Are hollow points really better?

[C-grunt]

So you want to take an already weak handgun, use the worst bullet profile you can get for tissue damage, and then make the bullet slower? Okay bro, its your gunfight. Realize the new military handgun is also spec'd to shoot hollow point ammo..... because the military knows that hollowpoints are better. And they've killed a lot of dudes with ball ammo.

Also comparing 44 mag to 357 mag isnt a fair comparison. Testing has shown that the 44 mag will start to show significant damage from temporary cavitation with certain loads. Its right on the cusp where rounds start damaging by more than just crushing tissue. So the extra abiity you see from hunting with the 44 mag is from more than just the extra width and weight.

Either way you are talking about rounds far more powerful than your standard duty rounds which we are talking about here. Between 2 combat tours in Iraq and 10 years as LE in a major metro city the amount of gunshot wounds Ive seen between accidental self inflicted, accidental, suicide, murder, aggravated assault, self defense, and combat is in the several hundreds. Being a gun guy I pay attention to the wounds. Also being a gun guy I talk to the medical staff (ER doctors, Xray techs, Paramedics, etc.... several who are gun guys themselves) and have never been told that they could tell the difference between duty handgun wounds.

Since my department reauthorized 9mm a few years ago we have had a few officer involved shooting with it. Every one has had the bad guy DRT on scene. I will point out that all those shootings were done by "tactical" officers so shot placement was good.

 

[RetiredUSNChief]

I've been doing carry ammo research, so I've been absorbing a lot of data, and one thing has been bugging me. If our standard for carry ammo is the FBI requirements, and if shot placement is key, why carry hollow points if an fmj can be made to fit FBI standards? (I'm not saying this is gospel, but lots of people go by it.)

If a +p+ hollow point fails to expand it's a mega powered fmj flying through everything, and does the exact opposite of what you wanted it to do, which is penetrate, but not over penetrate. Meanwhile a down powered fmj can't become more powerful. You don't have to worry about expansion, you don't have to worry about it not feeding, and it should have less recoil, permitted that the pistol functions properly.

Given that pistol calibers are so weak in general, are hollow points just over-engineered hype?

You're making some generalized assumptions.

For example, not all hollowpoints are "+p+". My preferred, for instance, is the Speer Gold Dot 230 gr. .45 ACP. It's a standard velocity (850 fps) round.

Same for my 9mm...the Speer Gold Dot 115 gr. is a standard velocity round, not a "hot round".

Hollowpoints come in many flavors, so lumping them all together is folly.

As for which...let's just say there is no one magic bullet that will fit all circumstances.

The goal is to inflict as much damage on your targetas possible in the shortest amount of time such that you maximize your odds of stopping a conflict sooner. Bullet design is just one tool in your toolbox for that job.

 

[Torian]

I like carrying hollow points in my 9mm for carry, but I'm more comfortable carrying ball in my 1911. I always thought that a expanding hollow point or larger caliber bullet had a greater chance of making contact with vital organs/arteries, and thus resulting in a mortal wound.

This is just rampant speculation however

 

[Zaydok Allen]

If a bullet doesn't expand and acts like a fmj, verses actually shooting fmj, I'll take the bullet that has a chance to expand every time.

If I am worried about penetration then hard cast, flat noses projectiles are what I load.

 

[Zendude]

I've been doing carry ammo research, so I've been absorbing a lot of data, and one thing has been bugging me. If our standard for carry ammo is the FBI requirements, and if shot placement is key, why carry hollow points if an fmj can be made to fit FBI standards? (I'm not saying this is gospel, but lots of people go by it.)

If a +p+ hollow point fails to expand it's a mega powered fmj flying through everything, and does the exact opposite of what you wanted it to do, which is penetrate, but not over penetrate. Meanwhile a down powered fmj can't become more powerful. You don't have to worry about expansion, you don't have to worry about it not feeding, and it should have less recoil, permitted that the pistol functions properly.

Given that pistol calibers are so weak in general, are hollow points just over-engineered hype?

This is the justification for using, say, a 44 special instead of 9mm. Much of the desire for hollow points is to increase magazine capacity with a smaller cartridge.

 

[ClickClickD'oh]

How is this thread still going?

Seriously, I thought the OP was a joke and someone would be by shortly to put it to an end... but.. LOL, seriously? There are still people thinking that packing FMJ is a good idea if HP or other expanding ammunition is available?

Add it to the list:

People that think we never landed on the moon
People that think JFK wasn't killed by Oswald
People that think 9/11 was a government conspiracy
**New** People that think FMJ is just as good as HP **New**

Here's the answer, you can close the thread after this. Yes, shot placement is key, but it turns out that humans involved gunfights aren't friggin laser beams, so "shot placement", although being key, is somewhat more difficult than usually planned for. HP or other expanding ammunition makes the hole bigger than FMJ would, so you get a little break in the shot placement is key thing.... because bigger hole.

/thread over.

 

[CraigC]

Well, no. There's a significant energy/momentum difference as well.

This is a logical fallacy which can be difficult for people to understand. It's a variant of the slippery slope fallacy which says that incremental changes are bad/good because if they continue they would lead to major changes which are obviously bad/good. This is sort of the backwards version of that--i.e. the claim that comparing two cartridges with widely varying performance implies that varying the same parameters which make the two cartridges differ, but by smaller amounts proves something significant about two other cartridges.

The fact that changing some parameters makes a practically significant difference in one case does not guarantee that changing those same parameters by smaller amounts will also make a practically significant difference. In this case, it helps to separate handgun cartridges into performance classes. The Service Pistol class is one obvious categorization and there is no credible evidence to date indicating that cartridges in this performance class differ enough in terminal performance to have practically significant effects on stopping power/gunfight outcomes. The Magnum Hunting Pistol cartridges fall into a completely different performance class, and comparing a caliber from the Service Pistol class to one in the Magnum Hunting Pistol class will show outcomes that differ in practically significant ways.

That's some interesting, wordy nonsense and more than a bit condescending, which seems to be your modus operandi. Pay attention to what I wrote. I'm not comparing service pistol cartridges to hunting cartridges. I'm comparing service pistol cartridges to each other and hunting cartridges to each other. However, t here is often little difference and too much is made of velocity. Anybody who's done any handgun hunting with cast bullets knows that.

Ok, if you can guarantee that you will always be able to line up your elephant frontal brain shots so that they are from the side (???) or so that you always hit the nasal passages, then you don't need to worry about the 2 feet of bone you'll have to get through in the other cases.

You seem to be going to a lot of effort on an irrelevant and meaningless point, strictly because of my wording, "several inches" rather than "two feet".

Those who actually hunt elephant go to a lot of trouble to get proper shot placement. An elephant is the last critter on earth that you want to flub a shot on. They can carry a mortal wound for miles and you're still out the $15,000 trophy fee. Many skip the brain until the finisher and make their first shot on the shoulder. Either way, it ain't "two feet", solid or otherwise unless the angle is completely wrong and it doesn't really matter anyway because this isn't a discussion of elephant hunting.

 

[Sam1911]

Right, no hydrostatic shock, no damage from cavitation, so accurate shots are what count. So use soft shooting FMJs.

If you want to, go right ahead. Nobody is going to be able to convince you otherwise.

As long as the penetration is there why aren't we going that route instead of upping the velocity, pressure and recoil on every round we can find?

I don't think we're "upping the velocity, pressure, and recoil on every round we can find." There are some +P rounds out there. But there are lots of standard velocity rounds and some reduced recoil stuff as well.

Ball FMJ ammo isn't necessarily the softest shooting you can buy. But it does have the worst bullet profile for any sort of wounding, as hunters will tell you. As some have said, this isn't really a question anymore, except in the very imaginary world of "tactical gun-fighting" discussions. In the world of people who shoot things made of meat and bone, regularly, this isn't even something that would be brought up for discussion.

Why should I carry a +p that gets 15 inches of penetration when I can get a standard pressure round, which penetrates 15 inches? Why should I use a standard velocity HP when a low velocity FMJ can have the same penetration with less recoil?

1) False dichotomy: You can have soft-shooting, quick-recovering, modest pressure ammo that expands well, and you can have hard-kicking FMJ stuff, too.

2) The important parts of a human being are about 2"-5" below the surface of the skin, and easy enough to get to that you could do so with a determined poke of a screwdriver. There's reasons to want good penetration but the claims that standard service type rounds of ANY reasonable cartridge don't get the job done are pretty vapid.

3) Over-penetration is a boogey-man that is brought up a lot as a serious risk for civil lawsuits in a defensive shooting, but there's about a ten bazillion-to-one chance that any bystander you manage to hit will be due to you missing the bad guy, not because your bullet passed through him and you scored a "double." It isn't quite a non-issue, in the most literal sense, but it is about as close as I could imagine to being one. Up there with one of my rounds striking an electrical panel and setting the house on fire. Yup...could happen. Not likely to be in my top 40 worries.

4) You've come to the discussion with your mind convinced, daring others to challenge the assumptions you've made. And you've dismissed the answers you've been given because you know better. There's not a lot more we can do for you.

 

[CraigC]

I love how the .45-philes immediately get all defensive and attempt to discredit gel testing with 100 year old anecdotal evidence. What else is new?

The Marines adopted their new Colt 1911 .45s, and then dropped them. And with that, the 1911 has about ran out of friends in the professional world. The Navy SEALs, Secret Service, FBI, and others haven't dropped larger caliber handguns for the 9mm based solely on gel tests. The gel tests do provide a reliable, consistent medium with performance generally applicable to homogeneous tissue, but officer related shootings are studied intently. All the research says the same thing, and it is exactly what common sense says; that the relatively small difference diameter of projectiles moving half the velocity they need to in order to cause damage through so-called hydrostatic shock, or cavitation is almost completely insignificant. Additionally, the 9mm operates at 10,000 PSI higher operating pressure, so it gets much more performance for its capacity then the .45 ACP. When all the professionals do the same things at about the same time, maybe there is a reason. Everyone paying attention to actual street results and committing any effort to relevant testing is shooting 9mm. But go ahead and bring up bring up more 100 year old stories, that contributes a lot to the discussion.

Navy SEAL's are bound by law to use FMJ. IMHO, ZERO military use has any relevance in a discussion of civilian self defense.

The Secret Service and FBI are government entities. Government entities don't necessarily choose the best tool for the job. They have A LOT of other considerations and those must be weighed against how often they actually use them. Their choices should be taken with a grain of salt.

Actually shooting live tissue would seem to suggest that the difference between the 9mm and .45 is NOT insignificant. Bigger bullets make bigger holes, which causes greater blood loss and that leads to quicker incapacitation. It's complicated and has a lot of variables but it ain't rocket science.

 

[ClickClickD'oh]

Navy SEAL's are bound by law to use FMJ.

Hague convention of 1899, IV, 3?

Not ratified by the United States.

 

[CraigC]

Hague convention of 1899, IV, 3?

Not ratified by the United States.

Oh, is that why we've been using FMJ all this time? Ratified or not, we abide it.

 

[MTMilitiaman]

Navy SEAL's are bound by law to use FMJ. IMHO, ZERO military use has any relevance in a discussion of civilian self defense.

The Secret Service and FBI are government entities. Government entities don't necessarily choose the best tool for the job. They have A LOT of other considerations and those must be weighed against how often they actually use them. Their choices should be taken with a grain of salt.

Actually shooting live tissue would seem to suggest that the difference between the 9mm and .45 is NOT insignificant. Bigger bullets make bigger holes, which causes greater blood loss and that leads to quicker incapacitation. It's complicated and has a lot of variables but it ain't rocket science.

Seriously? This is the best you've got? First off, the military does use JHPs:
https://thearmsguide.com/8209/8209/

These are among the finest professionals in the world. It doesn't matter who they work for, with the amount of research they have performed, if all of the best come to the same conclusion, you might want to pay attention. Or not. Your argument is that if Michael Jordan, Koby Bryant, and King James all suggest Nike basketballs over Wilson, their opinion on basketball doesn't matter because they are in the NBA. Good luck with that.

Speaking of taking with a grain of salt, you might want to let off the KoolAid. There has been actual research done since the WWII stories you cling to as gospel. It unanimously suggests that you're wrong, and that the difference between a 9mm and a .45 absolutely is insignificant. Why? Because it doesn't make that much bigger of a hole when compared to the size of the object it is penetrating. The area of a circle is equal to pi (3.14....) multiplied by the square of its radius. Therefore, the difference in area between a .451 caliber projectile and a .355 caliber projectile looks like this:
.451/2 = .2255 so a .451 caliber bullet has a frontal area of .1597 sq in
Compared to a .355 caliber bullet .0897 sq in
Then we subtract the 9mm from the .45 to get a difference of .07 sq in.

Significant? Compared to a 180 pound, 5 ft 10 inch male having a surface area of ~3,000 sq in? A difference in less than a tenth of an inch in bore diameter is so inconsequential that trained pathologists who see thousands of GSW in the course of their career still can not tell the difference between a .45 and a 9mm unless they manage to recover the bullet with enough of the base intact to get calipers over it. That's fact.

Few things in bureaucracy are unanimous. So when every single government agency comes to an agreement, it is probably noteworthy. And right now, almost unanimously, every single professional warrior that goes into harm's way with a sidearm on a regular basis has done the research, reviewed the material, and come to the same conclusion; that the difference between the 9mm and the .45 really is insignificant, and that it makes far more sense to opt for the capacity of the 9mm than the machismo and hype of the .45.

 

[earplug]

Its easier to shoot a compact 9MM fast with accuracy then a larger round.

 

[Sam1911]

This is getting hotter, not cooler, as we go. Surprise, a caliber war thread that got ugly! Who would have guessed.

Anyway, the arguments are all there on display for the OP to ignore at his leisure.

Let's call this debate "done" .... again.