Defining stopping power (Michael Courtney's thread)

[Jeff White]

I'm with Preacherman and Blackhawk 6, there is no such thing as stopping power. It would impossible to quantify it. You just can't can't model something so unpredictable.

How would your model account for the person who is hit and drops immediately dead or at least is out of the fight, and the person who takes the same hit and continues to function until he bleeds out and loses conciousness? There is a big psychological factor to consider. How could you model differences in human or animal anatomy? We're all built generally the same but a chest hit that opened my aorta and cause me to rapidly bleed out, might just miss Preacherman's aortta and allow him to stay in the fight for an extended period of time.

Stopping power means a CNS hit. Anything else is just guess work.

Jeff

 

[middy]

Okay then, off to Canada with my Marlin 60. I'm gonna bag me a moose with a CNS hit. It's the only way to be sure, you know.

 

[Michael Courtney]

Okay then, off to Canada with my Marlin 60. I'm gonna bag me a moose with a CNS hit. It's the only way to be sure, you know.

It is important to distinguish rapid incapacitation from eventual lethality. The hunter simply wants lethality in a time frame conducive to easy recovery of the carcass. To the hunter, waiting 10 seconds for an animal to drop is not an eternity (except for dangerous game.)

On the other hand, we should seek a combination of handgun load and shot placement that will reliably incapacitate an attacker in under 10 seconds.

But we can also make the point that even though only CNS hits are likely to cause immediate incapacitation, we would prefer a load with can produce incapacitation in 4 seconds (on average) with a center chest hit to a load that takes 8 seconds (on average) to cause incapacitation with a center chest placement.

The average incapacitation time does not guarantee an outcome, but it does give an advantage.

Michael Courtney

 

[Sam]

Michael,
4 seconds is in no way acceptable. It is an eternity when being shot at and not much less in a knife fight.

Ain't no stopping power.
Not much of any power with any firearm.
Example how come a round producing 248 ftlbs or lbsft of "energy" depending on your point of view will not move a 1 lb target 248 ft or a 248lb target 1 foot. Once you accept that little item and drag it away from the "physics" you can start to understand weapon effects.

Sam

 

[JohnKSa]

But it's BETTER than 8 seconds, right?

That's the point.

 

[X Who]

Remember the Strasbourg tests?

Where somebody shot a whole bunch of goats and timed them to incapacitation? What did they prove? What did Marshall and Sanow prove?

IMHO, it is all compromise. The handgun is a compromise of sorts: it is the only gun that can be on your person and quickly accessible nearly all the time. Power: 500 S&W or .25 auto? One is too much for SD and the other is too little. Deep pentration or rapid expansion and quick energy dump?

Carry a gun with as much power as you can handle, but can it be concealed?

Even if an experiment could be done firing bullets into test animals, it would be difficult to ensure against variations in the animals themselves unless enough are shot to average out variations. And then there is a large number of shot placements to test. And then add in stuff in the way (like arms or heavy clothing or fat or very heavy chest muscle

I don't know, but I suspect that the effectiveness of cartridge/bullet combinations can be only known to the level of broad generalizations. Even if the "best stopping power" round could be known, one may carry something else due to other considerations. What is best in one scenario will not likely be best in every scenario.

More information is good, I hope that those collecting data continue to do so, whether it is from street results or gelatin tests.

 

[Yooper]

I also have to disagree with the concept of "stopping power", it implies a reaction to bullet performance. To accurately measure reactions, the bullet placements would have to be identical on a variety of individuals with the only variable being the reaction to being shot. Given the variety of cartridges, the variety of possible shot placements and ranges, and the variety of possible reactions to being shot, it is almost impossible to arrive at a valid conclusion.

 

[Michael Courtney]

Michael,
4 seconds is in no way acceptable. It is an eternity when being shot at and not much less in a knife fight.

My point is that faster is better than slower.

Our definition of stopping power allows one to also conisder the probability of a given load causing incapacitation in 2 seconds. A load which produces a 50% probability of incapcitation in 2 seconds would be better than a load which produces a 20% probability of incapacitation in 2 seconds.

The fact that there aren't any available handgun loads that produce a 50% probability of incapacitation in 2 seconds doesn't mean that there never will be.

If we have a definition of stopping power that makes sense (mine does), then we can better understand how to better move from current levels of performance (the best handgun loads produce about a 20% probability of incapacitation in 2 seconds with center of the chest shot placement) toward ideal levels of performance. But improving bullet performance requires taking incremental steps, as well as a method of evaluating bullet performance in terms of the incapacitation produced.

Michael Courtney

 

[RON in PA]

What we need to do is produce an infinite number of human clones that are segregated into groups according to body weight and different psychological states and shoot them thus generating data for statistical analysis.

Easier solution and one that seems to be common: "shoot 'em till they drop".

By-the- way: How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? I didn't know we were a group of Talmudic scholars engaged in disputation. But maybe we are.

Always remember Sylvia Segrest, the psychotic young lady who shotup a mall in the Philadelphia area in the early 1980s with a .22 rim fire rifle. Killed seven people. I'll grant you that's lethality and not incapacitation, but it does give one something to think about.

Wanna bet that all the major military powers have been collecting data like this for decades and have it hidden somewhere.

 

[Yooper]

One definition for "stopping power" might be a manhole cover striking the target flat-on at 100 fps. I expect that "stopping power" diminishes exponentially as the diameter of the projectile decreases.

 

[benEzra]

Example how come a round producing 248 ftlbs or lbsft of "energy" depending on your point of view will not move a 1 lb target 248 ft or a 248lb target 1 foot. Once you accept that little item and drag it away from the "physics" you can start to understand weapon effects.

Actually, it would if you set up a way to overcome the impedance mismatch. The bullet does have enough energy to lift a 248-pound target one foot, if no energy were expended damaging the target. However, most of that energy will be expended in tearing up the bullet and the target, rather than moving it.

 

[Sam]

Michael,
Why didn't you say 2 seconds as opposed to the 4 seconds you mentioned. 2 seconds is better than 4, BUT NOT GOOD ENOUGH.
I don't see how you are going to quantify it any meaningful way in any case, and stay out of jail. You work something out with the comissars to use excess prisoners from the Gulag?
How are you going to ensure uniformity of the 10K variables involved and how will that translate to something useful to me?

benEzra,
I'll betcha that If I make some non deformable bullets and targets that you still won't get the movement.
The last "energy" guy had a different dodge. He stated that the claimed abundance of energy was magically transformed to heat. I even set up test condition to measure heat rise in the target but no load that he came up with caused the temp to rise, up to and including 375H&H.


Sam

 

[NineseveN]

You're not defining "stopping power", you're trying to define "probability to involuntarily incapacitate", and there is a difference.

Probability shows how likely something is to occur, power shows the ability to do something or not.

Every bullet has “stopping power” (though this does not translate into the media hype and bullet fluff we see on the internet or in gun rags) because every bullet has the ability to kill, eventually. How likely is a certain bullet to incapacitate? Without finding a model that completely mimics the human body, with the innumerable variations in angle, orientation, environmental effects, mass/size/weight/density/structural health, temperature and mental/physiological reactions (because all of these things impact the performance of any one shot with any firearm and any bullet), any study or data conceived from such a study has very little real world significance. The differences between the top samples from any caliber are insignificant in the world of flesh and physics. We can estimate the performance of one round versus another in a controlled medium, but that does us little good in the real world, because we’re not shooting at Jell-O or cadavers or test animals.

So this data may prove to be interesting, but that’s it. Handgun rounds perform inconsistently, shot placement is not consistent and such a study fails to take into consideration that the majority of shots in a firefight with a handgun miss vital areas. You can provide us the data that suggests that if our one shot hits a predetermined spot, bullet A may be more effective than bullet B, but in order to show any real world use, you would also have to account for the effects that hits in non vital areas produce because we are more likely to see those than perfect shots to the heart.

Regardless, you shoot until the threat has ceased, even if we could predict that bullet A has a 99% chance to stop the threat if a shot is placed directly into the heart, what good does that do us during the fight? How would I, a person out in the real world without the benefit of an x-ray machine or a means to see exactly where a shot went inside my target and exactly what it did to the organ (if it hit one), know which round did the killing anyway at the time of the shoot?

Could we honestly get to a point where we would have such a high degree of certainty in the ability of round A to incapacitate in under 2 seconds provided it hit a certain organ in a certain manner that we could advocate shooting only one shot and then waiting for 2 seconds to see if the target is incapacitated? 2 seconds is an eternity on the street. If I shoot someone three times, and the first shot destroys the heart, the other two hit the belly and then 5 seconds later the subject dies, can we really determine exactly which round stopped the threat? Was it the cumulative force of all three shots either physically or psychologically, or did shot 1 take 6-8 seconds to incapacitate and the other 2 were completely irrelevant? How can you know this? And more importantly, how can one observe, validate and process the effect of each shot in real time during a gunfight?

Until you can provide a method to accomplish that, such a study is useless beyond being theorycraft. You shoot until the threat is gone and you don’t stop. Until the attacker is lying on their back without a gun or weapon in hand or is visibly rendered totally incapacitated, you keep firing. You just cannot determine this in real-time while being a participant with any reliability.



That's my 2 shillings anyway.

 

[JohnKSa]

Probability shows how likely something is to occur, power shows the ability to do something or not.

Not really. There is probability associated with virtually any event. We would all agree that a howitzer has stopping power, but there is a small probability that a person could survive being shot with a howitzer--and you could find proof of that if you researched war wounds.

The fact that you can't GUARANTEE a result doesn't mean that the power to produce the result isn't there. It just means that even when you have LOTS of stopping power it's not always as effective as desired. The probability of failure to stop is low when using a howitzer.

In a handgun, the probability of failure to stop is much higher, but again, that doesn't mean that the power to stop isn't there. It just means that there's not nearly as much of it and that raises the probability of the target's not being incapacitated rapidly.

Could we honestly get to a point where we would have such a high degree of certainty in the ability of round A to incapacitate in under 2 seconds provided it hit a certain organ in a certain manner that we could advocate shooting only one shot and then waiting for 2 seconds to see if the target is incapacitated?

Unreasonable expectations, IMO. Science rarely makes huge leaps--you take small steps. First, you try a lot of experiments in a tightly controlled environment and carefully observe the results. Then you try to find a trend in the data. Then you try to determine what that trend means. Then you try to see if you can carefully alter parameters of the experiment to produce a desired outcome.

Look at it this way. When you buy self-defense ammo, you want to know how rapidly and effectively it will incapacitate an attacker. You can find out a lot about the ammo. Muzzle velocity, bullet weight, penetration estimates, expansion size estimates, probability of expanding properly, etc.

The problem is, none of those really tell you how rapidly and effectively it will incapacitate an attacker. What's more they don't even really tell you whether one round will be more effective than another. Even the experts can't tell you for certain.

This study is trying to get an answer to the question. Maybe not to nail down the answer, but at least to begin by trying to see if there's a discernible trend in the data. It surprises me that so many people seem to be against even exploring the problem...

 

[NineseveN]

Not really. There is probability associated with virtually any event. We would all agree that a howitzer has stopping power, but there is a small probability that a person could survive being shot with a howitzer--and you could find proof of that if you researched war wounds.

The fact that you can't GUARANTEE a result doesn't mean that the power to produce the result isn't there. It just means that even when you have LOTS of stopping power it's not always as effective as desired. The probability of failure to stop is low when using a howitzer.

In a handgun, the probability of failure to stop is much higher, but again, that doesn't mean that the power to stop isn't there. It just means that there's not nearly as much of it and that raises the probability of the target's not being incapacitated rapidly.Unreasonable expectations, IMO. Science rarely makes huge leaps--you take small steps. First, you try a lot of experiments in a tightly controlled environment and carefully observe the results. Then you try to find a trend in the data. Then you try to determine what that trend means. Then you try to see if you can carefully alter parameters of the experiment to produce a desired outcome.

Look at it this way. When you buy self-defense ammo, you want to know how rapidly and effectively it will incapacitate an attacker. You can find out a lot about the ammo. Muzzle velocity, bullet weight, penetration estimates, expansion size estimates, probability of expanding properly, etc.

The problem is, none of those really tell you how rapidly and effectively it will incapacitate an attacker. What's more they don't even really tell you whether one round will be more effective than another. Even the experts can't tell you for certain.

This study is trying to get an answer to the question. Maybe not to nail down the answer, but at least to begin by trying to see if there's a discernible trend in the data. It surprises me that so many people seem to be against even exploring the problem...

I think you missed my point. There is no way, regardless of the data available to observe this in any meaningful way during the fight. We're talking mere seconds and variables that I cannot even count. Unless a study can prove a handgun round to be 100% reliable in stopping the threat immediately in one shot every single time regardless of real-world variables, this data is useless in a firefight. All we have is a probability, and even if that probability increases, unless a shooter can monitor the real-time effects of each shot to produce incapacitation, we cannot put this data to good use in the fight. It may help us prepare with our load selection, but since the results cannot ever be 100% reliable or dependable due to the variables like shot placement, barriers and all of the other numerous things that occur in a gunfight but never in a lab, we still must shoot until the threat is visibly rendered incapacitated. If it takes 2 seconds for a heart shot to incapacitate the attacker and drop him or her on the ground, what do you think we're going to be doing for the 2 seconds after the heart shot is taken? Shooting, that's what (at least anyone with any sense).

Gunfights do not occur in a vacuum. The data will be interesting to view as it progresses, but it just does not solve the problem that shot placement is the engine and bullet performance is the wheel, without both, you're just not getting anywhere anytime soon...unless you push the car or wait for the attacker to bleed out, and I don't consider that fast enough, certainly not soon by my definition. But we cannot monitor the path that a bullet takes because even if we hit center mass, we won't know where it ended up. Hits in the chest do not produce incapacitation, it's what the bullets hits once it passes through the barrier of the chest that counts, something we simply cannot monitor during the shoot. Nor can we monitor if a bullet expands during the shoot which will generally determine how much the round affects the organ or area hit.

I'm not against the research, just highly skeptical of what it can do for us that Jell-O tests cannot considering neither have any practical application during the fight and both simply observe data under controlled conditions to help us prepare, but they still won’t win the fight for us. Will they help? Sure, if the preparations are made and they pan out in flesh and physics at the time of the shoot, but they cannot predict what will occur, only what may occur in some very specific situations with controlled variables. Again, not very useful in the 5 seconds of a firefight IMHO.

 

[JohnKSa]

The idea is to help you pick something as effective as possible BEFORE the fight.

During the fight, nothing changes from the way things are now. You aim for center of mass and shoot until the threat is over. You just have the extra peace of mind knowing that the gun/ammo combination you have chosen has been scientifically shown to have a better probability of rapidly incapacitating your opponent than many other combinations you could have chosen.

Unless a study can prove a handgun round to be 100% reliable in stopping the threat immediately in one shot every single time regardless of real-world variables, this data is useless in a firefight.

It might not change the way you fight, but it's certainly useful in a firefight to know that you've chosen your equipment well/wisely/scientifically. What happens in a fight is heavily affected by the choices one makes before the fight.

what it can do for us that Jell-O tests cannot

The one HUGE thing it can do is to actually begin to factor incapacitation into ammunition design equation. Gelatin can not be incapacitated--one could think of that as the primary limitation of gelatin as a testing medium.

 

[NineseveN]

The idea is to help you pick something as effective as possible BEFORE the fight.

During the fight, nothing changes from the way things are now. You aim for center of mass and shoot until the threat is over. You just have the extra peace of mind knowing that the gun/ammo combination you have chosen has been scientifically shown to have a better probability of rapidly incapacitating your opponent than many other combinations you could have chosen.It might not change the way you fight, but it's certainly useful in a firefight to know that you've chosen your equipment well. What happens in a fight is heavily affected by the choices one makes before the fight.

FMJ out of a handgun has killed plenty of folks, so I don't think bullet construction has a much of a bearing on what happens in a fight as you and others contend. There is plenty of real-world historical data to back this up. Does it help if you use JHP's? Science says so, but I think bullet construction is not as meaningful as some would like us to believe. Where it would likely make a difference is in "one shot" because the best round design and performance theoretically has the best percentage to do more damage in one shot, however; the "one shot" occurrence is a statistical anomaly in defensive gunfights according to the data I have read. I believe the data from all handgun shootings (civilian, civilian LE and military) would show that as the round count goes up (hits, not misses), the weight of the effect of one bullet's performance goes down...because incapacitation from handgun fire is rarely instantaneous.

So yes, this kind of data is helpful, but I believe it is marginally so.

 

[NineseveN]

The one HUGE thing it can do is to actually begin to factor incapacitation into ammunition design equation. Gelatin can not be incapacitated--one could think of that as the primary limitation of gelatin as a testing medium.

The relevancy of this comes into question. Think of it this way.

One stop shots are rare in handgun fights, so rare that the effect of one bullet can be considered marginal. Much like golf and golf balls.

If a company came out with a ball that is said to have a 99.9% chance for a hole-in-one on a 385 yard drive if there is zero wind and you hit it "exactly" right with enough power and accuracy to make it straight to the hole, almost no intelligent and informed person would buy it for those reasons alone. Why? Because 385-yard drives are so rare that planning your equipment around them is completely useless and opportunities for that perfect shot without wind do not present themselves enough to win golf games. Furthermore, if there was no wind and one could drive the ball that distance towards the hole with the accuracy to make it into the hole in exactly the right manner, the ball becomes irrelevant.

The problem with bullets, that this study cannot solve, is there is not an "exactly right manner" because people are not golf ball cups that react the same way every time as they are inanimate and people are not. You don’t need to convince the golf ball cup to allow the hole in one, you do need to kill or convince your attacker to stop...one shot kills with a handgun are so rare that this is an irrelevant scenario to plan for. I submit to you that 1, 2, 3, 4 or 500 rounds into the heart of different 128gr or 230gr JHP's will generally have the same physical incapacitation effects provided they all expand properly. We cannot reliably predict a target's psychological reaction to such a scenario (unless you can prove otherwise), so again, we're back to expansion and penetration. I fail to see how testing on any medium other than human beings with clothing, mass, and environmental variables equates to a better correlation on how bullets will expand and penetrate on humans any better than Jell-O does.

But that's all I'm going to say about that for now, I don't want to turn this into a JohnSKA VS NineseveN thread.

 

[Michael Courtney]

Michael,
Why didn't you say 2 seconds as opposed to the 4 seconds you mentioned. 2 seconds is better than 4, BUT NOT GOOD ENOUGH.

The definition of stopping power in the first post allows one to consider the probability of incapacitation in any time frame of interest. One could pick 10 seconds, or 4 seconds, or 2 seconds, or 1 second.

I don't see how you are going to quantify it any meaningful way in any case, and stay out of jail. You work something out with the comissars to use excess prisoners from the Gulag?

Once one has a definition, there are two possible approaches to quantifying things. One is to use live animal experiments. The other is the development of new techniques in Forensic Science to establish the time line of gunfights with an audio or video record. With increasing surveillance, an increasing percentage of shooting events are captured on audio and/or video.

We are working on acoustic techniques for shooting event reconstruction. Preliminary results indicate that using the acoustic signature of the bullet hit, one can determine whether the hit was the first hit to the chest, a subsequent hit to the chest, a miss, the first hit to the abdomen, a subsequent hit to the abdomen, a hit damaging major bone structure, or a peripheral hit damaging mainly muscle.

It is entirely foreseeable that we will be able to analyzing audio and video recordings of shooting events to determine the time from to incapacitation for each event.

How are you going to ensure uniformity of the 10K variables involved and how will that translate to something useful to me?

There are studies in many areas that determine the relative probabalities of outcomes without ensuring "uniformity of the 10K variables involved."

We make many life decisions based on the outcome of these studies.

For example, different individuals each have different genetic predispositions to cancer. Environmental factors further complicate the issue. There is a wide range of variation. This does not mean that a scientific study cannot determine the probability curve for contracting cancer after smoking Brand X for a certain number of years.

Suppose a scientific study compares the probabilities for contracting cancer after smoking Brand X for a certain number of years and smoking Brand Y for a certain number of years. In spite of complicating factors from the genetic and environmental variations in the specific cases, such a study can be done, and would constitute a valid scientific basis for concluding that Brand X creates a higher or lower cancer risk than Brand Y.

This same kind of study can conclude that exposure to sunlight increases cancer risk over time, or that certain foods can reduce the risk of certain cancers. In each case, there are broad variations in genetic and environmental factors, but sufficient numbers of data points can effectively average over these factors and understand how the variable of interest affects the outcome.

This kind of research does not claim that the outcome can be predicted for a specific individual, but only that the percentage of outcomes can be predicted for a large number of individual events. The fact that the outcome cannot be predicted for a specific individual does not mean that one cannot increase his odds of living to a ripe old age by certain choices such as quitting smoking or wearing sunscreen.

Likewise, one can increase ones chances of surviving a gunfight with a better ammo choice.

Probability theory correctly predicts that almost anyone who spends enough time and money gambling as a customer in a casino will come out on the losing end, and that the owners of the casino will come out on the winning end. The outcome of any specific bet is not predictable, but the eventual outcome of a large number of bets is predictable, and I often tell my college level statistics students that the lottery is a tax on people who are poor at math.

Most people make choices every day to do things that improve our health or safety in a probabilistic manner:
· We wear sunscreen.
· We try and quit smoking.
· We lose weight.
· We have our cholesterol checked.
· We buy a fire extinguisher.
· We check the batteries in our smoke detector.
· We investigate the safety record of a model of automobile before we buy it.
· We investigate the probabilistic failure rate of our method of contraception.
· We (females) get mammograms after a certain age.
· We (men) get prostate screenings after a certain age.
· We might even eat oat bran.

Therefore, there is similar value in seeking a probabilistic understanding of bullet effectiveness to aid in ammo selection. Research in this area also has important implications for training, shot placement, and future bullet designs.

Michael Courtney

 

[Michael Courtney]

So this data may prove to be interesting, but that’s it. Handgun rounds perform inconsistently, shot placement is not consistent and such a study fails to take into consideration that the majority of shots in a firefight with a handgun miss vital areas. You can provide us the data that suggests that if our one shot hits a predetermined spot, bullet A may be more effective than bullet B, but in order to show any real world use, you would also have to account for the effects that hits in non vital areas produce because we are more likely to see those than perfect shots to the heart.

The use of incapacitation probabality curves is generalizable to any shot placement. You are right that knowing the curves for one specific shot placement is not a complete picture. But it is a concept upon which a more complete picture can be built.

Suppose you know the incapacitation probability curves for three combinations of angle and placement: frontal to the center of the chest, from the side (through the upper arm) through the center of the chest, and frontal to the center of the abdomen. You still have an incomplete picture, but if you pick a bullet that does better than most other bullets for all three shot placements, you would know you're picking a bullet that works comparatively well for a variety of shot placement possibilities.

Regardless, you shoot until the threat has ceased, even if we could predict that bullet A has a 99% chance to stop the threat if a shot is placed directly into the heart, what good does that do us during the fight?

The study of stopping power is primarily about bullet design and load selection. As I mentioned in the first post of this thread, the tactical implication is:

Consequently, surviving a gun fight requires more than good shot placement with good handgun bullets; surviving a gun fight requires tangible actions to avoid getting shot during the time interval before incapacitation occurs. Evasive action is necessary, and the significant likelihood that incapacitation is still several seconds away should be sufficient motive for the defensive shooter to be moving rapidly toward cover, or in the absence of cover, at least moving to make for a more difficult target.

And more importantly, how can one observe, validate and process the effect of each shot in real time during a gunfight?

The main point of studying stopping power is improving the ammo design and selection process, not altering defensive tactics.

You shoot until the threat is gone and you don’t stop. Until the attacker is lying on their back without a gun or weapon in hand or is visibly rendered totally incapacitated, you keep firing.

The careful quantification of stopping power has not ever suggested that one stop shooting until the threat is stopped.

Michael Courtney

 

[Michael Courtney]

This study is trying to get an answer to the question. Maybe not to nail down the answer, but at least to begin by trying to see if there's a discernible trend in the data. It surprises me that so many people seem to be against even exploring the problem...

Lots of folks were against quantifying the link between smoking and cancer also. Many of the same objections that we're seeing here were raised: too many confounding variables, the research is worthless unless you can predict specific outcomes, etc. Correlation is meaningless unless you understand the detailed physiological mechanisms.

It's hard for people to see the relevance in the small steps science often takes. It takes a kind of faith to get behind the idea of understanding a subject better if that improvement to understanding doesn't immediately lead to an easily discernable improvement in quality of life.

Once the details get mathematically complicated, people often prefer to resort to older personal biases than make the cerebral effort required to understand the issue. Overcoming these personal biases often requires unanimous agreement among experts, and clear statements from government agencies, such as "The Surgeon General has determined that smoking is hazardous to your health."

But science needs to do its work long before experts are in unanimous agreement and the government gives its opinion. Division among expert opinion always preceeds agreement in the scientific process. As long as we use careful experiment and observation to discern between varying expert opinions, science can make the progress needed to lead to eventual agreement. This process usually takes decades, sometimes generations in areas where existing biases are strong and confounding factors are present.

Michael Courtney

 

[Michael Courtney]

Michael,
Why didn't you say 2 seconds as opposed to the 4 seconds you mentioned. 2 seconds is better than 4, BUT NOT GOOD ENOUGH.

We should also acknowlegde that there are many situations that justify the use of deadly force where 4 seconds is probably good enough. I am thinking primarily of situations where deadly force is justified but the attacker doesn't have a knife or a gun.

Consider that 1 in 3 females is the victim of rape at some point in her life and that many of these crimes are perpetrated without a gun or a knife. If a potential rape victim can incapacitate her attacker in 4 seconds, she has greatly increased her chances.

There are many situations where one has greatly increases the survivability or chances of avoiding great bodily harm if one can narrow the window of opportunity for the attacker to 4 seconds or so. Suppose someone is coming at you with a baseball bat or iron bar. Would you rather have to avoid getting whacked for 4 seconds or for 8?

Even in a gun fight, the difference between 4 and 8 seconds can be meaningful if you get behind cover and/or put some distance between you and the attacker.

Likewise, the difference between 4 and 8 seconds is meaningful when defending one's family. Sure, 4 seconds might leave enough time for the attacker to kill me, but the more rapidly incapacitation occurs, the fewer family members are likely to be harmed.

Finally consider the possibility of encountering an active shooter who is determined to keep shooting innocent parties until incapacitated. The difference between 4 and 8 seconds is certainly meaningful here.

Michael Courtney

 

[Jeff White]

There are no magic bullets

That's right boys and girls...magic bullets don't really exist. Nor will they ever exist. Until someone cuts down the old 90 mm recoiless so it's a portable as a handgun, no one will ever carry any weapon that stands even a 90% chance of making a one shot stop.

Choose the handgun you prefer in any caliber .38 special or bigger, select carry ammunition that penetrates 13+ inches and spend the rest of your money and time on practice ammunition.

You're looking for a technological solution to a training problem. You can go to the killing floor of your local meet packing plant and find the round that is statistically the best for one shot stops on large animals....22 rimfire.

How do you intend to gather this new forensic data? Are you proposing cameras and microphones on every handgun. Not many gunfights are documented with audio-visual tapes.

Michael Courtney wrote;

We should also acknowlegde that there are many situations that justify the use of deadly force where 4 seconds is probably good enough. I am thinking primarily of situations where deadly force is justified but the attacker doesn't have a knife or a gun.

Ever been in a fight doc? I mean a real fight, like since maybe the 4th grade?

Consider that 1 in 3 females is the victim of rape at some point in her life and that many of these crimes are perpetrated without a gun or a knife. If a potential rape victim can incapacitate her attacker in 4 seconds, she has greatly increased her chances.

One in three females the victim of forcible rape....Where are you getting those statistics from? Even if they were right, if you think a 6'2", 250 pound attacker already in contact with the victim couldn't kill or cause her great bodily harm in 4 seconds you're wrong.

There are many situations where one has greatly increases the survivability or chances of avoiding great bodily harm if one can narrow the window of opportunity for the attacker to 4 seconds or so. Suppose someone is coming at you with a baseball bat or iron bar. Would you rather have to avoid getting whacked for 4 seconds or for 8?

It only takes one second or less to be bludgeoned to death with either a baseball bat or an iron bar. A well trained shooter can draw and fire a hammer in under 2 seconds. Four seconds can be a very long time.

Even in a gun fight, the difference between 4 and 8 seconds can be meaningful if you get behind cover and/or put some distance between you and the attacker.

How many gunfights have you been in? Ever hear of the Tueller drill? The well trained shooter I mentioned above can't draw and fire on a knife wielding attacker coming at him from 21 feet before he's stabbed. Four seconds is enough time to do a lot of damage.

Jeff

 

[Michael Courtney]

We cannot reliably predict a target's psychological reaction to such a scenario (unless you can prove otherwise), so again, we're back to expansion and penetration.

You're in good company.

Albert Einstein got hung up on the probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics.

He said "God does not play dice" to make the point that a theory that only describes probabilities rather than predicting specific outcomes of individual events cannot be trusted.

Einstein turned out to be wrong.

I fail to see how testing on any medium other than human beings with clothing, mass, and environmental variables equates to a better correlation on how bullets will expand and penetrate on humans any better than Jell-O does.

The definition of stopping power suggests two possible experimental approaches. One is to use live animal experiments. Certainly it has limitations, but studying bullet effectiveness in both live animals and gelatin can probably tell us more than gelatin alone. Most medical researchers salivate at the possibility of studying their areas of interest in human-sized animals, and animal testing allows for the study of incapacitation potential. Gelatin only allows the study of wounding potential.

The other experimental approach is analysis of shooting events involving humans. The development of new techniques in Forensic Science will enable establishing the time line of gunfights with an audio or video record. With increasing surveillance, an increasing percentage of shooting events are captured on audio and/or video.

Preliminary results indicate that using the acoustic signature of the bullet hit, one can determine whether the hit was the first hit to the chest, a subsequent hit to the chest, a miss, the first hit to the abdomen, a subsequent hit to the abdomen, a hit damaging major bone structure, or a peripheral hit damaging mainly muscle.

It is entirely foreseeable that we will be able to analyzing audio and video recordings of shooting events to determine the time from to incapacitation for each event.

Michael Courtney

 

[Michael Courtney]

That's right boys and girls...magic bullets don't really exist. Nor will they ever exist.

Think outside of the box.

Do you mean to assert that 150 grains of high explosive fused to explode at a penetration distance of 6" will not immediately incapacitate an attacker over 90% of the time?

Do you mean we will never have a drug that can cause incapacitation very rapidly when delivered to the center of the chest via a handgun bullet?

Do you mean that it will never be possible for a handgun bullet to deliver an electrical shock capable of immediate incapacitation?

There are important distinctions between what might be politically acceptable and what will be possible.

How do you intend to gather this new forensic data? Are you proposing cameras and microphones on every handgun. Not many gunfights are documented with audio-visual tapes.

The probability of any shooting event being caught with audio surveillance is rapidly increasing. There's an audio recording of almost every police stop now, and both audio and video on many ATM's. Some cities have installed audio systems for the detection and location of gunfire in the areas where gun shots are most likely to occur. An increasing number of shooting events are being captured on 911 calls.

Ever been in a fight doc? I mean a real fight, like since maybe the 4th grade?

I have drawn my handgun 3 times in legally justified self-defense. Only had to shoot once. On another occasion I confronted a drug dealer on my property with a shotgun. He waited patiently and compliantly for the police.

if you think a 6'2", 250 pound attacker already in contact with the victim couldn't kill or cause her great bodily harm in 4 seconds you're wrong.

First of all, proper self-defense training should have the gun drawn prior to contact.

Secondly, I did not assert that incapacitation in 4 seconds completely removed the possibility of great bodily harm, only that incapacitation in 4 seconds gives a potential victim a pretty good chance of avoiding great bodily harm.

It only takes one second or less to be bludgeoned to death with either a baseball bat or an iron bar. A well trained shooter can draw and fire a hammer in under 2 seconds. Four seconds can be a very long time.

Yes it can. But it's not as long as 8 seconds. Would you rather avoid the iron bar for 4 seconds or for 8?

Ever hear of the Tueller drill?

Sure, I teach all of my CHL students about the Tueller drill.

The well trained shooter I mentioned above can't draw and fire on a knife wielding attacker coming at him from 21 feet before he's stabbed. Four seconds is enough time to do a lot of damage.
Jeff

Of course, if you just stand there after shooting the guy, he will hurt you. I was trained to move to avoid getting stabbed or slashed both before and after shooting. My point is that it's going to be easier to avoid getting stabbed or slashed for 4 seconds after shooting than for 8.

The best available load is only one aspect. Training is clearly more important. But this does not mean that load selection is irrelevant. Nor does it preclude the development of more effective loads in the future.

Michael Courtney