Given a lethal shot placement, .45 will kill someone 87% more deaderer than 9mm. It’s science.

Dude!
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I wonder how this dataset matches up with the cattle-blastin' Thompson- LaGarde tests from 120 years ago that lead to the Army transitioning back to .45

Wiki  

It seems like the conclusion throughout is "Much Faster is better, but if you're gonna be Slow, be Slow, Fat, and Heavy".

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I believe this goes to the point that DeltaElite is making. When it comes to lethality, a well placed shot from a .380 is equal to a .357 mag. What is NOT known or discussed is the time to incapacitation. Was the .357 mag quicker? That would be important when you're defending your life.

Like I said, I'm sure that's very difficult data to get.

Except bullet design did make a big difference in performance in the 80s. It worked exceedingly well for 9mm.  It was also the gun manufacturers' efforts to make their firearms more reliable using HP bullets. HP expanded and made bigger permanent wound channels instead of doing icepick, single channel, through and through wounding. the HP's did more damage by the jackets creating cutting and tearing jagged edges from the expansion. additionally, the lead part of the bullets would often come apart to create additional would channels. THere's been plenty of data put out in mag articles about it in the 80s and 90s.

Also I can remember a lot of poor information from the medical community on what bullets did in shootings to stack all my faith there. Doctors claiming black talons caused unrepairable wounds because of how they cut tissue or that they would cut surgeons making them not be able to operate safely. Ar15 bullets causing wounds just like the organ was smashed with a sledge hammer. Medical examiner saying someone was shot in the hand so they must have been up to surrender.

9mm took many a lung out

Once you have enough energy to get decent penetration, but don't yet have enough energy to create stretch cavity/hydrostatic "rifle round" damage, it's really not a significant part of the equation.

Hollow points may be no more lethal than FMJ, but you might not have to worry as much about over-penetration if you have a sub-optimal "backstop."

Oh yes very fair comparison of bullet types and wounding. We will shoot these cows with hollow points and flat nose in 45 but fmj in 9mm and 38 auto and we will shoot them in different places with the even larger caliber. When we decide that’s not the best we will suspend the cows and see which bullet moves them most lol. Then based on that we will adopt the bigger bullet but not the biggest bullet and we will give it round nose jacketed ammo.

OST for the wealth of knowledge this thread will present.

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Use a pistol to fight your way back to your rifle, then get the hell out of range of the feral shooting at you.

I like the .45 also, but wonder how much of the success is due to the experience of the guys carrying it?

Someone who’s trained, been shot at, practices would presumably be more ‘lethal’ by putting the rounds in the right place than a spray and pray shooter.

The Thompson/LaGarde "testing" was an early attempt at actual scientific study, but it was just terrible.  It was basically the handgun bullet version of:

Gunshot Wounds Forensic Pathology

@DeltaElite777 yes agree after actually looking at the test and seeing what they did it’s like hey we want this thing so test it in a way it will win. It’s often sighted as some magic reason 9mm or 38 is no good but when you look at the test data you realize they were never going to be.

More energy pretty much always increases lethality.  It also increases the chance a bullet will travel through barriers, which is the kind of thing that really wont show up in medical data.

No one is keeping tabs on how many people died because a HP bullet couldn't get through some sheet metal, but a FMJ did.

US defense procurement has pretty much been a clusterfuck from the jump.  The only saving grace is that everyone else's defense procurement seems to have been (and continues to be) as bad or even worse.  Every army of any significance seems to have their Crozier.

Guess I'll die

That's how you know it's Army testing.

How?  What's the mechanism by which sub-rifle levels of energy increase lethality?

Bullet and caliber mean more for wounding than for lethality. Doesnt matter what you put through the heart or cns. But if you have a soft tissue pass through, and open hp tears more. Hit a bone and you want something to hit hard enough to break it. I still want my 10mm for the woods but shot placement is key

Hollow points are to prevent overpenetration not to increase lethality.

Well since a metric of testing defensive ammunition is its ability to meet penetration standards after passing through common barriers. Most modern quality hollow points have zero issue getting through an intermediate barrier like glass or sheet metal and not only will they make it through they can perform decently afterwards.

IMO, a .45 acp is more of a professional's weapon. Someone that would practice a lot, and seek out training. And, probably do better at shot placement. 9mm and .40 are more common police calibers. Minimal training, little to no regular practice by the majority of cops. And their shot placement will suck.

I think muzzle energy is critical in pistol ammo; scratching to attain as much ft/lbs as possible with handgun ammo, you search for every in/lbs you can. Yeah, there is the tearing of flesh and larger calibers will naturally behave better than smaller calibers - slightly larger hole entry, through, and (if possible) exit. But it’s not just a slightly larger diameter that explains it. The energy dump delivered onto target is important. Handgun ammo is at a serious disadvantage to rifle fired ammo and by that rule of thumb small(er) handgun calibers are generally poorer performers overall than larger handgun calibers. Let’s add velocity. Velocity added to a weight value (grains) translates into in/lbs which add up to ft/lbs of energy. Now add frontal surface area. More surface means more energy dumping on target. Then let’s add shape to that surface area. Designed in such a way that it moves material in a predetermined fashion as it cuts a path through a medium.

ETA: Basically, a projectile designed to dump all the available energy it can onto/into a target.

Lol no.

You look at people carry handguns for a living, instruct, or are otherwise "serious students" of using a pistol for defensive purposes, and are allowed to pick their own gear, the LARGE majority are going to be packing 9x19.

It was a bonus. the fact is that HPs create more lethal wounding than jacketed round nose bullet profiles... was Level 9000 bonus point access unlocked.

the incapacitation level went up by an order of magnitude for 9mm in the 80s. 9mm was the driver for HP development then.

Yup.  The reason I carry JHP is because I want the best chance of the bullet depleting its energy IN a BG and not proceeding onto to an unintended target.

A holdover from the GunSight School. Because it was American history. And the HP revolution was not around when the school formulated its culture. It became a status symbol for competence and knowledge. And still is. But the fact is a Glock 9mm out of the box in the 80s and 90s was a more reliable weapon than any .45 ACP of the time period. almost the same lethality with the vastly improved bullet designs, with a higher capacity and less mean-time between failures and less downtime before getting it back to reliability status.

I'm in the "shot placement matters more" group.  A few of any caliber from .22lr and up delivered center mass is going to result in a bad day.

It’s like the author doesn’t understand that a fully expanded 9mm has a greater chance of damaging something important than a 9mm FMJ given the same less than perfect shot placement.

Yep, those are the most common CCW calibers.  I sure can't think of any other caliber that is commonly used in CCW

The OG 1911 laughs again.

This is why I carry a .50bmg pistol

They're just analyzing data- and drawing conclusions from data. While a JHP may well increase the chances of damaging something, the data showed no difference in mortality between FMJ and JHP.

That's not my experience at all. In fact, the only two people I personally know that are carrying a .45 acp as I type this have never attended any training class, and have never shot a single competition.

As long as 45 stays the best, I'm happy.

She's not doing a good job of it. She discounts CNS hits. Says the lethality of wounds is primarily a result of exsanguination.

If there was ever a field where “experts” on different sides of an argument use “data” from studies that don’t really provide the data that is actually needed to actually make a decision on that argument, it’s the field of efficacy of handguns for combat/self defense.

If you’re going to argue that you need 15+ rounds to adequately defend yourself, you don’t need stats on how many people successfully defended themselves with high capacity guns, or even how many people died with low capacity guns. You need to know how many people died only because they ran out of bullets, and who would likely have won that fight if they’d had more bullets. Maybe its out there, but I’ve never seen or heard of that study.

If you’re going to make an argument about caliber with regards to mortality, we have all the data we need…sort of. But “mortality” is not the same as “immediate threat stoppage,” which is probably closer to what we typically argue about here. As already stated, you need your attacker to go down right now - not after several minutes, after he’s already killed you. Simply looking at stats about people who died, at any point, and which caliber killed them doesn’t really answer the question we’re asking.

There’s also a lot of emotional attachment and baseless “beliefs” used in these arguments. Those believes may be right or may be wrong, but either way they’re not based on any actual evidence - just “common sense” and gun-community legends. “Flesh from the bone.” Just look at the arguments by relatively knowledgeable people, in this thread alone, with regard to hollow point ammo. There are at least three completely contradictory arguments as to why it’s better than ball ammo. One guy sad the real advantage is that it’s more reliable than “white box shit” or something like that. That really has nothing to do with whether or not .380 is better than .357 at stopping a threat. There was also an argument made that it was “better quality.”

“.380 is no different than .357 mag? I’m not buying it!” Well, of course it’s different with regard to energy, wound channel, penetration, and a whole host of other things. But does any of that matter? If I drop a 50 pound rock on your head from 20 feet up, you die. If I drop a 5 ton rock on your head from 20 feet up, you die. Is anyone going to argue that the 50 pound rock must be less effective because its smaller and has less energy? More important would be what size rock could be dropped on someone from a height of 20 feet and NOT reliably kill you. Below that weight, the shape and speed might make a difference.  Once you’re above that weight, the shape, size, and speed of the rock doesn’t really matter any more.

With regard to handgun ammunition and mortality, this article seems to state that the LOCATION of the injury is more of a factor than the size of the bullet that caused the injury. If clipping the femoral is going to cause death, and a .32 has enough energy to reach it, then the .357 essentially becomes that 5 ton rock.

We actually need data on people that got shot and didn’t die, but were immediately incapacitated vs people that got shot IN THE SAME PLACE and didn’t die but WEREN’T incapacitated, and the calibers/bullet shapes in those incidents. There’s a host of other factors as well like multiple hits, size/mental state of the wounded person prior to the shooting, etc.

Until that data is out there, all of these arguments are pointless.

The thing about .45 being deadlier was the really surprising part but I guess there is some threshold where a bigger hole really is better.  Otherwise I think the rest was already pretty much known.

<------ laughs in 45acp
w/ grip zone

“What causes death is rapid exsanguination (blood loss). A hit to the central nervous system or head does not guarantee an instantaneous kill. Despite what you see in the movies, the survival rate for wounds to extremities is very high, and death becomes more likely the closer you get to the heart of major arteries. The most deadly places to hit are the groin, armpits or a major artery in the torso.”

My read on what she's saying is not that she's discounting CNS hits, it's just not like what you see in the movies. Outside of a CNS hit, blood loss IS the major mechanism to death. You don't agree with that?

ACP ackshually stands for automatically caps people.

Well no fucking shit?  


I carry Gold Dots because in a situation where I would have to defend myself I'm not really counting on the bad person to be squared up to me and standing still like a target.  If my shot placement isn't great I want the bullet to do as much damage and dump as much energy as possible.

Sonny Crockett's Bren Ten was a .45

While I am sure the projectile weight, caliber etc does not matter in that they are likely are fatal if hitting centre mass.....

I would be more interested in how long the bad guy took to pass out / be incapacitated.

I have a feeling that a 115gr HST in the chest will be faster to render the bad guy unconscious than a 115gr FMJ would.

Yes, 10mm is .40