trigger.”
While this might seem, on a surface level, simply a matter of downloading ammo to generate less recoil, as your skill level increases, you’ll find it’s not simply a matter of adjusting the amount of recoil, it’s a matter of adjusting the character of recoil.
Everyone is different. Everyone has a different body: a different skeletal system, a different muscular system, a different nervous system, and, probably most importantly, a different mind. Therefore, how our body absorbs recoil, and what our mind perceives as “easily controllable,” can be a hugely variable thing. At the extremes, we have two classic sorts of handgun recoil, “fast and snappy,” typified by the 9mm Parabellum, and “slow and pushy,” typified by the .45 ACP. Typically, out-of-the-box, 9mm Parabellum ammo will have fast and snappy recoil, out-of-the-box .45 ACP will have slow and pushy recoil.
A huge part of shooting a handgun fast and well is getting the gun to track consistently, i.e. when its muzzle flips, you want it to recoil in a very linear, predictable, repeatable fashion. Ideally, that means when you fire the gun its front sight doesn’t move up very much, it travels straight up-and-down, and comes right back to the same spot, or very, very close to it.
It’s possible you might be able to make that happen with factory ammunition. It’s not overly likely, but it’s certainly possible. If you’re not getting the sight tracking you want with factory ammo, fortunately you have another option: You can handload ammo that does make the gun track the way you want. This can be a long process of experimentation. But it’s why really good “combat” pistol shooters are almost invariably also dedicated handloaders.
