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Gene L
Senior MemberPosts: 12,750 Senior Member
Penetration v expansion
Gene L
Senior MemberPosts: 12,750 Senior Member
What are your thoughts, especially on lower caliber ammo? I don't think with a .380, a .32, (which I carry some of the time) or even a .38 special with a 158 bullet you're going to get any expansion. Velocity just isn't there. I'm not sure with a 9mm, but I shoot hardball in my short 9mm guns as I want to punch a hole. Not always, I'm unsure on the 9, but pretty dedicated on the .32 and the .380.. Is there any stats on making a hole through a bad buy is better than limited penetration with expansion? How important is a bigger hole in stopping a bad guy, which is the only reason I carry a CCW.
Concealed carry is for protection, open carry is for attention.
Replies
I lean towards penetration. I figure road rage incidents are a likely scenario. Also winter clothing. I've never really trusted HP bullets from handgun rounds. I mostly assume (perhaps wrongly) that their advantages are too small to matter.
YMMV.
Mike
N454casull
Basically, if it ain't a rifle, it's awful. End of story. Pistols don't nominally wound at an incapacitating level unless they make physical contact with a vital thing and damage it. Rifles generate some proxy damage due to impact velocity.
AND pistol bullets are very unreliable expanders. So, I'd say I'm more interested in a non expanding flat nose bullets for light calibers like 32, 38, etc, even wadcutters that show between 15-18" of gel penetration.
Penetration over diameter ALL DAY LONG.
The current thinking on how to prioritize things is (1.) Accuracy, (2.) Sufficient Penetration to hit something important, and (3.) ONLY SO LONG AS #1 & #2 are not compromised, take all the diameter you can get. (HOLD THAT THOUGHT)
So when you go to stuff that makes bigger holes, you're generally going up in recoil which is going to cut into a lot of folk's ability to deliver accuracy. The end effect is that yeah, you might get a couple tenths of an inch more diameter, but if the bullet lands five inches away from where it was intended to go, and the lighter kicking round is in the X-ring, those couple tenths aren't helping you. A lot of the expanding .40's and even .45's don't have the penetration of their 9mm counterparts. They get wide, but they usually lack the few extra inches the heavy 9mm's can deliver. What a lot of folks overlook is a thing called "wound volume", which is a factor of both width AND depth, so the extra depth a 9mm can get you will count towards that, AND stand a better chance of intersecting something critical because of that depth than an equal wound volume achieved by a wider slug won't make.
But you're talking pocket pistol calibers. The minimum happy number for penetration is regarded as being 12" in FBI-spec Jell-O. The reasoning is that if you have a side-on shot and an upper arm to contend with, you can still make it to aorta, vena cava, spine, etc..., whereas a massive mushroom that stops short is useless. 9mm and bigger can be loaded to a power level where the slug can expand and still have the energy to penetrate. .380 and .32 hollowpoints that expand very typically DO NOT make that depth, and the only way you can reliably get there is with a solid. My preferred approach for those smaller rounds is a flat-nosed FMJ or hard alloy bullet. This is probably your best compromise - it will penetrate enough, and the flat nose will have at least a little better crush/tear effect than a round nose. It is worth considering in this discussion that a lot of European powers considered the .32 and .380 totally adequate police and military rounds, but that was back in the day before we started insisting on hollowpoints for everything. I think the concept of them being "gutless" didn't really get rolling until HP's took their penetration away.
Another thing to consider is that if you aren't solving the problem instantly with nerve damage, you're solving it somewhat less instantly with blood loss. An equally well-placed, equally penetrating .40 or .45 is better on the theory of "bigger drain diameter", but then you have the argument of more holes in less time for an overall bigger drain with the smaller stuff. Any hit that does more than nick a big, pressurized artery or vein will end things quickly, & I doubt that "starting with a 4" is going to be the definitive game changer. There may be a point below where an artery can marginally self-seal, but that's probably well below the diameters we're discussing. This is just my theory here. . . If you look a some of the "one shot stop" studies, 9mm seems to run around 88-90% and the .40 and .45 about 92 to 94%. Statistically, not very definitive, but the question I have to ask is this: "Are the bigger rounds ranking slightly better because they ARE better, or is the only reason the 9mm is ranked slightly lower is because the shooter was able to get down out of recoil faster and deliver more than one round before he perceived the first one was effective, therefore that incident didn't rate a "one shot stop"?
Don't mistake me - I'm not going to start carrying a .32 or .380 loaded with ball for grizzly bear defense, but the above thought processes have caused me to regard that idea as less insane than I would have 30 years ago. Mr. Browning was no dummy, & it seems unlikely that he'd design a cartridge that he thought wouldn't work for the intended task. I think it's people monkeying with his tools (i.e. with hollowpoints) that is the cause of the doubt.
"Nothing is safe from stupid." - Zee
If I could have both adequate penetration and expansion regardless of entry angle and/or intermediate obstacles, I would take both.
How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and [how] hard it is to undo that work again! -- Mark Twain
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German writer and politician
Tell me how the .40 S&W is obsolete?
Everything I’ve seen shot with the .40 S&W (and it ain’t just animals) died quickly and decidedly when placed in the right location.
I have not not been impressed with the .45 ACP and one bullet. Penetration was there but expansion was not. Took a long time to die with two rounds (posted).
Me?
I want both penetration and expansion.
I currently have that with the .40 S&W 155 & 180gr HST. We will see what the 9mm that everyone praises as having caught up with the rest of the world, will do.
I will set a trap for pigs this coming weekend and see and see if I can test the 124gr Speer Gold Dot in a 9mm as compared to others.
Science!!
i don’t know what the answer is. But, I know what works. And it’s both.
Rapid expansion without penetration sucks.
Penetration without expansion sucks.
I want both.
Thanks for the efforts Zee. I always enjoy the science.
ECHO...ECHO....echo...
Ah......One savors the hypocrisy!
Karma.........It’s a bitch.
How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and [how] hard it is to undo that work again! -- Mark Twain
Only difference is one cartridge is actually effective.
I await the 9mm sacrifice that will compare to the .40 I have been using.
:popcorn:
😁
If you're not hitting the pump or the computer you're just changing the position from which your getting shot at.
The computer or the pump. Everything else is just unnecessarily prolonging your encounter.
How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and [how] hard it is to undo that work again! -- Mark Twain
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German writer and politician
The likelihood of either of them continuing any sort fight after sustaining those wounds was highly unlikely...
😁
Need to to figure out what distance the velocity will equate to being fired out of a handgun from point blank to 25ish yards.
Its getting 1,350 fps from its 16” barrel. Not a fair comparison until its slowed to Pistol impact velocity.
What much of the LE community is concluding is that the .40's problems are in the internal ballistics side of the equation. I know from long firsthand experience that its high pressure and snappy recoil is a wearer of gun parts and a frustrator (invented word - just now!) of casual 100-300 rounds-per-year shooters, which is unfortunately the majority, and we have to consider the users in this whole discussion. In fairness to the cartridge, a big part of the initial attraction to the round was that it fit into a 9mm magazine body. The major problem early on was that very little was typically done to re-engineer the pistol for the new power level, and the result was either a gun that needed recoil and mag springs changed as often as you change your socks, or a gun that starts breaking or malfunctioning rather rapidly if you don't - compared to a gun that in 9mm would run practically forever.
To HK's credit, they were one of the few (maybe the only) manufacturers that designed the gun from the ground up around the .40's pressure curve. Good on them, but the USP pretty clearly outlines the problems I'm talking about. The gun is a big, chunky, blocky, brick of a thing - the light, sleek 9mm is gone. In the rest of the industry, we saw a lot of half-assed revisionism going on the the form of reinforced slides, heavier springs, and various other forms of "shoring up" that worked to varying degrees of satisfaction, but at the armorer level, the .40 still makes for headaches - more money spent on parts that could be better spend on ammo, and more time wrenching that could be spent shooting. First and foremost, a handgun's gotta work, and the hotrod .40 gets to a point of not working quicker than comparable 9mm's and .45's.
The ideal pistol would hold a 250-count case of 12 gauge magnum slugs in its magazine, conceal like a Walther PPK, recoil like a subsonic .22, and last like an AK-47. The .40 has been a less extreme version of teaching us that this is not going to ever be a practical reality. The current thinking in the field is that 9mm with good ammo is functionally the best way to achieve all our goals.
"Nothing is safe from stupid." - Zee
How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and [how] hard it is to undo that work again! -- Mark Twain
I suppose you could argue for both, so alternate solids and HP's in your stack.
IMHO
D
Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.... now who's bringing the hot wings? :jester:
How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and [how] hard it is to undo that work again! -- Mark Twain
How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and [how] hard it is to undo that work again! -- Mark Twain
35-65 ish yards for a window.
Porcus en Circenses. . .how can we lose?
"Nothing is safe from stupid." - Zee