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The 9mm Luger is everyone’s caliber. The 9mm is a powerful number well-suited to personal defense. The 9mm easily jolts 115 to 124-grain bullets to well over 1100 fps. +P or higher-pressure loadings may reach 1300 fps.

The 9mm is not quite as good as some of its fans think, but it is a better cartridge than most of its detractors would have you believe. It has evolved into perhaps the ideal personal-defense caliber for most users.

The 9mm uses a .355-inch bullet. It cannot do the work of larger calibers, but it certainly outclasses smaller calibers. The 9mm offers all of the recoil most shooters are willing to master.

A number of very experienced shooters choose the 9mm based on excellent control, good practical accuracy and a good reserve of ammunition. A compact 9mm Luger handgun is easily controlled with practice.

A compact .40 S&W handgun or .38 Special small-frame revolver may be a bear to handle. Some of the finest handguns in the world are chambered for the 9mm Luger cartridge.

Many affordable handguns are chambered in 9mm as well. It is important to choose a loading with a good balance of expansion and penetration.

The 9mm needs good expansion to be effective, and all calibers must exhibit adequate penetration for good effect. Non-expanding FMJ loads have proven ineffective. The search was on for five good 9mm defensive loads.

When I was given this assignment, I resolved to test each loading not only for reliability and accuracy, but wound potential as well. I tested the loads without regard to advertised velocities or overstated claims.

There is a lot of misinformation regarding wound potential. A lot of folks don’t understand that questioning the veracity of a source is instrumental to understanding and using sources.

Misinformation is staggering. I use water for testing penetration and expansion because it is within 10 percent of gelatin results and much, much easier to work with.

While some will say this isn’t valid compared to gelatin testing, the answer is of course it is. As I stated, water and gelatin testing are very close to one another, usually within 10 percent in penetration and expansion results.

Neither bears a close correlation to flesh and bone. The primary advantage of gelatin is that the wound channel may be observed and even preserved. Water only supplies the end result. On the other hand, my work is easily double-checked.

I tested many loads, but ended up with five that I feel fill the most important niche roles of the 9mm Luger. I think they are excellent loads. For testing, I used a GLOCK 19 9mm handgun.

A handgun with a shorter barrel may be expected to produce less velocity, while a longer-barrel handgun will exhibit greater velocity.

With modern loads, the difference in expansion and penetration may be slight in either barrel length. Reliability is 100 percent in these loads. Accuracy is consistent at 15 yards.

1. Hornady 100-Grain Critical Defense Lite

This loading fills the need for a low-recoil loading for those of small stature, particularly in a compact handgun. Older shooters may also feel a need for lower recoil.

The Hornady load functions well despite lowered bullet weight. Velocity averaged 1140 fps. Penetration was 12 inches of water and expansion averaged 0.59 inches.

This is a credible choice that will serve well for recoil-shy shooters or those using the smallest 9mm handguns.

2. Fiocchi 115-Grain Extrema

This is a good go-anywhere, do-anything load. It works fine in every 9mm I have fired, and offers good accuracy and a clean powder burn. The 115-grain Fiocchi Extrema isn’t loaded too hot or too light, it is just right! Accuracy is excellent. The load averaged 1160 fps. Penetration was 16 inches and expansion a very consistent 0.55 inches.

3. Hornady 115-Grain Critical Defense

The Critical Defense uses a polymer plug to instigate expansion. This works well against a variety of material. The Hornady Critical Defense load is loaded to 1151 fps.

Penetration was ideal at 16 inches, and expansion was excellent at 0.58 inches. This is a good general-purpose defense load.

4. Underwood 124-Grain JHP

I wanted to test at least one +P or maximum-effort loading. The Underwood loading clocks 1302 fps average. Recoil was the greatest of any load tested.

We probably would not use this one in a sub-compact pistol. Recoil would be greater, and greater slide velocity may lead to malfunctions. The load was reliable in the GLOCK 19 and accuracy was good.

Penetration was 18 inches and expansion the greatest of the test at 0.82 inches. That is a lot of wound potential.

5. Buffalo Bore 147-Grain JHP

Buffalo Bore also offers fast-stepping 9mm loads in 115 and 124-grain weight. I wanted to test a heavyweight 9mm. The industry standard for the 147-grain JHP seems to be 960 to 1000 fps.

This loading breaks 1047 fps average in the GLOCK 19. This is excellent velocity for a 147-grain bullet, yet recoil isn’t excessive. Reliability is good.

If you have the need for deep penetration against heavily-clothed attackers or feel that light cover is part of the likely scenario, this is a good choice. Penetration was 20 inches and expansion was a reliable 0.56 inches.

When you choose personal safety gear, choose what is optimum for your use, not what is popular. Obtain training and build skills, or else resign yourself to defense at arm’s length.

Decide that defending yourself is possible, not impossible. It fails the power of my pen to describe the fear of a fight fought to the finish. Avoid it at all cost, but by the same token, be prepared with the best gear and supplies possible.

What is your favorite 9mm Luger defensive load? Why? Let us know in the comments section below!

Let’s talk about my favorite topic: Laravel.

In Laravel, I often had the situation that I started building something where a package is already there out in the wild. Since I recognized that also for not so common topics packages are existing but also for niche problems, I check google out first before I start programming things. Best example:

I started building my own tax list for my first Product smartdb.io, where I have Stripe implemented for the billing. While researching for the way of writing the reverse charge on the receipt, I found the package from Marcel Pociot which is solving my problems totally: Vat Calculator

But now my list of Packages which I never wanna lose again:

Livewire

Writing reactive UIs is not so intuitive with vue. Ok, you can get it on your plate fast what you have to do, and packages like Interia.js are adorable, but this is nothing compared to livewire. With vue and laravel, you have to create a REST API first and then fire queries and requests to it. Or use Inertia.js, of course, this is making your life easier. With livewire, you can write everything directly in PHP, no need for big JS things. If you want to create something minimal but reactive like the burger-menu on your page, you can use alpine.js. Alpine.js is minimal and functional like tailwind, just check it out.

Horizon

Horizon is a package for managing your queues. It’s so lovely how easy it is to manage multiple, autoscaling queues with it. You can define what queues should run, how much throughput they can have and also what for timeouts etc. they have. Also, the failed jobs are visible in the UI, that’s so good!

Nova

If you didn’t buy Laravel Nova yet, go for it! It’s such a good admin-tool for all your apps, and you can just pay for it if you go live with your app because the license is not limited at your local machine, only for production apps. I also build whole management apps with nova. For example, our Community “Bitkom”: We made a management System for online orders with it, and just with it and mailgun.

Laravel Gravatar

No need for explanation: Never build an upload for an avatar in your MVP again. Here is the package: thomaswelton/laravel-gravatar

Telescope

Debugging your laravel web-application never was more comfortable than with telescope. It’s so pleasant for development purposes. GitHub

socialite

With Laravel socialite, the Social authentification is so secure and comfortable. You want your users to login with GitHub, Facebook, Google, or others? With socialite, it’s done in under 5 minutes. Get it

Cashier

If you start your own SaaS or Shop with laravel, you’ll have the moment to collect money from your users. With cashier and Stripe, it’s easy. Cashier link

Sushi

Sushi was a sponsor package from Caleb Porzio, which is creating Eloquent Models from an array instead of a database connection. Now it’s free to get here: GitHub. I can describe my use-case of this package at best with “better ENUM”. I use it for long lists of countries, specs, or others that are more or less static, for example, taxes, AWS region mappings to AMIs, and such things.

Laravel Debugbar

You all should know it. I use it for years, and I love it. I’ll not explain it too much, but you can debug your MySQL queries, Gates, views, and all other things you need to debug with it. You see how many Queries are executed, you see which views got rendered and all these goodies. Get it

To be honest, I think this list is not complete. Maybe I’ll add a second list and a third and so on. But for now, these are the packages I don’t want to miss.

Let’s set the stage…

We have a list of products that we need to filter. For example, we have a storefront that sells sporting apparel. Each product has a brand (Nike, Adidas etc.) and a category (t-shirts, shoes etc.). We’ll show brands and categories as a list of checkboxes. The user should be able to click on the desired brand and/or category (one or more), then click filter, which will refresh the page showing the filtered results.

Packages

The only package we’ll be using is Spatie’s Laravel query builder. It extends Laravel’s default Eloquent builder by making filtering through large lists easier. Check it out on Github or on Spatie docs. I’ve started using it recently and it has a very fluent API.

Schemas

These models have typical one-to-one relationships, product-to-brand and product-to-category.

I’ve kept the columns to a bare minimum. Product table looks something like this:

$table->text('id'); $table->text('name'); $table->text('description'); $table->text('category_id'); $table->text('brand_id'); $table->text('thumbnail')->nullable(); $table->text('large_preview')->nullable(); 

Category table:

$table->text('id'); $table->text('name'); 

Brand table:

$table->text('id'); $table->text('name'); 

Layout

To get a feel of what this looks like on the front end, we have a column on the left side which lists brands and categories. Each item has a checkbox. The user can check the desired checkbox items and click the filter button.

Below is the snippet for the left panel blade partial. I’ll skip the styling.

<p>Brands</p> @foreach ($brands as $brand) <label class="m-checkbox"> <input name="brand" type="checkbox" value="" @if (in_array($brand->id, explode(',', request()->input('filter.brand')))) checked @endif >  </label> @endforeach <p>Categories</p> @foreach ($categories as $category) <label> <input name="category" type="checkbox" value="" @if (in_array($category->id, explode(',', request()->input('filter.category')))) checked @endif >  </label> @endforeach <button type="button" id="filter">Filter</button> 

Everything is pretty straight forward. The @if conditional is there so once the form is submitted, we can catch the selected id’s through request() object and use them to tick the checkboxes.

Product list renders something like this, again skipping the styles.

@foreach ($products as $product) <p></p> <p></p> <button>Add to Cart</button> <hr> @endforeach 

Javascript

Laravel query builder can filter models based on URL parameters. We’ll use javascript to refresh the page with selected brands and categories. We’re trying to stay away from submitting forms with arrays as names. I have not really found a good way to submit form arrays without swapping brackets with URL safe characters. The query string doesn’t looking appealing when you swap it out. JS method will keep the URL pretty. This also keeps the request() object variable clean, plus it opens the door to other ideas, like submitting through Ajax or Livewire.

<script> function getIds(checkboxName) { let checkBoxes = document.getElementsByName(checkboxName); let ids = Array.prototype.slice.call(checkBoxes) .filter(ch => ch.checked==true) .map(ch => ch.value); return ids; } function filterResults () { let brandIds = getIds("brand"); let catagoryIds = getIds("catagory"); let href = 'products?'; if(brandIds.length) { href += 'filter[brand]=' + brandIds; } if(catagoryIds.length) { href += '&filter[category]=' + catagoryIds; } document.location.href=href; } document.getElementById("filter").addEventListener("click", filterResults); </script> 

When the filter button is clicked, you can collect all the id’s for brand and category. Internally, the getIds function collects all the checkboxes with brand or category names, then filters through, collecting the values of checked checkboxes.

document.location.href=href refreshes the page with the url containing the brand and categories to filter.

document.getElementById("filter").addEventListener("click", filterResults); adds the click event to the filter button.

Controller

The index controller below, without URL parameters, will show all the products. When url parameters are supplied, products will be filtered. Check out Spatie docs for more options.

public function index() { $categories = Category::all(); $brands = Brand::all(); $products = QueryBuilder::for(Product::class) ->allowedFilters([ AllowedFilter::exact('brand', 'brand_id') AllowedFilter::exact('category', 'category_id'), ]) ->get(); return view('products.index', compact('products', 'brands', 'categories')); } 

I hope this helps in your filtering with Laravel project. If you have a question, drop a comment and I’ll be sure to get back to you.