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Old 08-30-2009, 03:30 PM
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Erich Erich is online now
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Location: High Desert of NM, USA
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As much as I hate to disagree with my friend flopshank, I just have a different opinion on this one.

So, I've worked in some capacity on a couple dozen killings with .380s, and a few more .380 shootings in which no one was killed. I've seen three instances of .380 JHPs (Hydra-shoks and Golden Sabers, IIRC) failing to adequately penetrate - and this actually represents the majority of the .380 JHP cases I've seen (I think there were a couple others, but I've seen many more shootings with ball in this caliber). Now, in those failures, one guy lived after being shot three times (once in the head, once in the chest and once in the ***), though another guy was killed by the same .380 Hydra-Shok used in that shooting. In the other case, the JHPs (I'm pretty sure they were GSs) failed to penetrate various barriers, but both guys were later killed with execution-style headshots with the same rounds.

Based on what I've seen, it is very common for a bullet to need to penetrate an arm or some similar barrier before it can get to the vitals at which it was aimed. Slow, light bullets (and, yes, 95-grains at under 1k fps is slow and light in my opinion) like those put out by the .380 don't seem to do well when hollowpoint "brakes" are utilized.

Over the course of the 200 handgun killing cases I've worked on (and taking into account my sometimes unique ability to get the detailed afterstory from the shooter himself), I've come to the belief that, to be assured of stopping, one must put hits on vital structures (brain/spinal cord or heart/aorta) of an aggresssor. I don't see how .380 JHPs add to a shooting's effectiveness, but I've seen a high percentage of instances in which they detracted from it. I wouldn't use .380 JHPs - not that they can't work, just that I've seen too many cases (for my comfort level) in which they failed to work. They'd be great for putting down a wounded horse, however (there was just a thread on this, so the thought is fresh in my mind) - or other execution-style or perfectly unimpeded-to-the-vitals shots. The realities of force-on-force combat render the availability of such shots something on which we would be foolish to depend.

That said, I've never seen a case in which .380 ball failed to adequately penetrate. I know an experienced pathologist we used as an expert who carries .380 ball . . . and he completely agrees with me on the essentiality of targeting vital structures and not just "center of mass" with handguns. (Gray's Anatomy is online: Gray, Henry. 1918. Anatomy of the Human Body . Study it.)

In fact, I've worked on one shooting in which a .380 ball round (out of a relatively long barrel) overpenetrated and injured an unintended victim (Rule 4, people). Now I've seen a whole lot of .380 ball rounds not overpenetrate, but this shows how Mas is right when he warns us to consider the dangers of overpenetration, even with mousegun rounds. (I have to say that I've wondered a bit whether the .380 might not just be the perfect storm of perhaps-too-penetrative in a ball round and not-sufficiently-penetrative in a JHP. Given the similarity of the ballistics, I wonder the same thing about the 9x19Mak. Those blowback calibers are sure not 9x19 ball, though, which is pretty much guaranteed to overpenetrate.)

Alas, I'm not with friend flopshank on the 110-gr .38s, either. I'd simply never use such unless I were in dire straits and that was all that was available. But I'm glad that we can all be friends nevertheless.
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