Trends In Self Defense... Testing 100 handgun loads in ballistic gelatin and finding the obvious... The term handgun stopping power generally relates various opinions about the ability of handguns to create ballistic wounds sufficient to incapacitate a target. Stopping Power is a misnomer. It is wholly subjective in both results and interpretation, as just as many stops with a handgun are physcological, as are physical. Using muzzle velocity, caliber, bullet weight and energy, there have been multiple attempts to create formulas to rate handgun stopping power. The problem is that these theories are tied to mortality; the notions are based on the handgun s ability to kill. From a hunting standpoint, that makes sense, but when looking at the role of a defensive handgun, it s at least partially, of no consequence, since the role of a handgun in self defense is not to kill, or wound your attacker, it s to make him STOP attacking you. The goal of the hunter on the other hand, is to kill as humanely as possible. Again, the goal of an armed citizen using a defensive handgun is to stop an attacker as quickly as possible. As similar as killing and stopping may sound, they are two very different things. It s true that if you kill something you have stopped it, but unlike a hunter who can shoot an animal and let it run off a short distance to expire, a defensive handgun user needs to stop an attack immediately. If your attacker has a chance to run, he s more than likely going to run AT you, not away from you. Causing immediate death with any firearm is difficult, and with a handgun it becomes particularly difficult, achievable only by a shot to the cranial vault that destroys the brain, or a spinal hit that destroys the nervous system. That is difficult to accomplish in a dynamic situation. It is why law enforcement officers, soldiers and civilians train to shoot center mass on the available target; it increases the hit probability. As a result, that is where the debate of handgun stopping power is centered. What handgun/ammunition combination will do the best job of stopping an attack when a bullet is placed center mass of the attacker? The operative word here is stop, not kill. If an attack is not halted immediately, death might be the ultimate result, but it might arrive too late to matter. Many victims are killed every year by attackers they just killed, but in their remaining seconds of life, managed to do what they wished to that victim. Animals, and that includes humans, die when their brains run out of oxygen, or the central nervous system is destroyed. One murder I m aware of that always comes to mind, was perpetrated with a. 2013 ~ Dynamic Force Institute, LLC www.dynamicforceinstitute.com 1
17-cal. pellet rifle, proving to me that about any bullet through any vital organ can kill. But it can take from 10 seconds to 10 minutes to occur. In 10 seconds an attacker can carve you up like a Christmas turkey, or put more holes in you, then you put in him. What s needed is a combination that s very likely to make an attacker stop doing the thing that is endangering you... Immediately. Jim Cirillo, a New York City cop who survived more than 17 gunfights, once wrote, The only oneshot stops I ever saw were a.38 Special Super Vel hollow point and a 12 gauge slug. Both shots were to the brain. Two other cops, Evan Marshall and Ed Sanow, authored three books examining one-shot stops from defensive handguns. Their work is shrouded in controversy for several reasons, but something that cannot be ignored is that they found multiple instances with every common defensive handgun cartridge where one-shot stops had occurred. Keep in mind their study was about one-shot stops, not one-shot kills. It is most important to recognize that Marshall and Sanow did not find a single cartridge that had not produced multiple one-shot stops (no distinction was made by the way, between physcological stops and physical stops). How could that be? How could small caliber, pipsqueak guns stop attacks? The answer is simple; pain and fear.. A physcological stop. Police officers know that pain compliance is an important tool. They are issued batons, pepper spray, blackjacks and Tasers to bring that about. But, you don t have to be a cop to know that. Few things control human behavior like pain. Smack your thumb with a hammer hard enough, or crack your shin on a coffee table, and you ll immediately stop what you re doing. Even the toughest cage fighter can be stopped with a solid hit to the groin, kidney or liver. The key to immediately stopping an attacker with a handgun is either through the conscious fear that you ll shoot him (or shoot him, again), or through the conscious, or unconscious fear and/or pain that the shot inflicts. Fear and pain are why things such as pepper spray, batons and less-lethal rubber bullets are, to a lesser extent, sometimes effective too. Regardless of how determined someone is to doing harm to someone else, if the aggressor is hurt badly enough, quickly enough, he or she will stop. So, the logical approach to handgun stopping power would seem to be to use the combination capable of causing the most pain, or demonstrating the ability to cause immediate pain (deterrence). The problem with pain is that there is no way to measure the amount any combination might produce. It would seem that those loads that make very wide and nasty, but sometimes shallow wounds, such as Corbon s 165-gr.,.45 ACP +P load, would hurt the most; it will literally chew up the first 6" of a gelatin block. Loads like that damage a great deal more tissue than those that punch a neat hole all the way through a bad guy like a 230-gr.,.45 ACP full-metal-jacket (FMJ) load, which can penetrate 3 ft. in gelatin. The data collected by Marshall and Sanow seem to support that conclusion. So do the results of the controversial Strasbourg Tests, in which multiple goats were shot while being electronically monitored. That all makes sense, but by itself can be a foolhardy approach, because pain is not experienced the same by everyone, and pain can be blocked by adrenalin and drugs. Soldiers and police officers who have battled through pain become heroes, bad guys that do the same become wanted. It s likely that the adrenaline in your attacker will be high (fight or flight) and it s possible he could be under the influence of a mind altering drug. Pain and fear are effective, but might not be enough, and certainly can t be relied upon, since I know of more than a few instances where individuals have absorbed incredible levels of damage and continued to fight on, only to die when THEY were ready. So what is the answer? Some like to base conclusions on caliber, bullet weight and energy. So let s consider those. The caliber of the unfired bullet matters very little since bullets radically change 2013 ~ Dynamic Force Institute, LLC www.dynamicforceinstitute.com 2
shape in the first several inches of penetration, especially if they encounter bone early on. And, after/if dynamic expansion has occurred, the wound created varies minimally regardless of bullet diameter. Jim Cirillo stated in his book, Bullets, and Gunfights, Lessons and Tales from a Modern- Day Gunfighter, The forensic experts I have questioned while attending many post mortem examinations stated that they could not tell the difference between a.32 caliber round nose bullet and a.45 caliber round nose if both passed through the body, since both only make small wound channels as they pass through tissue. My testing has confirmed this; in 10 percent ordnance gelatin their wound channels are indistinguishable, since the channel closes on itself after the bullet has passed through. It should be noted that Jim finally settled on wadcutters as the most effective rounds to use in his.38 revolvers, as they cut a wound channel instead of simply pushing through. What about bullet weight and energy? Energy, kinetic energy, is a product of bullet weight and velocity, but two bullets can have the exact same energy and create substantially different wounds based on how they are designed to work, how they expand, and their path in tissue. Realistically, it makes no sense to base performance on the potential to do work kinetic energy if that work is not done. With regard to bullet weight alone, Finn Aagaard, a much respected gunwriter and very experienced big game hunter once wrote, Given sufficient penetration and good shot placement, what does any additional bullet weight add to killing power? Nothing, absolutely nothing. This leaves us with the more logical approach of basing stopping power on terminal performance what occurs after bullet impact not external ballistics. Impact velocity, bullet expansion and actual penetration would seem to be the pragmatic guidelines in the determination of effectiveness. A bullet that expands, creates a larger wound cavity. The more expansion, the 2013 ~ Dynamic Force Institute, LLC www.dynamicforceinstitute.com 3
more tissue that is damaged, destroyed, or traumatized. Multiple tests have shown a correlation between large wound cavities and bullets that expand at least 1.5 times their unfired diameter. However, over-expansion and/or fragmentation to the point that the bullet loses considerable weight limits penetration, and penetration is important. The problem is that deep penetration without expansion is notorious for slow incapacitation in the absence of proper shot placement. Hunters and gunfighters will confirm this, and the reason is that round nose bullets that penetrate really deep, and expand very little, damage small amounts of tissue and cause minimal pain (based on the meplat, or shape of the bullet), which is what makes wadcutters so effective all 2013 ~ Dynamic Force Institute, LLC www.dynamicforceinstitute.com 4
out of proportion to what one might expect. Still, if we hope to penetrate the vitals as a fail-safe to the possible lack of our attacker s ability to feel pain, sufficient penetration like Aagaard alluded to is much more important. And then there s impact velocity. When you combine high impact velocity with expansion, temporary wound cavities get very large. This should not come as a surprise. The. 38 Spl. and the.357 Mag. shoot the same caliber bullet, but the.357 Mag. pushes it much faster and has a much better record for stopping bad guys. When comparing their performance in 10 percent gelatin using similar bullets, the difference is obvious. The problem can be, a large, but shallow wound cavity from a very fast bullet that did not reach vital organs... A flesh wound. So, should you carry the combination you think will cause the most pain, or the one you think will penetrate through to the vitals no matter the shot angle, and regardless of what gets in the bullet s way? Common sense tells us that the fail-safe, penetration, should be our first priority; if pain fails to stop the attack and it might we have to rely on the bullet s ability to drive through vital organs. The ability to inflict the maximum amount of pain should be our secondary goal. This makes choosing the handgun/bullet combination simple you want the combination that penetrates to a sufficient depth and damages the most tissue in the process. However, its size is NEVER going to be as important as where you put it, and how many times you can do it quickly. So, after all of this time and testing, the results are, as always, inconclusive. There are simply too many variables in every defensive encounter. There is however, one thing I am VERY sure of, and that is, lots of wound channels will always be more effective than fewer wound channels, or a single wound channel. There may be bad hits, but there will never be a good miss. Ammunition is cheap, life is dear, so regardless of the caliber, continue to press the trigger until your attacker drops out of your field of view. If you do your part, the size of the bullet will never be an issue. Shot placement and multiple hits are what stop attacks. Nothing more, nothing less. 2013 ~ Dynamic Force Institute, LLC www.dynamicforceinstitute.com 5
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