Ammo Review: Hornady Critical Defense vs. Flour

Why? Umm. Because we can?

In this episode, we test Hornady Critical Defense ammunition against what is arguably the cloggiest stuff known to hollowpoints – flour.

Stick with us, you never know when you might run into a real-world shootout in a bakery. Or something.

Being that we expected flour to be a tough customer, we elected to test both velocity and weight. Critical Defense .357 Sig to meet the velocity threshold and .40 S&W to meet the weight.

We thought this was a great idea that had potential not only for real world application, but entertainment value as well. And we weren’t disappointed. When you hit a bag of flour with expanding ammunition you get a gratifying ‘fleur de flour.’

Oh, in addition to a neat picture of a bag of flour exploding, we also have expansion test results. Just for fun, we tested two loads in each caliber: the Hornady Critical Defense rounds and Speer Gold Dot projectiles.

	The Hornady Critical Defense load in .357 Sig held up pretty well to the bag-o-flour. Five of the six projectiles expanded fullyand the sixth expanded partially.We would trust this load in a donut shop shootout.
	OK so we went a little trigger happywith the Speer Gold Dot loads and shot nine of them into the flour. What can we say? It made for great explosions!Out of the nine we shot, five expanded fully, two clogged up and didn’t expand at all, and two expanded just a little – although in a very non-photogenic way.
	We shot four rounds of the Critical Defense .40 S&W loads into the flour and all four expanded adequately.As the photo shows, one was exceptionally photogenic and the remaining three were less attractive, although plenty effective.
	Cloggy, cloggy, cloggy.Of the three rounds of .40 S&W Gold Dots we recovered, none of them expanded properly.One had no sign of expansion at all, one had a weak attempt, and the third must have hit a flour-based black hole. Either that or it nudged another projectile already in our high-tech bullet catcher.