I shoot the 357sig regularly. I see what the 357sig round does compared to other rounds. I chose to carry it after a lot of range time with it. I don't need someone else to tell me what it can/can't do. I've seen it for myself. I venture to guess that most of the posters who doubt what Ayoob and others say about the 357sig have not had any significant trigger time with it.
While I admittedly do not have much trigger time with .357 SIG, I've had quite a bit with .357 Magnum, but without actually shooting people I don't see what shooting a lot of rounds is supposed to tell me.
The podcast was a discussion about what those LEO's experienced on a daily basis. Real world experiences speak volumes. Reading what a round can/can't do on the internet doesn't begin to tell the whole story. The participants on the podcast were talking about their experiences. I'd value that information highly. Most of the things I read on the internet from anonymous posters I'd take with a grain of salt
And I stand by my statement that the podcast discussion was little more than vague, mystified reasoning based on some anecdotes. I can accept that they don't know exactly why .357 SIG does what it supposedly does, but at one point somebody said whatever that is doesn't show up in gelatin tests. Now, I'd be the first to say that gelatin is NOT living human flesh, but if anything it exaggerates the effects of bullets, since it is less elastic and resilient than most types of flesh. Most of us are well aware of the 5.56x45mm/.223 Remington velocity threshold that determines what type of damage these rounds are going to do--either explosive fragmentation or just a small wound channel--but we can easily see the difference in gelatin. .357 SIG doesn't look much different from the other service calibers in gelatin, and this makes sense because it's not all that different on paper, either--even the 165 grain .40 S&W Ranger-Ts in my cabinet have nearly the same kinetic energy as typical .357 SIG defensive loads.
I fail to see where the so-called "lighting bolt effect" comes from. That is, unless some loads in other calibers have it, too. Ayoob wrote in
The Gun Digest Book of Combat Handgunnery regarding a 180 grain .40 S&W load: "I've run across several shootings with Winchester's talon-style Ranger loads. All but one stayed in the body. All have opened up exactly like a Winchester publicity photo. All have stopped hostilities immediately." I guess he thinks that it has "stopping power" too, based on real experiences. I guess that .357 SIG is not so special if .40 S&W stops them cold every time, too.
Not to rag on Ayoob, though. In the aforementioned book, his reasoning is more complete and sound than it is in the podcast, understandably, and he's well aware, as we all should be, that different "authoritative" sources will often disagree with one another. Some of us are more inclined to embrace anecdotal evidence from real shootings with all of its warts and imperfections, while others tend to want to make sense of it all through studying certain aspects of wounding and analyzing controlled lab test results that show comparative terminal performance. Using both sources would be advisable, I think, but be aware of their limitations--even with information that comes from real world events (lots of random factors and likely some bias involved in each case).
