smoothie said:
9mm would have penetrated that cell phone.
I have a spent 9mm bullet sitting on my desk right now. It was sitting on the door mat outside my office one morning, the first day back at work after New Year's Eve about 20 years ago. The ogive on one side is very slightly flattened, and there was a corresponding "skid" mark on the paint of the wooden front door. It is obvious that the bullet struck the door at a downward angle and came to rest on the door mat. As undamaged as were the door, the doormat, and the bullet itself, it is obvious that there was not much energy involved.
That bullet most certainly would not have gone through a cell phone. It
would have dented the phone a little bit, and it
might have torn a hole in a shirt - if the fabric was light enough. But there is no way that this 9mm bullet would have done any more damage than the .45 caliber bullet which is the subject of this story.
I worked for several years on the PM shift of a level one trauma center back in the 1980s. Late one afternoon, we treated a guy who was hit by a .45 ACP FMJ. He was sitting in the driver's seat of his rag-top Jeep at a red light. The bullet came down through the top and struck him in the thigh, breaking his femur at the mid shaft - a very serious and significant injury. Since there were no tall buildings anywhere nearby, and since nobody heard the shot, that bullet had to have been fired upward at an angle and then arced in from some distance.
Mr. R.J. Richard is damned lucky he didn't get hurt worse, but I suspect that you can't support your assertion that a 9mm
would have penetrated the phone. Maybe it would, and maybe it wouldn't. It's entirely possible that if R.J. Richard cared to repeat the experiment, he might be killed. So let's look at the numbers to see what they can tell us....
I've just looked at the Federal Cartridge website, as an example, and here are the data for a
124 grain 9mm FMJ compared to a
230 grain .45 FMJ (both are standard loads for the caliber):
Code:
Load No Caliber Muzzle 25 Y 50 Y 75 Y 100 Y
AE9AP 9mm 1150 1095 1049 1010 977
Energy in Foot Pounds (To nearest 5 Foot Pounds)
Load No Caliber Muzzle 25 Y 50 Y 75 Y 100 Y
AE9AP 9mm 364 330 303 281 263
Load No Caliber Muzzle 25 Y 50 Y 75 Y 100 Y
AE45A 45 Auto 890 872 856 840 824
Energy in Foot Pounds (To nearest 5 Foot Pounds)
Load No Caliber Muzzle 25 Y 50 Y 75 Y 100 Y
AE45A 45 Auto 404 389 374 360 347
Now, I have nothing against the 9mm caliber, and some day I'll buy one; but I think it is safe to say from the above data that, given identical circumstances of a 440 yard distance and with just a caliber change, there is no way on earth that your 9mm would have gone through the phone when a .45 couldn't. Not a chance.
But that's just me. I'm a numbers guy.