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A 55-65gr HP or SP .223 round at close to 3,000fps is going to do quite a bit of work work.
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I totally agree!
It sounds like you know this already. But I'll go ahead on this since many may not.
Rifle bullets are in a whole different catagory of performance "wound chanel" wise from pistol bullets in general.
The speeds of rifle bullets allow for very fast impact and expansion speeds compared to pistol bullets.
Take a hollow point 130 gr. .270 rifle and shoot an elk in the lungs. It will blow them out like a pumkin. The very fast speeds of the rifle are what does the job on elk. Now take your .38 revolver and slip a 130 gr. round in between the ribs of an elk and see what happens. You will, indeed, probably kill him just as dead. But he'll likely go a long way before you find him. It won't make a lot of difference if you drive the .38 at 800fps or at 900fps. And it won't make a lot of difference if you substitute a 1400fps .32 for a 1200fps .357. Neither one is going to do the kinds of severe things we can do with Jack O'Conner's favorite rifle - kill him, yes; drop him in his tracks before he can gore you, no.
Handgun speeds just don't cause that explosive reaction of tissue. Rifle speed bullets cause comparatively dramatic wound chanels which in a split second become very real permanent wound chanels because of the tearing of tissue etc.
If we put our hand in a buck of water - it causes hardly any damage to the subject. It simply slides in and the water closes back after it's insertion. If we shove it in a little faster the results are little different. But if we hit the water with a great deal of impact, the results are comparatively staggering. We'll have water in our face, on the walls, and on the floor. A great deal of our water will have been displaced (never to return) from the bucket. We'll have a real "life changing" wound not just a temporary bruise in our bucket of water.
Rifle velocities can translate all that energy into real work in the form of tissue disruption beyond the actual path of the puncture. Handgun velocities, for the most part, do not.
They will certainly cause some damage around the chanel of the bullet path and I'm all for "bruising" the bad guy while I'm killing him. But their only real hope of stopping the assault in time to save our bacon is reaching the vitals (hopefully the central nervous system) with a bullet that can cause severe damage when it arrives on target.
What you see is what you get. You can choose a .32" hole or you can choose a .45" hole. Your choice.
Extra powder can drive your chosen bullet deeper or it can cause it, in many cases, to mushroom better (making a larger wound chanel) or both. But energy for energy's sake means nothing. We need to look at what we are accomplishing with all that energy.
In the case of the .32 mag. - we are most likely overcoming the light bullet's tendency to slow down quickly with extra velocity to begin the wound chanel with. The result is that the light bullet goes in just as deep as the slower heavy bullet. The recoil (for the sake of illustration) is the same for both. The noise level is likely greater from torching off all that powder. The wound chanel is obviously larger for the .38 cal. round - although the bruising aroud the chanel is most likely greater for the fast stepping .32.
Which would you like to be stabbed with, both to the depth of 9 or 10" - a fast moving ice pick or slow moving shovel handle? Which do you think is more likely to sever something vital in it's path, a pencil or a 1" closet dowel?
Like I said, the .327 may make it and it may serve many people well down the road. I hope it does. But don't choose that carry gun based on paper energy alone. That would be a bad mistake IMO.
Didn't mean to highjack the thread. Ill get off this now.
