The idea that someone will take a .45 through the thigh and keep charging you isn't very realistic either.
It isn't probable, but it does and can happen. The point isn't how probable it is, the point is that destroying a small part of a person's thigh is not any sort of a guarantee that they will be incapacitated.
The fact is that it's not probable that someone will charge you once you pull out a gun. 9 times out of 10 they will run when the gun appears. But it does happen sometimes.
It's also not probable that a person who is shot (anywhere, regardless of the severity of the wound) will continue to attack. The FBI says that most people who are shot give up rather than continue attacking--even if they're not severely wounded or incapacitated. But some do continue attacking.
The POINT is that none of those things have anything to do with caliber. They have to do with the mindset of the attacker.
I was responding to a comment that implied that choosing a .45ACP was a good idea because shooting an attacker in the thigh would put him on his backside.
The point is that if it does put him on his backside (or causes him to break off the attack) the odds are that he's not doing it because he's incapacitated, he's doing it because being shot has rearranged his priorities. And that is, at best, only peripherally related to the caliber of the bullet that hit him.
You are describing a thigh as if it were a block of ballistic gelatin.
Not at all, I'm merely attempting to provide a little bit of perspective.
It's instructive to understand just how little tissue is actually damaged by a typical handgun bullet. It helps to understand why failures to stop occur, for one thing. It never hurts to be able to quantify something as long as we keep in mind the assumptions or simplifications that maybe wrapped up into that quantification.
Statistically speaking, 90% of statistics are pulled from thin air with no corroborating fact.
Statistics don't tell the whole story but that's not sufficient rationale for totally dismissing them and basically making stuff up or speculating instead.
Statistics are a way to condense large amounts of "experience" into a reasonably easy to understand format. They can be used to mislead or they can be used to inform and enlighten.
The reason this topic is so confusing to many is that people would rather believe what they want to believe rather than actually taking a look at what we can learn from the experience of others (in the form of statistics or case studies) or from doing some simple math to actually determine how much tissue a bullet can be expected to damage.
A .22 is minimum state mandated coverage. If you think that's enough to get you by, good for you. And now that the insurance allusion has been beat sufficiently, I'll just hope you don't get into a situation that will require more than the state minimum while simultaneous hoping we're not in your car when it happens.
That's a reasonable analogy, and I don't disagree at all.
The point is that we have some people on this thread who are basically saying: "If you can't afford to carry more than the state mandated minimum coverage you might as well just not have any insurance at all."
What I'm saying is that even the "minimum coverage" is better than none at all, and while it's certainly not ideal, it doesn't mean you're automatically doomed if you "have an accident".
I would characterize the viewpoints in the thread a bit differently.
1. A .22 is fine for self defensive carry.
2. A .22 is less effective than other choices but some choose to (or are forced to) make that trade off.
3. A .22 is not sufficient for self defensive carry and those who do so are ignorant and irresponsible.
A fair summation. I would characterize my opinion as falling into category 2.
As I have already said, I would never recommend it up front as a defensive caliber, but I have recommended it to some who have either stated or made it plain that they either couldn't or wouldn't carry or shoot anything larger.
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