Hang with me here. I’ve been thinking a lot lately (dangerous i know) about handgun cartridge ballistics and effectiveness. It was sparked by a comment made by a senior ballistician at Federal Ammunition during a short video i was watching. He commented that hydrostatic shock isn’t a reliable thing until you get up to over 2300 fps, though it can happen intermittently at speeds as low as 1800 fps depending one the mass of the bullet and the part of the body struck by the bullet. He then reiterated the now generally accepted principle that handguns generally just poke holes in people, so the important part for self defense is to ensure that your bullet is going to penetrate the assailant deep enough to reliably stop the threat, followed in a distant second by the concept that bigger holes with sufficient penetration are better than smaller holes with sufficient penetration. He then commented that they don’t develop self defense loads trying to achieve max pressure or max velocity for a given cartridge and bullet weight, but rather they try to load to ensure that that round generally perform within their acceptable penetration window (12 to 18 inches of penetration in ballistic gel after passing through some replicas of heavy clothing, ie. The FBI protocol). He also explained that they recognize that ballistic gel and living flesh are two different things, and that 12-18 inches in gel will yield a different result in flesh, but that that result will be more reliably lethal in living flesh if the round meets the 12-18 inch gel penetration standard, which standard is measurable and repeatable for testing purposes.
These statements were insightful, I thought, since there is so much marketing of self defense rounds that ignore these things.
Which begs the question, why is there so much focus (some might term it marketing hype) on the velocity of the newest and greatest self defense round? Seems to me that an ammo company might do better to market their self defense rounds as “reliably meets the FBI ballistic protocols when shot from a 4 inch barrel.” I think i would find this more persuasive as a marketing tool than “124 grains at 1200 fps”.
So, as I’ve been stewing on these principles, and doing various amounts of load development, i happened to have a chance at shooting some small game at 25 yards using a very light 148 gn hbwc (700 fps) out of a 38 special. The results were devastating on the animal. Knocked it down right there with a clean .38 hole straight through. I then watched a few videos doing ballistic testing of 38 hbwc bullets and saw that they were frequently meeting the FBI penetration standard with very little recoil (though admittedly also very little expansion).
And this made me say to myself, aren’t we all fooling ourselves with the endless discussions about which is the best self defense round? And letting the industry lead us around by the nose for the newest and greatest thing? If the round penetrates sufficiently, then the only remaining debates are really just recoil, expansion, and round capacity, all of which are so dependent on case by case circumstances that they aren’t worth debating about which is “best” because there isn’t one?
Long story short, I’m feeling like the whole self defense round debate is a tempest in a teacup, which is constantly being stirred by the ammo industry to drive sales. But really, there’s been equally effective self defense rounds out there for more than 40 years.
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These statements were insightful, I thought, since there is so much marketing of self defense rounds that ignore these things.
Which begs the question, why is there so much focus (some might term it marketing hype) on the velocity of the newest and greatest self defense round? Seems to me that an ammo company might do better to market their self defense rounds as “reliably meets the FBI ballistic protocols when shot from a 4 inch barrel.” I think i would find this more persuasive as a marketing tool than “124 grains at 1200 fps”.
So, as I’ve been stewing on these principles, and doing various amounts of load development, i happened to have a chance at shooting some small game at 25 yards using a very light 148 gn hbwc (700 fps) out of a 38 special. The results were devastating on the animal. Knocked it down right there with a clean .38 hole straight through. I then watched a few videos doing ballistic testing of 38 hbwc bullets and saw that they were frequently meeting the FBI penetration standard with very little recoil (though admittedly also very little expansion).
And this made me say to myself, aren’t we all fooling ourselves with the endless discussions about which is the best self defense round? And letting the industry lead us around by the nose for the newest and greatest thing? If the round penetrates sufficiently, then the only remaining debates are really just recoil, expansion, and round capacity, all of which are so dependent on case by case circumstances that they aren’t worth debating about which is “best” because there isn’t one?
Long story short, I’m feeling like the whole self defense round debate is a tempest in a teacup, which is constantly being stirred by the ammo industry to drive sales. But really, there’s been equally effective self defense rounds out there for more than 40 years.
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