Background Pony #DFEF
Here, have a rant I have posted elsewhere on the Internets.
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“Stopping power” with handguns is a will-o’-the-wisp. Inflicting injuries so severe that they incapacitate immediately, even with the latest and greatest hollowpoint ammunition, is a spotty proposition at best with handguns and seems to be almost entirely dependent on bullet placement and intangible, unmeasurable psychological factors, like just how badly that guy over there with the machete wants to kill you (also known as “dumb luck”). Even with high-powered rifles, anyone who’s hunted whitetail deer has seen a hundred-and-fifty-pound deer with its heart and both lungs torn to bloody pulp by hydrostatic shock and an exit wound the size of a silver dollar on its far side leap into the air and run a quarter mile before collapsing.
As has been noted on other forums, a statistic that hasn’t changed much since the advent of metallic cartridge firearms after the Civil War is that when a police officer in the US draws his sidearm and shoots in defense of his own life or the life of an innocent party, he uses between 2.3 and 2.5 rounds, on average, going up or down a bit from year to year. This despite a century and more of technological innovations that were sold as “game-changers.” Large caliber cartridges that dwarfed the dinky blackpowder .32s that police departments issued all up and down the East Coast in the 1880s came into common law enforcement use nationwide after the First World War. Smokeless powder. Magnum revolvers. High capacity magazines. Hollowpoint bullets. Lights and lasers. New shooting stances and new training methods. And on and on. It’s still 2.3 to 2.5 rounds.
But it’s also been noted that when we get away from instantaneous effects, and look at things like viability of surrounding tissue after a gunshot wound, we see clear trends. Wounds from higher velocity cartridges that create greater hydrostatic shock tend to be slower to heal and more prone to post-surgical complications like infection. Revolver cartridges with “Magnum” in the name are particularly known for causing wounds that seem straightforward in the emergency room–but two weeks after the first surgery, the patient is back in the operating room for an amputation because so much tissue around the path of the bullet turned necrotic and gangrenous in the days after surgery. And this seems to be true even when expanding hollowpoint bullets are not used–plain old flat-nosed cast lead bullets of the kind Elmer Keith was playing with a century ago are good enough to do this.
In 1946-47, the Army interviewed thousands of military surgeons and physicians and were told again and again that 9mm wounds healed slower than wounds inflicted with .45, that the higher-velocity 9mm was more likely to shatter bone in a way that drove sharp bone splinters deeply into surrounding tissue, resulting in more hemorrhages, more infections, more amputations, and a higher mortality rate in an era before antibiotics were common. But the .45 was kept in service, in part because it was, at the time, well regarded by the troops, who had confidence in it, in part due to the fact that the US military had two years prior purchased two million .45 caliber pistols and a million and a half .45 caliber submachineguns, and no one was willing to volunteer to tell Congress, in peacetime, that they wanted to scrap it all and start over. See also, Douglas MacArthur and his cancellation of the .276 Pedersen service rifle cartridge in 1932–not because it didn’t perform as advertised, not because it wouldn’t have improved on the old .30/06 in important ways, but because he knew better than to try to hard-sell it to Congress during the Depression when the War Department was still sitting on billions of rounds of surplus .30/06 ammo left over from the First World War, at a time when War Department budgets were so low that Americans were drilling with broomsticks in Basic Training instead of rifles and hanging hand-painted signs that said “TANK” on the sides of trucks.
Nonetheless this is one of the reasons NATO selected the 9mm pistol cartridge as standard. Another is that other NATO countries had already adopted the 9mm cartridge and had significant stocks already available. Another is that there were interviews with hundreds of former Wehrmacht enlisted men who’d used the 9mm in combat and were with few exceptions highly satisfied with its performance, especially from submachineguns. But they did not have the unrealistic expectation some Americans do from watching black-and-white Western movies that a proper pistol bullet should pick up the recipient and throw him ten feet through the air, through the glass window of the saloon, out into the street for tidy disposal. But that’s a different topic.
—–
“Stopping power” with handguns is a will-o’-the-wisp. Inflicting injuries so severe that they incapacitate immediately, even with the latest and greatest hollowpoint ammunition, is a spotty proposition at best with handguns and seems to be almost entirely dependent on bullet placement and intangible, unmeasurable psychological factors, like just how badly that guy over there with the machete wants to kill you (also known as “dumb luck”). Even with high-powered rifles, anyone who’s hunted whitetail deer has seen a hundred-and-fifty-pound deer with its heart and both lungs torn to bloody pulp by hydrostatic shock and an exit wound the size of a silver dollar on its far side leap into the air and run a quarter mile before collapsing.
As has been noted on other forums, a statistic that hasn’t changed much since the advent of metallic cartridge firearms after the Civil War is that when a police officer in the US draws his sidearm and shoots in defense of his own life or the life of an innocent party, he uses between 2.3 and 2.5 rounds, on average, going up or down a bit from year to year. This despite a century and more of technological innovations that were sold as “game-changers.” Large caliber cartridges that dwarfed the dinky blackpowder .32s that police departments issued all up and down the East Coast in the 1880s came into common law enforcement use nationwide after the First World War. Smokeless powder. Magnum revolvers. High capacity magazines. Hollowpoint bullets. Lights and lasers. New shooting stances and new training methods. And on and on. It’s still 2.3 to 2.5 rounds.
But it’s also been noted that when we get away from instantaneous effects, and look at things like viability of surrounding tissue after a gunshot wound, we see clear trends. Wounds from higher velocity cartridges that create greater hydrostatic shock tend to be slower to heal and more prone to post-surgical complications like infection. Revolver cartridges with “Magnum” in the name are particularly known for causing wounds that seem straightforward in the emergency room–but two weeks after the first surgery, the patient is back in the operating room for an amputation because so much tissue around the path of the bullet turned necrotic and gangrenous in the days after surgery. And this seems to be true even when expanding hollowpoint bullets are not used–plain old flat-nosed cast lead bullets of the kind Elmer Keith was playing with a century ago are good enough to do this.
In 1946-47, the Army interviewed thousands of military surgeons and physicians and were told again and again that 9mm wounds healed slower than wounds inflicted with .45, that the higher-velocity 9mm was more likely to shatter bone in a way that drove sharp bone splinters deeply into surrounding tissue, resulting in more hemorrhages, more infections, more amputations, and a higher mortality rate in an era before antibiotics were common. But the .45 was kept in service, in part because it was, at the time, well regarded by the troops, who had confidence in it, in part due to the fact that the US military had two years prior purchased two million .45 caliber pistols and a million and a half .45 caliber submachineguns, and no one was willing to volunteer to tell Congress, in peacetime, that they wanted to scrap it all and start over. See also, Douglas MacArthur and his cancellation of the .276 Pedersen service rifle cartridge in 1932–not because it didn’t perform as advertised, not because it wouldn’t have improved on the old .30/06 in important ways, but because he knew better than to try to hard-sell it to Congress during the Depression when the War Department was still sitting on billions of rounds of surplus .30/06 ammo left over from the First World War, at a time when War Department budgets were so low that Americans were drilling with broomsticks in Basic Training instead of rifles and hanging hand-painted signs that said “TANK” on the sides of trucks.
Nonetheless this is one of the reasons NATO selected the 9mm pistol cartridge as standard. Another is that other NATO countries had already adopted the 9mm cartridge and had significant stocks already available. Another is that there were interviews with hundreds of former Wehrmacht enlisted men who’d used the 9mm in combat and were with few exceptions highly satisfied with its performance, especially from submachineguns. But they did not have the unrealistic expectation some Americans do from watching black-and-white Western movies that a proper pistol bullet should pick up the recipient and throw him ten feet through the air, through the glass window of the saloon, out into the street for tidy disposal. But that’s a different topic.