If you are just a few feet away when armed attack against you starts and you manage to score a hit against attacker just before he (being sexist) pulls trigger will that hit carry enough umph to stop the action, or are you now shot too? About to be stabbed by knife, will your 32 prevent the stab or will your follow up shots come after you have sustained a serious wound?
Like I said before, 32 will kill someone, but that's not the goal of SD shooting. You would like to stop their aggressive action from hurting you. With less than 100# KE they may or may not show a reaction to being solidly hit.
I still don't believe that attacks are stopped by KE numbers or what they represent. I believe that, in greater than 99 percent of cases, they are stopped by one of two other things: disability/incapacitation, such as a shot (or multiple shots) that makes it physically impossible for the attacker to continue, or the decision on the part of the attacker to abort. Cases of the latter are far more common, and in the majority of
those cases, no shot is even required. Cases of the former require head or CNS shots almost exclusively, which can be as tricky for a .380ACP as for the lowly .32.
We're all taking a gamble, no matter what caliber sidearm we're carrying. Our first gamble is that we'll never even need them.
For my P-32 to fail me in a defensive role, all of the following failures in my self-protection plan would have to occur first: 1) A threat presents itself to me and I am unable to detect it in time to avoid it, and 2) I am unable to evade it, to remove myself from the situation in time to head off a confrontation, and 3) this takes place on one of the very few days I am actually carrying the P-32 over my PF-9 as my primary means of defense (beyond the mental skills in place already), and 4) I am unable to present my means of self-defense in a manner timely enough to convince the suspect I am a serious threat to him if he does not cease and desist, or he does not recognize the threat I present, and 5) I am unable to deploy and fire my weapon in the event the previous four failures have occurred, and 6) the attacker continues to fail to recognize the threat I present to him as being more significant than anything he could gain by continuing his attack against me despite being shot or shot at, and 7) all shots available to me, as well as any other means available to me to continue my counter-attack, remain insufficient, and 8) I remain unable to otherwise extricate myself from the situation.
That's a long chain of failures that must go unbroken for a defender to come out as the "loser" in a criminal attack. Yes, it does indeed happen, but that's not what we're dissecting here. What we're dissecting here is the .32 against the .380 in self-defense, since that's where the thread was headed. Given my lifestyle and protection plan, of which I alone am the expert here, I'm confident that I am not going to be injured or killed because I was carrying a P-32 instead of a P3-AT. If I ever am injured or killed while carrying only the P-32, it will be due to circumstances in which my PF-9 would have also been insufficient (as would likely any handgun I can carry about me.)
