How long do you want to be in the fight? Here we discuss some considerations of self-defense handgun capacity.
Back in the day of the gunslinger, fighting handguns held six rounds. Of course, legend has it that they generally only loaded five rounds, at least that’s what John Wayne’s character J.B. Books told young Gillom in The Shootist, “You keep your hammer on an empty chamber for safety … load six if your insides tell you to.”
Regardless, for social survival, five or six rounds seemed like enough, at least up until Dieudonné Saive gave us the Hi-Power in 1935. With the advent of the high-capacity pistol, lawmen, civilians and even bad guys got to thinking having more than six rounds was a good thing.
If you believe statistics, for a civilian to survive the average self-defense shooting, they’ll not need more than five or six rounds. However, as the great Mark Twain said, “Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.” I often take the approach that everything in life is 50-50. The girl will say yes, or she won’t, your horse will come in first or worse, and you’ll either need less than six rounds or more. But then, like a more recent philosopher by the name of Paul Harvey once offered, “If there is a 50-50 chance that something can go wrong, then 9 times out of 10 it will.”
How Much Do You Need?
All this leaves us with the $10,000 question regarding your self-defense handgun: How much capacity do you need? One way to look at this is to examine how long it takes you to shoot any number of shots, and how accurate those shots might be. Of course, this will vary a great deal with shooter skill, but based on my shooting records I can give you an example.
From the holster, I can generally get two hits on a man-sized silhouette target at 10 yards in about 1.20 seconds. If I reduce the target size to an 8-inch circle, my time increases to about 2.5 seconds, which is about twice the amount of time. As for five shots, it usually takes me about 2.0 to 2.2 seconds to get five hits on the silhouette target at 10 yards, depending on whether I’m shooting a 9mm or a .45. Reduce the target size to 8 inches and the time almost doubles.
Why is this important?
It’s important because depending on how accurate you want your shots to be, you will empty a six-shot handgun—revolver or semi-auto, it does not matter—in somewhere between 2 and 4 seconds. If you can remain calm enough to take your time and shoot at the right spot, your two to six shots will likely stop the threat. (Here we go with statistics again, likely could be anywhere between 51 and 99 percent.) If you rush like statistics suggest you will when you’re scared for your life, you might have some misses or less-than-ideal hits.
The point is that, with a six-shot handgun, you will more than likely be out of ammo in about 4 seconds. If you shoot well, it all might be over. If you don’t, or even worse if there’s more than one attacker, it still might be over—over for you as opposed to the bad guys.
The point you need to consider is that in a self-defense situation where you must shoot to save your life, with a six-shot gun you best be prepared to reload after about 4 seconds. OK, that’s not a problem because you practice speed loads, right? Well, how long does that take?
Just as with the time it takes to shoot, the time it takes to reload will vary too. With the right pistol and an open carried magazine, I can sometimes complete a reload and fire an accurate shot in about a second and a half.
When working with a concealed magazine, it can take me from 2 to 4 seconds to reload and fire a single shot with a pistol, depending on where I have the magazine concealed and on the pistol I’m using. That’s not too shabby but we already know what can happen in 1.5 to 4.0 seconds. At 10 yards, someone could easily shoot you anywhere from between two to five times.
It Probably Will
When it comes to my life, I kind of like Harvey’s logic, which essentially says that if anything can go wrong it probably will. You don’t have to be a mathematician to deduce that, if your pistol holds 10 rounds, you can stay in the fight twice as long as you could if it only held five rounds. You also don’t have to be a tactical savant to recognize that conducting a reload during a gunfight could get you killed.
So, we are once again back to the $10,000 handgun capacity question. The simple answer is the more the better. But this only applies up to the point where the added capacity increases the size of the pistol making it uncomfortable to carry and/or difficult to conceal.
So, what’s the complicated answer?
Well, I think it’s obvious. First, the capacity of your pistol should reflect how long you want to be able to fight. If you’re comfortable only fighting for your life for a few seconds, a five- or six-shot handgun is just fine.
If you want to be able to fight for twice that long, you need twice the capacity … and so on and so on.
Second, you’ll have to temper the time you’re prepared to fight with the comfort and concealability of your handgun. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my gun to run empty before the fight is over … and I don’t want to have to reload my gun until it’s really—really—over. Five or six shots might be enough, but if you believe Harvey, it will only be enough 10 percent of the time.
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the March 2025 issue of Gun Digest the Magazine.
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