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Old 03-10-2017, 09:57 PM
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Originally Posted by Ziggy2525 View Post
I'm not a LEO or a Coroner. I do analytics. Seems to me, in all of these caliber debates, people are trying to use the probability of one event to predict the probability of another event without knowing if they are correlated.

As a civilian CHP holder, I carry to stop a threat that could kill or severely injure me or my loved ones (and possibly a stranger depending on circumstances). The statistic that matters to me is how often a particular caliber and type round failed to protect a defender from death or severe injury when it was fired in self defense and struck the BG.

One extreme could be that every BG that was shot with a .380 died, but before they died the BG was still able to kill or severely injure every GG that was using the .380 (or any other caliber).

OTOH, the other extreme would be that no BG was ever killed with a .380 fired in self defense, but no GG that used a .380 for self defense was ever injured or killed either. That would be pretty effective.

It's what happens to the GG that fired their weapon in self defense that matters (again - pick a caliber) .

The outcome for the BG might be relevant if there was some data that showed that the outcomes for the CHP GG and the BG are correlated. I've looked. I haven't seen anything that relates the two things.
There are some interesting pitfalls when you start looking at data. For example, back in my investigator days I knew a chest cutter (thoracic surgeon) who had emigrated from South Africa. Over his career he had treated about 1500 gun shot wounds and he expressed to me once that he felt the most lethal pistol load was the .45 ACP with a 230 gr FMJ.

That gave me pause for a minute as it's actually counter to what most people on the pointy end of the stick had observed, until I considered his point of reference and the sample of gun shot victims he treated. In short, the majority of people he treated survived long enough to end up on his operating table. He never saw the GSW victims that did not live that long. Thus it skews his sample group pretty significantly as his point of reference excludes the people who were dead at the scene.

It's roughly analogous to the operational research done during WWII into increasing armor protection in bomber aircraft. The conventional thinkers wanted to place armor in the areas where they observed the most damage in aircraft that returned from combat. The out of the box thinkers like Abraham Wald however, noted that the aircraft being studied all returned from combat, and thus the damaged areas represented survivable damage while the areas they never observed damage, were the areas that required protection as damage in those areas was not survivable.

My chest cutter friend also noted that the more bullet wounds a patient had the more likely the patient was going to die, as even small wound tracks compromised more systems and damaged more organs and created a greater possibility of creating damage he could not fix, or could not fix in time. In other words, 10 rounds of .22 LR in the torso may not create any useful degree of rapid incapacitation (and is thus a very poor self defense round), but those 10 .22 caliber wound channels will very likely result in the victim dying in a few hours, day, or weeks, so the .22 LR is potentially very lethal when multiple hits are involved.

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I'm a moderate in the sense that I see the value of ballistic gelatin testing in terms of measuring and comparing bullet performance, however I don't think that very quantifiable and repeatable data has any real meaning if it is not correlated with actual rapid incapacitation in real world engagements.

I have all of Marshall and Sanow's books on the shelf, but just mentioning their names will get a vitriolic reaction as the hard core jell junkies tend to despise the research and lit reviews they've done trying to develop a better model that does a better job of explaining and predicting bullet performance. The haters go out of their way to find potential flaws in what is a very complex subject.

There's not just room for both points of view, but in fact a need for both points of view.
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