Ballistics FMJ vs Hollow Point Wound Diagram
Jim Cirillo, a New York City cop who survived many gunfights, once wrote, “The only one-shot 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.
How could that be? How could small caliber, pipsqueak guns stop attacks? The answer is simple; pain and fear. Police officers know that pain compliance is an important tool. They are issued batons and pepper spray 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 and you’ll immediately stop what you’re doing, and 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 through the conscious or unconscious fear and/or pain the shot inflicts. Fear and pain are why things such as pepper spray, batons and less-lethal rubber bullets are effective too. Regardless of how determined someone is to doing harm to someone else, if the aggressor is hurt badly 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.
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.
Comments
Post a Comment