Does .45 live up to the hype?

[ev780]

...he went off on a tangent about the mass of metal injected into a charging attacker.

Which I clearly explained to you as satire.

The poster seems to know quite a bit about pistol shooting, but he has not been bringing to bear in a logical manner anything about the science of handgun wounding mechanics or anything about shooting at fast-moving, attacking human targets. Those factors are integral to the discussion, and that poster's views aside, it is important that the large number of guests on our board have the best information that can be provided.

Well then turn this into a blog. If only your version is suitable for the broader audience.

On the subject of moving targets, I made an error. The poster provided some data regarding the time need to fire some hundreds of .45 and 9mm rounds, and said that the difference in rate of fire was 0.7 rounds per second. That would obviously be very significant in defensive shooting. But it occurs to me that few people will experience such a difference in "split times". The numbers apparently included time for reloading, which would be irrelevant.

More than one because that is not at all what I said.

The difference between the first place in SSP and CDP was about 20 seconds faster for the SSP division. Amazingly, same for DFL in each category, 20 seconds to SSP. Looking good for the 9mm guys.

The IDPA Nationals were 274 official rounds. So 20 seconds divided by the 274 rounds is .07 seconds per round. Alright so is that significant? Only you can answer. In practical real world terms, over the universe of gunfights? Not a chance.

All I was doing was dividing a difference over a constant. It has limited value for sure. I never denied that my math was for conceptual thinking only. I'm sorry you didn't grasp this. I will endeavor to be more clear. However, maybe you could ask questions rather than use your moderator title to bully your customers.

 

[stanley_white]

Under what circumstances might that be a reasonable and lawful strategy?

I used to carry a J-frame S&W 5 shot model 640 Pro with 38 Special +P FBI loads in it.

Once I got married, and had a kid who was tiny and had to be carried, I switched to a Glock 19.

Why?

Because I envisioned a scenario of me handing my tiny kid to my wife and saying "Run!" while I engaged the possibly multiple attackers for as long as possible to buy her time to get away.

My shots would have still been accurate (not military-style suppression), but I would want the threat focused on me (not my wife / kid) for as long as possible to buy my wife time to escape.

Reasonable? Yes.

Lawful? I haven't had to find out (knocks on wood).

-Stan

 

[Kleanbore]

Reasonable?

The objective is a good one , but
i would not consider suppressive fire--a volley of unaimed shots--to be a reasonable way to achieve it.

Lawful?

Reckless endangerment is not lawful.

 

[stanley_white]

The objective is a good one , but
i would not consider suppressive fire--a volley of unaimed shots--to be a reasonable way to achieve it.

Reckless endangerment is not lawful.

I never said I would engage in "suppressive fire--a volley of unaimed shots."

-Stan

 

[Kleanbore]

I never said I would engage in "suppressive fire--a volley of unaimed shots."

Noted.. Sorry.

But accurate fire is not "suppression".

 

[stanley_white]

Noted.. Sorry.

But accurate fire is not "suppression".

I agree, which is why I said "My shots would have still been accurate (not military-style suppression)."

-Stan

 

[Kleanbore]

Which I clearly explained to you as satire.

After having been questioned on it. But this is serious stuff. We do not take the subject lightly.

Serious discussion is welcome here.

Well then turn this into a blog. If only your version is suitable for the broader audience

There are around 1600 persons on line here now. Around 1400 are guests. We have a duty to provide good information.

It is not "my version"--it is what defensive trainers and the FBI Training Academy tell us.

More than one because that is not at all what I said.... All I was doing was dividing a difference over a constant. It has limited value for sure. I never denied that my math was for conceptual thinking only. I'm sorry you didn't grasp this

However you were trying to say it, that "math", when added to your comments on injected mass, certainly appeared to be intended to argue that rapidity of controlled fire is not important in defensive shooting.

...rather than use your moderator title to bully your customers.

What brought that up?

 

[Kleanbore]

I agree, which is why I said "My shots would have still been accurate (not military-style suppression)."

Okay.

Your post was in response to a question about suppressive fire. I took it wrong.

 

[gryphon1911]

I agree, which is why I said "My shots would have still been accurate (not military-style suppression)."

-Stan

Just FYI:

In military science, suppressive fire is "fire that degrades the performance of an enemy force below the level needed to fulfill its mission".

 

[Mosin77]

After having been questioned on it. But this is serious stuff. We do not take the subject lightly.

Serious discussion is welcome here.

There are around 1600 persons on line here now. Around 1400 are guests. We have a duty to provide good information.

However you were trying to say it, that "math", when added to your comments on injected mass, certainly appeared to be intended to argue that rapidity of controlled fire is not important in defensive shooting.

I thought the “metal injection math” was brilliant. In fact, I literally laughed out loud when I read it, because “weight of metal” is exactly the criteria that seagoing navies used in bygone days to evaluate their ships’ fighting prowess and decide when they were evenly matched, outgunned decisively, etc. And for them, it was a pretty good system that was usually pretty correct.

Now, you might argue (and correctly) that a wooden-hulled, sail-propelled, ship-of-the-line is a far different target than, say, a threatening criminal. But, at the end of the day, it’s hard to prove that “weight of metal” is any less valid as an objective criteria to measure handgun cartridge effectiveness, than many of the other criteria we are accustomed to use. After all, sailing vessels, like human bodies, have hard-to-hit “CNS” and other kill zones, and many places where a bullet (or cannonball) will cause minimal real incapacitation. Weight of metal is fairly proportional to likely amount of tissue disruption, where each additional unit of disruption (cubic inch, cm, mm, however you prefer) brings us that much closer to a likely CNS disruption, or, more to the point, a cumulative volume of damage such that the aggressor cannot continue his behavior (he’s bleeding heavily internally.)

 

[Kleanbore]

Weight of metal is fairly proportional to likely amount of tissue disruption, where each additional unit of disruption (cubic inch, cm, mm, however you prefer) brings us that much closer to a likely CNS disruption, or, more to the point, a cumulative volume of damage such that the aggressor cannot continue his behavior (he’s bleeding heavily internally.)

Probably true, but not all volume of tissue destruction is equally meaningful.

 

[redcon1]

Just FYI:

In military science, suppressive fire is "fire that degrades the performance of an enemy force below the level needed to fulfill its mission".

The full definition:
Suppression is fire that degrades the performance of an enemy force below the level needed to fulfill their mission. The purpose of suppression is to stop or prevent the enemy from observing, shooting, moving, or carrying out other military tasks that interfere (or could interfere) with the activities of friendly forces.
So suppressive fire is fire that inhibits enemy maneuver which thereby facilitates your own maneuver, ideally, out of the firefight itself or out of a poor defensive situation i.e. a fatal funnel of some kind or inadequate cover/concealment.

Battles are won by slaughter and maneuver. The greater the general, the more he contributes in maneuver, the less he demands in slaughter.
Winston Churchill

 

[JohnKSa]

Forget the first shot of each, the rate of fire is 5 rounds of 9mm per second and 4 rounds of 45ACP per second.

Ok. I see what you're saying, but you can't really call that the "rate of fire" since the rate of fire is the number of shots per second, including all of the shots. It's like saying not counting the first mile, my speed over the two miles was 100mph.

The equation for cubic inches of wound track would be: diameter X diameter X .7854 X depth X number of holes.

9mm expanded bullet of .625 with a depth of 9" X five holes = 13.8 cubic inches of wound.

45 expanded bullet of .875 with a depth of 9" X four holes = 21.65 cubic inches of wound.

Another set of numbers. The important one is what the difference in caliber is buying you in terms of a practically measurable difference in the outcome of actual shootings. If there's a significant benefit, then the data from actual shootings must show it. If the data from actual shootings does not show it, how can it be significant?

Oh that's priceless. Yes, studying exactly what handgun bullets do to living tissue is not worthwhile at all. Because we all know that tissue destruction and blood loss are meaningless.

It's been done. The problem is that after spending a lot of time studying what bullets do to living tissue and simulants, the result was that they still could not crown a winner from the service pistol calibers.

And, hunting is considerably different from self-defense. At least it is if it's done right. Self-defense encounters almost always involve moving while shooting at a moving target. Unless a hunting encounter turns into self-defense, that kind of approach to hunting would be unethical, to say the least.

In a proper hunting scenario, capacity and recoil recovery should be relatively unimportant because the first shot should do the work if the hunter has done the proper job in terms of tool selection and preparation. In self-defense encounters, misses are essentially inevitable, and carefully aimed shots with no need to avoid incoming fire from a stationary target are virtually non-existent.

We're talking about terminal ballistics and you're talking about everything else.

Because in a self-defense encounter, that "everything else" can be shown to have a significant and measurable effect on the outcome of real world shootings. That means neglecting it to focus on only one factor is unwise--and that's doubly true if the one factor that is focused on can't be shown to make a measurable difference over the solution space (service pistol calibers) in question.

This is why I utterly disregard the .357 as a home defense cartridge.

After having been present for a discharge of a .357Mag indoors, while I was not wearing hearing protection, I can not disagree with you. I never heard the shot. I didn't hear anything at all for the next 15-20 minutes and then I was very badly hearing impaired for quite a bit longer. I never recovered fully and still have pretty bad and easily noticed impairment in one ear.

 

[Nuclear]

The energy of a 45ACP and a 9mm are about the same. Assuming the same depth of penetration, the crush cavity of a couple of 45 caliber rounds are equivalent to the crush cavity of three 9mm caliber rounds. According to Ellifritz’s study, 45ACP is marginally better or equivalent to 9mm, except when it comes to number of hits needed to incapacitate, where it takes 2.08 for the 45ACP to 2.45 for the 9mm. So it is objectively better than 9mm, unless you really believe that bigger holes don’t make a difference, and you can shoot 3 9mm rounds as fast as 2 45ACP rounds.

Interestingly, to answer the OP, in Ellifritz’s study, the 45ACP does split the difference between 9mm and 44 Magnum. And you are limited to 10 round magazines in CA, which takes away some of perceived advantages of 9mm.

 

[JohnKSa]

According to Ellifritz’s study, 45ACP is marginally better or equivalent to 9mm, except when it comes to number of hits needed to incapacitate, where it takes 2.08 for the 45ACP to 2.45 for the 9mm. So it is objectively better than 9mm, unless you really believe that bigger holes don’t make a difference, and you can shoot 3 9mm rounds as fast as 2 45ACP rounds.

Do we really want to look at the number of hits needed to incapacitate from Ellifritz's data? If we do, then we would have to say that the .22, the .32, the .380, and the .38Spl are all significantly superior to the .45ACP.

But that's the only anomaly in the data, right? Well...

The .22, the .380 and .38Spl have a higher or identical percentage of fatal hits than the .45ACP. (Please note that I'm just quoting the study, not advocating fatality figures as a way of assessing self-defense rounds.)

The .22, the .380 and .38Spl have a better or identical percentage of one shot stops as the .45ACP.

Interestingly enough, that's true even though those calibers rank lower than the .45ACP study result for accuracy. So they're more effective at killing and more effective at stopping with a single shot even though they don't rank as high for accuracy. What do we make of that?

What do we make of the fact that the .380ACP outranks the 9mm in every category except one?

What that data is telling you isn't that given two bullets with the same diameter, the lighter and slower one will have more terminal effect--we know that can't possibly be true.

It's not telling us that a much heavier, faster, much larger bullet is less likely to be fatal than a much smaller, much lighter, slower bullet. Again, we know that can't possibly be true.

It's telling us that even with all the data Ellifritz compiled and all the analysis he did, other variables that can't be accounted for, and NOT terminal effect, are dominating the data. It's not that the .22LR is really more likely to do more tissue damage than the .45ACP, it's that differences that have nothing to do with terminal effect are controlling the outcomes. That makes the results seem nonsensical if one tries to interpret them based on the assumption that the differences in outcome are based on differences in terminal effect.

 

[Socorro27]

Do we really want to look at the number of hits needed to incapacitate from Ellifritz's data? If we do, then we would have to say that the .22, the .32, the .380, and the .38Spl are all significantly superior to the .45ACP.

The .22, the .380 and .38Spl have a better or identical percentage of one shot stops as the .45ACP.

Interestingly enough, that's true even though those calibers rank lower than the .45ACP study result for accuracy. So they're more effective at killing and more effective at stopping with a single shot even though they don't rank as high for accuracy. What do we make of that?

What do we make of the fact that the .380ACP outranks the 9mm in every category except one?

.380 is effective because the shooter knows it is weak and takes an extra 1/2 second to aim. Look at the bear article I linked to earlier. The 9mm was just as effective at stopping bears as other rounds including some of the bigger rounds. Why? Because the 9mm shooter knew (according to conventional belief) that the round was weak for bear and took care to aim for the brain.

 

[rust collector]

In response to the OP, nothing lives up to the hype, and nothing is as good as we want or see on television. As others have noted, there is no agreement on so much as the criteria for evaluation, so a definitive answer is not possible. The question seems to be what would convince the OP to opt for a 45 ACP rather than 9x19. Only he can answer this based upon his criteria.

Do I have that right, @The Exile? Or have you checked out of your own controversy?

 

[Kleanbore]

This

What that data is telling you isn't that given two bullets with the same diameter, the lighter and slower one will have more terminal effect--we know that can't possibly be true.

And this

It's not telling us that a much heavier, faster, much larger bullet is less likely to be fatal than a much smaller, much lighter, slower bullet. Again, we know that can't possibly be true

Prove this

It's telling us that even with all the data Ellifritz compiled and all the analysis he did, other variables that can't be accounted for, and NOT terminal effect, are dominating the data.

Which is because of this

"The study" involves matters that depend on far more variables than the amount (number) of data can properly address.

 

[SDGlock23]

I like the .45 an awful lot, of course no cartridge is perfect but the .45 is one of cartridges I choose to use. It's very American, has a rich history and I mean let's face it, it pokes big holes and it shoots easy. I understand why people like 9mm, mainly it's cheap and it also has higher capacity, but it's a smaller, lighter bullet. Is it still deadly though? Obviously, I'm sure 9mm has put more people in the ground than any other cartridge in existence. That doesn't mean it's the best however.

Keeping this to solely 9mm vs. 45, there are times I'd rather have the .45 and depending on guns, times I'd rather have 9mm. If it's say a G21 vs G17, I'd take the G21. If it's a commander size 1911 .45 vs. a G19, I'll take the G19 for capacity alone. Lately I've been pondering on why people say fast follow up shots are so important and I think mainly that, besides capacity, it's really the only area where the 9mm can claim to be "better". Think about that, the 9mm cannot win a ballistic argument, the only supposed advantages of it are all on the users end, which I dare say is not where we should be focused.

The issue though of faster follow up shots, for civilian use, is that such a claim really only offers an advantage at the range, say in competition. Sounds odd to say perhaps, but in real life, we're responsible for every bullet we may have to fire and not only that, if each shot fired is absolutely justified.That means that between shots we are going to need to perceive if the next shot is needed, which will slow us down....down to the point where any caliber can be fired plenty fast enough, yes even the larger ones.

We aren't cops and shouldn't act like one, mag dumping into someone just because we see cops do it is a good way to land yourself in prison. What cops can get away with could put you behind bars. My point is this, if we're unfortunate enough to have to use a weapon to defend ourselves, yes shoot until the threat is stopped but there's a fine line between enough and what could be considered excessive and justifying each shot will slow down our shot to shot speed, which means at that point, that supposed advantage of the 9mm simply doesn't exist, so there's no disadvantage to carrying a bigger caliber.

 

[hso]

This is just going around in circles. Time to take a break.