Quote:
Originally Posted by diyj98
How far was Rodny when he was shot? I'm betting a heck of a lot further than the distance most of us could ever shoot inside our homes.
|
Not particularly far. Unfortunately, all we have to go on is his own hazy memory.
Quote:
|
Here's another experiment. Test that birdshot penetration on ballistic gel at chicken ranges (the 40 to 50 yards) versus home defense ranges (10 feet to 30 feet at most?). Wait, I believe that was just done in the Gunblast video posted above.
|
Couple things here.
(1) The material in the Gunblast video was some meat. Pretty easy to tear a steak apart with your hands. Not as easy to shred live human flesh.
(2) Ballistic gelatin tests for birdshot in the #8-#5 range show penetration of 2-4 inches at 7-10 yards. That's bare gelatin, as well. The problem is that despite the velocity of individual pellets, they don't have a lot of mass. At #2 sizes, you get to around 10". Buckshot in the #4 and larger size gets you to 15-20".
(3) Ballistic gelatin is misinterpreted frequently, just as you have. People like looking at "wound channels" and "stretch cavities" because it confirms what they already think and they like pretty pictures. Which is sort've silly, because a block of gelatin is just a dead, uniform mass, about as far from living tissue as you can imagine. The real story is in the recovered projectiles and where they ended up. Did they all expand consistently? What depth did they penetrate? Measuring penetrative depth doesn't tell you how far a projectile will penetrate an attacker (remember: bones, skin, living stuff), but it does give you a reasonable way to compare penetration between projectiles of different diameters, weights, and velocities. Presuming, of course, that your ballistic gelatin is uniform and consistent, which it basically never is on a test-to-test basis.
TL;DR--I sure wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of either one, but if you made me use a shotgun, I'd load with buck all day long.