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Most of Dr. Fackler's work is neither in support of or opposition to Marshall and Sanow's studies. If I recall correctly, Dr. Fackler was an Army surgeon in Viet Nam who became involved in a debate with other surgeons about how to best treat gunshot wounds. The prevailing strategy at the time was to excise tissue that had been disrupted but not liquified (temporary cavity) under the rationale that much of it was bound to become necrotic and therefore a source of intractable infection. Dr. Fackler held that most of the excision was not only unnecessary but detrimental because circulation in that tissue would normally be restored and it would recover well without excision. If it were excised, the surgery would be prolonged and risky, the void left would be a worse source of infection, recovery would be protracted, and there would be greater permanent disabiity.
Surgeons frequently become skeptical and argumentative when their accepted methods are challenged, so the debate went on for some time. Dr. Fackler moved from battlefield surgery to research at the Army's Letterman Hospital. There he pursued the topic of wound trauma and developed the use of ballistic gelatin as a tissue simulant to provide evidence in support of his contentions about surgery and wound healing.
I find it difficult to think of this aspect of his work as anything less than brilliant. However, his work had little to do with the rapidity of incapacitation due to gunshot wounds. In a battle situation, whether at the front line or at the hospital, nobody has the time or inclination to stand around with a stop watch and observe how long it takes soldiers to become incapacitated after being shot in precisely what part of their bodies with just what kind of missile at exactly what velocity. Dr. Fackler, to my knowledge, never conducted any research at all investigating incapacitation viz a viz wound trauma or ammunition type. His work was more lately energetically cited, however, in support of claims that "nervous shock" or "hydrostatic shock" were illusions (maybe they are) and that incapacitation could only result from upper CNS wounds or severe hemorrhage (maybe there's something else going on, too).
Marshall and Sanow, on the other hand, were highly interested in the topic. They were both involved in law enforcement and, accordingly, had a deep and personal interest in the effectiveness of their ammuniton. They were not the first to be so interested.
There have been numerous attempts to quantify "stopping power"; Hatcher, Taylor, etc. They tend to suffer from the same problem; oversimplifying a complex phenomenon into one number, usually some condensation of the characteristics of the ammunition rather than of the wound produced. That one number inevitably becomes inaccurate in describing the phenomenon in some, perhaps many, circumstances. It is true that some generalizations are accurate most of the time; disrupting vital organs is desirable, adequate penetration is important, big, heavy, fast bullets have a more profound effect than small, light, slow bullets, etc. However, there will inevitably be tradeoffs involved. Nobody can always use, or want to use, the biggest, heaviest, fastest, deepest penetrating ammuniton available. Considerations such as portability, concealability and shootability are also important.
When tradeoffs are involved, people will vary in the extent to which they value any particular factor. A lightly built, inexperienced shooter may value shootability more than would a large, strong expert marksman, for example. And when the choices involved are complicated, people tend to want agreement and assurance that their choices are correct. They will often value reaffirmation more than actually making the right choice. This is especially true when they cannot afford to make multiple selections to cover their bets. Their opinions may become polarized to the point that they become insulting or violent. Most of us have seen the decal of the little boy peeing on the Chevy logo pasted on the back windshield of a Ford truck and vice versa , for example. When very many people do that, the general tone of the debate can degenerate into ridiculous childishness.
Before Marshall and Sanow published their first book, semi-automatic pistols had begun replacing revolvers as law enforcement duty pistols and the self-defense handgun debate had become polarized into heavy and slow bullets versus light and fast bullets; in particular, the .45 vs. the 9mm. The 1911 pistol, shooting .45 calibre 230 grain ball ammo had served honorably, effectively, and reliably in four wars and was revered, by many, at the same level as Mom, apple pie, and football. The fact that many 1911s at that time had some difficulty digesting anything other than hardball did not faze most devotees of the .45; they revered hardball, too.
The high-capacity 9mm pistols, termed "wondernines" by their detractors, had also come onto the scene. Many police agencies had replaced their old-fashioned revolvers with "high-tech" 9mm pistols, attracted to their high capacity, fast reload, safety, and ease of training. The fact that their caliber, although of higher velocity than the .45, had smaller and lighter bullets did not faze them either; they could use expanding ammunition and shoot twice as many rounds. In the course of time, as the debate developed, this began to be characterized as the "spray and pray" strategy. For quite a long time the debate continued, degenerating all the while.
When "Handgun Stopping Power: The Definitive Study" was published, in 1992, I think, the debate was about at the level of the aforementioned "Ford vs. Chevy" charade. What Marshall and Sanow attempted to do was to bypass much of the "energy vs. momentum" debate by estimating the empirical relative effectiveness of different sorts of handgun ammo in producing rapid incapacitation. In order to get data that was in any way capable of generating reliable results, they had to eliminate as many uncontrolled variables as possible, while simultaneously obtaining a sample size of some reasonable statistical significance. In order to do this they had to come up with a simplified operational definition of incapacitation that could be used as a basis of comparison. The measure that they ultimately were almost forced to use by research constraints, was the "one shot stop" as defined by them in their publications. To anyone who reads their work with any intelligence it is obvious that the one shot stop concept was never anything more than an operational measurement. It was never a design goal for ammunition nor a combat strategy. It was simply the best measure they could find for comparing the effectiveness of different kinds of ammunition in producing rapid incapacitation in the real world. Unfortunately, when some people discovered in the results that some 9mm ammo produced a higher proportion of one shot stops than some .45 ammo (hardball), the howls of protest could be heard on Olympus, and some aspects of the debate degenerated even further.
The one shot stop studies are imperfect with regard to the design of the studies, the data collection, and the analysis. That same criticism can legitimately be applied, and is, to most research from psychology to pharmacology to particle physics. Some of the criticisms applied, however, are less well founded than Marshall and Sanow's work. Some people, for example, question the use of one shot stops, as a measure, rather than multiple shot stops. But if you were comparing, say, "three shot stops", how would you go about differentiating, after the fact, between cases where the shootee was incapacitated only after the third shot and cases where the shootee was incapacitated at the first shot but the shooter didn't notice and fired two more shots?
Some of the criticism aimed at these studies is oversimplified, some is just plain wrong, and some is utterly ridiculous. Some websites investigate bullet performance in gelatin, provide results only about penetration depth and recovered diameter, and make only feeble attempts to relate the results to effectiveness in real people. They sometimes claim that such estimates can't be made. Why bother then? Other investigators, basing their reasoning on recovered bullet data assert that there is no significant difference in effectiveness among the common handgun calibers, as long as they're not "mouse guns". How can they tell? An often repeated mantra at some fora is that "incapacitation can only be produced by an upper CNS hit or profound loss of blood pressure caused by severe bleeding." So why do cops use Tasers if not to incapacitate without killing? On one wound ballistics website, a writer went to great length to explain that kinetic energy not only had no application to bullet effectiveness, but that it was an artificial concept that had little use in the real world. Try running that by your hydrodynamics professor. But if you offer any disagreement with these people, they will pointedly remark that you don't know what you're talking about, call you silly names, ban you from their forum, and suggest that your morals are nearly as low as those nefarious scoundrels Marshall and Sanow. Why don't they just make a decal of a little boy peeing?
I do not defend Marshall and Sanow here; as I mentioned earlier I think their work could be better. On the other hand, I have never seen any sort of venom or childishness coming from them. I would merely like to see this whole debate elevated out of the daycare center. I would expect any reasonable person who is interested in the topic to exercise his energy and intelligence, study in accord with his inclinations, form his own conclusions, try to keep his discourse intelligent, avoid dogma, and go easy on the insults. I might add that if Marshall and Sanow's work were such a deceitful, erroneous crock of baloney, that it should be rather easy for somebody to produce a better study of handgun effectiveness on real people. I'm not holding my breath.
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