Posted on 06/08/2014 4:50:58 PM PDT by maddog55
You understand some of the essential elements at play. As you noted, blood loss. Air embolism as well, along with pneumothorax (and sometimes hemothorax), airway compromise, and infection. If you’re in EMS or have been trained on TC3 those are what you’ve been trained to treat in order to save lives. That is what kills, not “energy”; simply big holes in and big holes out that intersect with important organs and blood vessels along the way — generally energy beyond what is necessary to push a projectile through a body is going to be uselessly zinging off into the wild blue yonder. Hydrostatic shock is largely a myth, and will be until we’ve got man-portable railguns firing hypersonic or high-hypersonic projectiles.
Self defense ammunition must, by definition, quickly and reliably stop an IMMEDIATE threat to your life or the lives of others. However, there’s a tradeoff we have to deal with here, as you noted. The most lethal ammunition we could use, the same ammunition we would choose to hunt large game with due to it’s ability to quickly, reliably, and humanely drop an animal, is simply NOT suitable for self-defense; despite its ability to quickly stop a would-be-murderer.
I would choose to hunt large North American animals with jacketed soft-points, or something like hard-cast lead in a semi-wadcutter or Keith-style if I were using a lever-action. Due to the ability of those particular projectile designs to reliably penetrate completely through an animal while retaining mass, and creating large entry and exit wounds to facilitate rapid blood loss and air embolism, such projectiles make ideal choices for quickly, reliably, and humanely harvesting large game. However such projectiles are not well-suited to self-defense despite their extreme lethality.
By definition a self-defense situation is a situation where I am required to immediately take a shot in order to save my life or the lives of others; by definition I will NOT be able to wait for the perfect shot angle some other day, by definition I will likely NOT be afforded the luxury of choosing to hold my fire until I have a safe backstop and a clear range, by definition I will be reacting to an assailant and likely doing so under unfavorable circumstances. There may be innocent bystanders just a sheet-rock wall away.
Whenever possible one would wish to avoid such nasty situations, and not just because no sane, decent human being wishes to take another person’s life. Whenever and wherever possible people that understand the realities of self-defense try to do everything in their power to avoid situations where self-defense would be necessary — by avoidance, by deterrence, by deescalation, whenever possible. For those reasons I’d like to see public policy and social institutions in place that deter, discourage and reduce crime, as well as incapacitate criminals, but sadly liberals appear to prefer policies that enable, encourage, embolden, facilitate and even create criminals.
But when such situations cannot be avoided, and immediate action must be taken in order to save lives, the most rational trade-off between reliably stopping an assailant and not sending lethal projectiles sailing into the night is to choose a modern bonded jacketed hollowpoint. Typically these are designed to reliably penetrate deep enough to reach vital organs, causing enough damage to physically incapacitate someone trying to do severe harm to yourself or others, while reducing (only reducing) the chance that the projectiles will over-penetrate and pose a threat to bystanders. A projectile that cannot reliably penetrate deep enough to reach vital organs is unlikely to physically incapacitate an assailant, and a projectile that penetrates completely through an assailant is a threat others — hence the reason law enforcement agencies have adopted standards and testing procedures to guarantee that ammunition achieves those parameters.
Look at the type of ammunition your local police departments issue, chances are it’s going to be something along the lines of Ranger, Gold Dot, Golden Saber, the like; all modern bonded jacketed hollowpoints from reputable, established manufacturers that extensively test their offerings and have their ammunition tested by the DOJ or other agencies prior to wide-scale adoption by law enforcement agencies.
Not birdshot, not incendiaries, not foil-wrapped compressed-lead powder, not flechettes, and certainly not a miniature copper fork. Seriously, it may sound boring, but Winchester, Remington, and Federal are in business because they make cartridges that work for their intended purposes. If something really, truly, was a better mousetrap, you’d quickly see it being used by the people whose lives depend upon it and you’d see it or a knock-off of it offered by all the major manufacturers. It’s important to avoid useless gimmicks and the companies that peddle them - they’ll probably sound neater than hell, that’s how the unscrupulous companies selling them expect to make money, but there’s no place for showmanship and snakeoil in life-or-death decisions.
That video I posted earlier shows the RIP ammo performing about as well as two shots from a .22LR, effectively downgrading a capable 9mm pistol into the equivalent of a .22 Derringer. To all the freepers out there, if you are choosing ammunition for a self-defense weapon that you’re going to trust your life to, please pick more effective ammunition than the little-copper-fork.
I’m guessing from your statements that you’ve read Marshal and Sanow’s work and have been blown away by it (pardon the pun).
I have a back ground in statistics, as well as pre-hospital emergency medicine, and all of my education and real-world experience would indicate to me that Marshal and Sanow’s adherents are misrepresenting a small data set and irresponsibly spinning a tall tale.
But, such things are eye-catching and certainly capture the imaginations of people unfamiliar with sampling bias, or worse yet people who don’t understand the limitations imposed by a given methodology, nor the nature of correlation. Creating charts from cherry-picked and unrepresentative data to create fantasy numbers to compare and contrast is naturally going to be more viscerally satisfying than the boring, real-world details really at play.
You mentioned a “very unique condition” not representative of wider self-defense situations, and that certainly applies to the standard of “one shot stop”. The double-tap is frequently taught by self-defense instructors, and every police department I’ve dealt closely with has trained their officers on some variation of the controlled-pair or double-tap. Immediately you can see that this invalidates the sampling technique used in collecting data on “one shot stops”, if you throw out every reasonable and effective defensive gun use in the country by trained persons firing two rounds or more according to their training, and you treat those as a “failure to stop”, then you as a researcher have failed properly construct a model to measure what you intended to measure. Worse that kind of arbitrary definition utterly misrepresents real-world situations.
Despite what people would like to believe, death is just about NEVER instantaneous. Lethal wounds are not by definition instantly lethal, it’s not like flipping a light switch or cutting a puppet’s strings. There is sufficient blood in the brain for cognition and conscious, deliberate action to continue for many seconds, even after (for example) decapitation. People often mistakenly think that it’s amazingly rare for someone to keep fighting after sustaining a lethal wound, when in reality this should be expected to happen as a rule and not an exception. Anyone who hunts should realize that you can make a good shot taking out both lungs and the heart and, if so inclined, said lethally wounded animal can still cover a lot of ground in the seconds left to it.
The only way to nearly-immediately stop a person or an animal is to destroy the central nervous system, though you keep one anchored in place pretty well with damage to the spinal column or sufficient damage to the skeletal structure to keep it from walking.
Those facts should immediately illustrate that the most important factor is going to be shot placement, followed by shot placement, with shot placement being vitally important too. A couple hundred feet per second, a few tens of grains, or a few hundredths of an inch in diameter from a pistol caliber are not going to make a significant difference compared to that, you’re just not going to magically ‘flip the switch’ or ‘cut the strings’ any more often. Trying to cook up numbers that show a significant difference based on those factors is just so much mental masturbation.
Rather than being distracted by unrepresentative numbers someone has cooked up, it’s far more rational to choose a self-defense pistol and cartridge on the basis of what you can comfortably carry and employ, accurately and reliably fire, and whether or not it will fling a projectile that can reasonably penetrate deep enough through flesh and obstructing skeletal features to reach vital organs while leaving a wide wound to facilitate rapid blood loss and air entry; and ideally not go zipping through and off to Tijuana either. After you’ve done that, do everything in your power to avoid having to use it, and if the world isn’t polite enough to go along with that plan and you find lives endangered anyway, then shoot until the threat stops.
Black talons were renamed gokden sabre. The only reason they were black was the coating required not to ruin inferior barrels the fbi wanted.
Let the lawsuits begin with this round. Woe to tge person that puts a few of these in an assaulant. An anti gun DA (pretty much all of them) will love prosecuting the person using these.
I agree. These are nothing to write home about but the concept is interesting. A regular hollow point will have more stopping power but this will make the surgeons job harder because of all the little pieces to find and remove.
Like any handgun round; it’s all about bullet placement anyway. Hit someone in the head or neck with one shot of anything and they will think twice about taking another step forward unless they are high on something like PCP.
"To protect and to serve."
In South Minneapolis leather 50s style leather jackets are the norm for the hoods, that and sub zero temperatures, and layering, really woke me up to clothing issues and bullets.
I think that many of us who grow up in warm and hot climates, don't give enough thought to penetration and seasonal loads for carry.
Forgot....See leather, Head shots, auto pilot thing. I book leather with Kevlar etc.
The video did't really investigate the effect of range, either. This projectile looks very UN-aerodynmaic and might be very slow after .... O say 20 yards or shorter even.
Come on, RIP, ship out a few hundred boxes so we all can try your idea!
The fragmenting shotgun round you want is already made out of steel. Check it out.
http://ddupleks.com/index.php/en/1270-cal/hexolit-32.html
Perfect! Is there a limit on how much I can order?
Maybe only limited by your checkbook balance...
I saw a box of 20 or these 9mm r.i.p. rounds for sale at the last gun show I went to here in N.C. wait for it........$120 dollars !!!! They were still on the table when I left..
Thanks for the reply. My thoughts were any hollow point, BTs, or RIPs, the difference would be minimal compared to where the round hits.
More advertising than impact.
I’ll keep practicing with what I got on the “back forty”
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