Ammoland: Is .30-30 Winchester Ammo Ideal for Personal Defense?

Above, Winchester .30-30 ammo. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

This evening, I was perusing Ammoland.com for news or deals on 9mm ammunition. Right now, there's an ammunition shortage (regular readers of this blog would know that from prior posts) and current available supplies have been marked up in price.

While looking, I came upon an article on the Winchester .30-30 ammo. The gist of the article is: Is Winchester .30-30 ideal for personal defense? It is interesting that this question was brought up since the .30-30 have proven itself as a popular hunting round.

The Winchester .30-30 is a 120 year old round and mainly used in Winchester 94 lever-action rifles. I bought a Winchester 94 (1962 vintage) last year. That's why the article caught my attention.

Above, yours truly with the Winchester 94.

The article starts with:

USA – -(AmmoLand.com)- There’s been a lot of talk over the years, in gun shops, around camps and occasionally even in print that the .30-30 Winchester rifle should finally go the way of the Dodo.

I have heard more than one conversation between so-called learned experts that it’s a useless round past the 100-yard mark and that even at that distance, it’s really barely just getting by and that’s just for hunting. So what about the .30-30 as a viable defense round? Is it any good, or should it be hung over the wall with Granddad’s antique snowshoes and left as a memory of another time?

        

        .30-30 Winchester Ammo

Most experts, of course, will throw out there that the best choice for a defensive round would be some semi-auto rifle, and in many cases they would be right, but in some locales, the laws are not always on the side of gun owners, and in some cases, those semi-auto rifles, are restricted or have to be “compliant” which to many of us, translates into another word. Neutered. For instance, in my particular state, any AR platform can’t have a pistol grip with a detachable magazine, which can only be 10 rounds anyway so they have this bizarre stock that resembles PVC pipe or you can have a pistol grip but must load from a stripper clip from the side at an angle. I applaud the gun makers for coming up with alternatives, but these guns are still shadows of their former selves.

Getting back to the .30-30 Winchester, look at the round itself. The 150 grain round is listed at 2,400 fps, and while this isn’t blowing the doors off the competition when you compare it to the .308 or .30-06, you have to be impressed when you compare it to one of the most respected military rounds on the planet, the 7.62x39mm, which with its 123 grain FMJ is also listed at the 2,400 fps mark.

One of the reasons the .30-30 Winchester has always been so popular is because of the gun it was chambered in. Putting the round into the 1894 Winchester rifle and the more desirable carbine with its 20-inch barrel standard gave the shooter a gun that weighed a little more than six pounds and was only thirty-seven inches long. Compare that to say an SKS which weighs over eight pounds and is three inches longer. If the Winchester 94 is not your thing, the Marlin 336 Rifle and it’s predecessors, the 1893, the 1936 and the Model 36 are all fine guns in their own right.

The article then gives a very interesting history of the Winchester .30-30 and discusses its effectiveness in personal defense. It is a good read.

To read the full article, go here.