I'll go out on a limb here and say that there is no such thing as "over penetration." The term itself makes it sound like complete penetration of your adversary is a bad thing, from a ballistic point of view. The best way to stop your assailant who is trying to kill you is by shooting THROUGH him. That means that we'd like the bullet to expand at least a little bit and we want one hole in and another hole going out. This belief that a bullet must stay inside the adversary to "dump all its energy" is complete nonsense and is the purvey of gun writers, police chiefs and lawyers. Being concerned about being sued is one thing, but advocating the carry of less than effective ammo for the explicit purpose of not being sued is another matter entirely.

Does this mean that we want to go around carrying ball ammo? No, not at all. In this day and age we have bonded cores (Speer Gold Dot) and homogenous construction (Barnes XPB) which should expand at least a little bit and retain enough weight to punch on through. In my experience, many of our better loadings today simply lack velocity. It's unfortunate that we have some of the best technology and it's being defeated by watered down ammo. From what I've seen out on the street, we're far better served by jacketed flat points than most of the hollow points we have nowadays.

I will concur with the laws of physics and momentum in that all else being equal, heavier is almost always better.

Dave Sinko