Well, I recognised his training site as one of the big name ones but didn't know he was James Yeager. Now that I know that I am no more impressed. I only noticed one correct thing in his whole presentation, and that was that many .40S&W pistols were scaled up 9mms and that as such they were not heavy enough for the recoil of the round. In passing he admitted that this was not true of the HK and other pistols designed specifically for the .40. Even that is only partly true in a pratical sense because the Glock, with its light weight, is easier to carry and for many that more than outweighs the extra felt recoil. Think of a Glock in .40S&W as sharing the characeristics of a pocket pistol. Power per ounce is a major criterion! 2 inch 357 Magnum snubies are not fun to shoot but people still carry them for good reason.
The wear issue is unimportant and he misunderstands it. Even if the pistols wear out in, say, 35,000 rounds, the cost of replacing the pistol is small relative to the total cost of ammunition expended. Many people who carry a pistol 12 or more hours a day will think that a saving of 4 to 6 oz or so is a good trade off.
If the .40 is a high pressure round, so is the 9mm - they are very close. More important the pressure inside the barrel has very little effect on wear. Bullet momentum and slide velocity are the most significant parameters for wear rate and the bullet momentum of his favoured .45ACP is much higher than the 9mm but designers usually deal with it by having a heavier slide. A 9mm conversion barrel will not drive the slide fast enough in a G21 or 20 for instance. The bullet momentum of the .40S&W, as originally defined from the FBI tests which established the 10mm Lite, had a bullet momentum equal to the normal 230gn .45ACP.
That segues into the FBI and the ontogenesis of the .40S&W. When the FBI set up the test protocol for their post Miami Shootout pistol selection they specified that no round had to have more than the bullet momentum of the normal .45ACP. ab initio, they included the .38Sp for comparisson, since that was what had failed in Miami, the 9mm and the .45ACP. Only once the test team was set up did one of the team suggest the inclusion of the 10mm. The idea was agreed to, but, because of the recoil limit, he handloaded all the test rounds to equal the recoil of the .45ACP using a 180gn bullet. By a very small margin that light loading of the 10mm beat the .45ACP but the team said they would be hapy with either.
This had several consequences. The first was that the FBI ordered a large quantity of 10mm loaded to the test specification. They never had full power 10mm rounds. The second was that they ordered a big batch of 10mm pistols from S&W. Those pistols were about 3 oz heavier than the 1911 Government model and so had slightly less felt recoil. All the so amusing stories about the recoil being too much for wimpy FBI Agents were just nonsense. The scrapping of the 10mm project and the escape from the S&W contract were all a matter of internal politics and a rather dirty story. It was a couple of years before S&W brought out the .40S&W and so it was not a matter of the FBI choosing it as a replacement for the 10mm.
So we have the famous, extremely self confident but ignorant James Yeager repeating the tales that he could pick up in any gun website, without wondering if they are true or false.
Perhaps most importantly, he makes the unsupported claim that all the main cartridges are as effective as each other - 9mm, .40S&W, 357SIG, .45GAP and .45ACP - but that on the spurious basis of pressure one shoud choose either the 9mm or the .45ACP. That is, the two cartridges with the greatest divergence of characteristics - light and moderately fast versus heavy and distinctly slow! To know that the five major self defence rounds are equal in their effects he would have had to shoot lots of people with the different rounds under controled circumstances. Neither he, nor anyone else, has done that. He is talking nonsense.
And then he makes the claim that he has trained 3000 people in the last month alone. That is 100 per day if he works a 30 day month. I wonder how much personal attention he gives them? Does he give them all some kind of survey to fill in of how long their various pistols last? If he does such a thing why does he not tell us the results rather than saying that he is a great trainer and so he just knows.
The simple truth is that James Yeager can probably teach people to shoot pistols with reasonable competence, but he has little or no understandig of the nature of knowledge, and its falsification or verification within some limits of confidence.
English