Isn't that how you discredit MacPherson?
This is a strawman fallacy. I don't remember anyone trying to discredit MacPherson. His book on Bullet Penetration is very good on all the points for which he refers to careful, repeatable experiments. The weak areas are where he relies on the expert opinions of others without the benefit of repeatable experiment. In any case, disagreeing about points raised in a scholarly work is not "discrediting" the scholar, it is simply disagreeing. Scholars disagree with each other all the time without "discrediting" each other.
MacPherson's article _Statistics Tells the Ugly Story_ is much less compelling than his book on bullet pepetration. However, asserting that this article contains rhetorical fallacies and serious logical flaws that amount to abusing statistics to support a false presupposition is still a matter of scholarly disagreement about a single publication rather than a broad attempt to discredit a scientist or his work.
Scientists can have strong disagreements in some areas while recognizing high-quality work in others. Each assertion that a scientist or other scholar makes should be weighed on its merits as supported by reason and experimental evidence without regard for the correctness of assertions the scholar has made in other areas. This is what separates science from other disciplines: we discern truth from experiment and reason, not based expert opinion, regardless of the reputation of the "expert."
For example, I have a high regard for the quality of RyanM's work in correlating bullet velocity with wound volume. This work is analytically sound, based on repeatable experiments, and I would recommend it highly for publication. On the other hand, I probably disagree with RyanM's assessment of the M&S OSS work because I believe his assessement of the OSS work is based on expert opinion rather than a careful, reasoned consideration of repeatable experiments.
The history of science is full of examples of scientists who were completely wrong on some points, but made important contributions in others, sometimes in the same published work. Scientific validity is determined by repeatable experiment, not by "expert" opinion or errors the scholar may have made in other assertions.
On the whole, Fackler and MacPherson have made many important and enduring contributions to terminal ballistics, and I expect RyanM and Dodson to make others as well. Disagreeing over some points should not be interpreted as an attempt to broadly discredit these scholars. The assertions they make which are backed up by repeatable experiments represent solid contributions to the field. But a keen scientist is always trying to distinguish assertions which go beyond clear inferences from repeatable experiments.
Michael Courtney
The 125 JHP is the king of the hill, the standard by which others are judged. However, a lot of other loads will do the job just fine, 140 grainers, heck, P+ 38s.
