JHP versus FMJ

[message_board_expert]

Last year or so an Alaskan guide and his party encountered a grizzly bear in the bush and the guide shot and killed it with a 9mm semi-auto stoked with ball ammo best I recall. Just goes to illustrate in that instance the power of penetration with ball ammo where people in the background are not an overriding concern.

 

[mscampbell2734]

Interesting thread. My question is in a 1911 do you want 230gr. HST in std. or +P?

Standard

My Department issued HST +P for several years and had to switch to standard pressure when the number of damaged and malfunctioning guns became unignorable.

Plastic guns, Glocks, were largely unaffected by hot loads but the smaller 1911s and 4516s had huge issues with them.

 

[BB57]

I came into the FBI five years after the 4/11/86 shooting, and met several of the participants.

One of the many take-aways (most never made public) was that penetration was supremely important.

If Jerry Dove's much-maligned 115 grain Silvertip had been an FMJ round it would have punched through Platt's arm and chest and made a hole in his heart.

We didn't go to FMJs, but we did go to deep-penetrating 147 grain 9mm loads.

It was a pendulum swing and a bit of an extreme one at that.

SigP220.45's account of the 9mm silver tip failure due to under penetration served to show why the older scientific model of a hollow point with lots of expansion and quickly dumping all its energy in a 6-8" wound channel just didn't work consistently *in the real world*.

However, the FBI then swung way too far in the wrong direction and had different failures due to deep penetrating 147 gr hollow points that often failed to expand and didn't produce a stop either. Small wound channels have less volume and don't reduce blood pressure as rapidly as larger wound channels.

That's ultimately what led to the current FBI ballistic gel test requirements where the FBI expects a load to consistently achieve both a minimum 150% expansion and penetration between 12" and 18" in both bare and heavy clothing covered 10% ballistic gel when fired from their issued handguns.

The piece that people forget is that the FBI derived those test standards and requirements based on the the performance in gel testing of certain loads that performed consistently well (but not perfect) in actual real world shoots.

The idea was to find what did work consistently well in a large number of shoots, then base gel test performance standards on how those loads performed in gel tests. It's the field data that provides the validity, gel test data is just the reliable method of gauging performance.

Once established, gel test standards allowed new loads to be tested in an objective, reliable (repeatable) manner.

But again, the *validity* of those test standards was based on field performance and field performance data is still used to continually validate those standards.

——

Lots of folks still say than penetration is the most important factor. And yet the FBI has never advocated for an FMJ or ball round in modern times, nor does any major police department issue them.

IIRC the MI highway patrol was the first agency to move to 9mm and they used FMJ. They immediately had numerous failure to stop issues with it and agencies in general just stopped going down that FMJ path.

In addition, an armed citizen who fully owns the criminal and civil liability attached to each bullet fired, over penetration should be a concern.

 

[BB57]

The OP's comment about "survivor bias" is interesting. I know an ER nurse in Detroit who's had quite a lot of experience with treatment of shootees. She has noted that calibers seem to be getting larger over the years - used to be lots of people were shot with .25's and .32's, now she sees more 9mm's and .40's. But she doesn't see many shotgun wounds. One might conclude, therefore, that not many shotguns are used in these situations. Not so. She tells me that the shotgun shootees just go straight to the morgue, they almost never see them in the ER. No doubt more handguns are used than shotguns but the point is you can't determine how many shotguns are used by what turns up in the ER. Same way with bullets. Might be the people shot with the very best bullets just never show up in the ER. Maybe we should be looking at numbers from the morgues too.

That's the point made in my post regarding a thoracic surgeon who felt the 45 ACP 230 gr FMJ was the deadliest handgun round. Large caliber with fewer hits and wound channels,
and non expanding bullets resulting in more people shot with it surviving long enough to reach his OR, and then a higher percentage of them dying on the table.

In that case, seeing fewer people shot with 9mm hollow points and having fewer of them die in the OR doesn't necessarily mean 9mm hollow points are less deadly, and has little bearing on whether they are more or les effective at producing a stop.

You always need to look at the big picture - including what's missing in the data and or the flaws in how data is collected.

 

[old tanker]

...Prior to the FBI going to the 9mm they had their ComputerMan model with RII which said rapid expansion, limited penetration was what was needed by LE...

Blasting bullets into Jello, filming temporary wound cavities with high speed cameras, the Justice Department touted the RII and "hydrostatic crock" throughout the Seventies. Winchester's engineers built them the bullet that did what they said they wanted. Miami proved them wrong.

Someone who has spent many a fall looking at leaves "change color" likely has a better understanding of what bullets do to flesh and bone and how living things react to being shot. Most can also attest as to how seemingly identical hits can result in wildly different reactions.