Why is penetration so important?
- Thread starter dcfis
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There is a very real chance you will have to fire through a barrier of some sort. Walls, car doors, auto glass, etc. are all commonly shot and have large effects on the performance of handgun rounds.
Knowing how the rounds perform against certain barriers is vital knowledge to know what is hard cover and what is not, and what is an acceptable hard background "catch" and what is not.
That is why the FBI does testing on the various barriers ... because they are a legitimate part of a gun fight.
Sure, part of a gunfight. Not part of a strictly self defense scenario. You have already lost if you are in that situation with a 7 shot pocket pistol. I wasnt talking about perusing a BG like a LEO or going solo strike team, strictly as a last resort up close to defend yourself and provide time to get away to somewhere safe.
Long story short: the goal is to make a big hole and dump as much energy into a person as possible in an area that will either disrupt bodily functions or persuade them to stop an attack.
Two ways to do that: Heavy and slow or Lite and fast.
If the bullet exits the body the energy remaining is lost.
Once you've done your best to shoot someone while in fear of your life and assuming you hit them and you didn't choose a caliber or round that will disrupt bodily functions or persuade the bad guy to stop an attack before they kill you, you've made the wrong choice.
Two ways to do that: Heavy and slow or Lite and fast.
If the bullet exits the body the energy remaining is lost.
Once you've done your best to shoot someone while in fear of your life and assuming you hit them and you didn't choose a caliber or round that will disrupt bodily functions or persuade the bad guy to stop an attack before they kill you, you've made the wrong choice.
So.
With pistols, energy deposition has nothing to do with it. The "energy" of handgun rounds is pretty small. Bullets are small. Sure they are going fast, but if you compare the energy to other things, like a baseball bat, its not that much. You want tissue damage to drain that blood from the body.
I want my bullets to go through though the bad guy. I want my bullets to go through the deer I shoot. Granted, one is with a rifle, where I want two holes to drain blood so I can track the deer its not completely unrelated. You might say that I should be worried about hurting a good guy behind the bad guy. While this isn't impossible, the odds of a bullet going into a bad guy, exiting, then hitting a good guy are pretty small. And hopefully the bullet would have spent most of its energy and would be less deadly. I'm much more worried about the misses flying in the air.
Modern bullets are incredibly well designed to expand in a controlled fasion to get the desired penetration if they hit in the approprate velocity range. They can't make miracles, but they are a ton better than they were 20 years ago.
I answered the your technical question, "why is penetration so important", but I can see this is really a mindset discussion.
"I say old chap, would you mind stepping out from behind that cover, it's not very sporting you know!" Sounds silly, doesn't it?
As a good guy, you don't pick the gunfight, it picks you. Having preconceived limits about "the scenario" or when "you have already lost" are self-defeating.
Further, excluding the possibility of having to penetrate a thick jacket, drywall, or car window from "personal defense" ammo is absurd.
Not trying to be antagonistic, but trying to get this discussion headed in a productive direction.
What if that gun fight starts in your car? What if after the first round the attacker takes cover behind a car? What if he takes cover behind a steel product display?
There are numerous opportunities from a CHL perspective that involve barriers. Not every encounter you will be met with will be contact distance, and the vast majority of them will be encountered in a method that is advantageous to the attacker.
I agree, and this is the method behind my argument.
Sorry neighbor!
Every possible ounce of energy should be taken into the worse place possible of the bg and none left over for the bullet to exit or even reach further into the BG. Safety has little to do with it.
Hunting something and stopping a person have two different goals. The tools of assassination and defense may share some attributes but they should be separate categories and not confused.
We'd all agree you can stop someone with a .22lr and with correct shot placement. ANYTHING else in my opinion is to increase the odds in your favor.
Hunting something and stopping a person have two different goals
You want to kill a deer, bleeding them out with "two holes" is acceptable. You aren't fighting them off. If you shoot and they run off your hope is they bleed out.
This isn't the same when you try to stop someone in self defense. You want to maximize the bullets energy to stop them ASAP.
The rules are the same as far as wanting to kill them quickly. The issue is that bullets exiting a deer in the woods or out in the country are in a MUCH safer environment. I do not want two holes in a person, I want them to catch all the bullets I fire at them for the sake of any innocent bystanders that may be behind them.
I do not find any degree of wounding acceptable for 3rd parties, and the entire applicable usage of JHP munitions is to reduce the chance of the bullet exiting.
WIKI (quickest reference I could find) and I disagree.
Hollow-point bullet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I would agree safety due to less over penetration is a benifit
I'll maintain that JHP's primary reason is used for the following:
to increase its size once within the target maximizing tissue damage and blood loss or shock
remaining in the target to expend all of its kinetic energy in the target
Case in point they are outlawed for use in warfare :-)
Go into your bathroom. Face a mirror. Now take a pistol shooting stance. Notice something in front of your vitals? Your arms.
As others said, ballistic gelatin doesn't act exactly like a flesh and blood creature. It simulates muscle, but people are more than just muscle. We're skin (tougher than you realize), bone and other stuff. And no two critters (human or not) are going to give the exact same reaction to a bullet hitting them in any given area. Individual physical differences can give wildly different results. That's why gelatin is used instead of actual living creatures - it's consistent, a known quantity. Using it allows a more scientific way to test and develop ammunition.
After consulting with people who know, the FBI came to the conclusion that 12" is the minimum acceptable penetration for ammunition. Less, you risk not hitting vital organs reliably. 16" is the other end of this zone, but only because more is energy wasted in the form of recoil and muzzle blast.
The problem with your argument is that handguns don't have enough energy that you can "dump" it into a target and cause more damage. No matter what, a handgun in .380 up to 10mm is going to poke a hole, period. It's not like a rifle or shotgun where you'll get a significant stretch cavity. Hollow points do two things - increase the cavity size slightly and reduce the chances of a bullet still being lethal should it exit the other guy. That's about it.
Because all laws forbidding something are based on truth?
That ban was put in place at the beginning of the era of smaller, lighter bullets traveling at velocities above 2000 FPS. The terminal ballistics of the stuff weren't entirely understood yet, but the Brits (always at the forefront of efficiency in killing) started experimenting with soft-nosed ammunition at the Dum-Dum arsenal. Other European powers got scared and suddenly there was a ban on the stuff.
It's kind of like the fairly recent treaty to ban cluster bombs. It wasn't for humanitarian reasons, it was because the damn things are so effective.
And it's not hollow points that are banned under the first Hague Convention of 1899, it's bullets that are designed to expand or flatten easily in the human body. HP match rifle ammo is fine because it does neither - it fragments.
That comment was more of a red herring. Hence the smile.
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The energy of a bullet is weak compared to say the energy contained in a punch. The difference is the bullet impacts the body at a much higher velocity which imparts an impact loading beyond that of a punch. The impact shock is what tears flesh in a rifle round, but in a pistol round you don't get sufficient velocity and impact to do that.
That simply just leaves crushing as the primary method of damage in the body, and that's exactly what pistol rounds do. They simply crush. In that regard the JHP isn't significantly more damaging compared to an FMJ. While the JHP has a wider area due to expansion, it also doesn't do as well against bone and other hard targets. If I'm taking a pelvis shot, I don't want a JHP ... I want an FMJ.
Ultimately there is give and take with any munition, including JHP.
... unless you START the gunfight, it IS a self defense scenario.
if you want something to give you time to run away, buy a smoke grenade. if you want to be properly prepared, for any scenario carry a hi capacity 9mm with some +p+ on tap.
then put your .380 in your ankle holster incase your real gun breaks.
