Your scale is bogus. It was always bogus. There is no shocking power with a handgun. With a rifle, sometimes. With a handgun, no.
“Unfortunately, although many still don’t realize it, the Thompson-LeGarde tests were fatally flawed and revealed nothing about handgun stopping power.
The first test protocol involved shooting hung human cadavers and attempting to measure the swing imparted by the impact of a pistol bullet. No rigorous attempt was made to choose corpses of identical size and weight. No examination of the permanent crush cavity caused by the bullet’s impact was made. Nor was there any attempt to determine if this test had any scientific correlation with actual stopping power. (You will probably not be surprised to find that it doesn’t.)
The second test protocol involved shooting live cattle with the same small number of handgun calibers and loads. (I believe this took place at a slaughter house.) No attempt was made to differentiate between the sex of the animals, their size, or their vitality. Nor was their any attempt to standardize the number of shots fired at any one animal. Some were shot once, some twice and some animals were shot three (or possibly more) times. Thus, any comparison of loads was fatally flawed from the outset. If you read the raw Thompson-LeGarde data, you will discover that almost all of the animals were finally put down by a sledgehammer blow, not their pistol wounds. I actually read the results of the individual steer tests and the only steer I remember being killed outright by a bullet was hit with a high velocity round from a .30 Mauser pistol, which created secondary bone fragments that quickly killed the animal. However, Thompson and LeGarde ignored this result and did not conclude that the U.S. military should adopt the .30 Mauser cartridge.
These unfortunate bovines were vastly bigger and physically very different from human beings, which means that even had the Thompson-LeGarde testing on live steers been a carefully controlled study, which it was not, the results were inherently meaningless if applied to humans. The only valid conclusion based on the Thompson-LeGarde steer shootings is that no handgun caliber tested was effective at “stopping” steers...
...In particular, Colonel Hatcher extrapolated from the Thompson-LeGarde non-results his formula for Relative Stopping Power, to which he added bullet form coefficients based entirely on his personal and subjective opinion about the effect of bullet material (lead or FMJ) and nose shapes (mostly RN and flat point variations) on stopping power. Hatcher completely ignored expanding bullets of any sort in devising his formula. The result was rating the .45 ACP, 230 grain RN/FMJ service load a 95% effective one shot man stopper, which is a huge over estimation of that load’s actual effectiveness. The bottom line is that the Hatcher formula, based as it was on Thompson-LeGarde extrapolated into a mathematical formula, is worthless for comparing the actual stopping power of various handgun calibers and loads.”
http://www.chuckhawks.com/handgun_stopping_power.htm
“SHOCK to the body is the point, to STOP the person in a FIGHT situation from continuing his action.”
It doesn’t happen. If the bullet doesn’t hit anything vital, the person can still function. If the person is determined, he can function with anything short of severe damage to the central nervous system. Try reading the FBI, which took a more scientific approach that Hatcher did:
http://www.firearmstactical.com/pdf/fbi-hwfe.pdf
Or, they may be stopped by psychological reasons - they know they have been hit and their body thinks the proper response is to stop. That is why a 22 LR has had many one shot stops, and why the 45 has often failed: it all depends on what you hit and how determined the person is.
Any hunter knows you can gut shoot a deer with a 375 H&H Magnum and have it run away, or drop it with a 243 that hits a vital. You can also shoot a deer in the heart with either of those and have it run for 10 seconds. Or drop with one shot. It depends on the deer and what you hit.
You know what I’m writing is correct. Would you prefer to be shot in the shoulder with a 45 or in the heart with a 38? Which one will stop you first?
“Realistic Expectations: I think this is where we go astray; we expect way too much from our handguns. Hunters have known that seemingly equivalent shots on similar animals can produce very differing results. One may instantly drop while the other runs, yet both received lethal hits to the heart/lung area. This is so often seen that’s it’s accepted. Deadly force scenarios for most of us are much rarer and there are folks interested in self-protection that have no experience in hunting; they have never seen anything shot. They have never seen a deer with a shredded heart run a hundred yards. They have seen shoot-em’-ups on television and movies. Many of us do not have the proper “respect” for what adrenaline can do and most have not witnessed the damage a person on PCP can withstand and just keep going!
If a 150 pound deer can be shot through the heart with a .30-06 180-gr. expanding bullet at 2700 ft/sec and keep moving, should we expect that a 200 pound human hit with a 180-gr. expanding forty-caliber bullet at 975 ft/sec to be instantly incapacitated?
I believe it’s an unrealistic expectation to assume that any defensive pistol cartridge will deck a human being as though struck by lightning. It will happen on some occasions, but not all and probably not the majority...
...If you shoot a forty-five as well as a 9mm, go with the former, but do not expect it to be vastly superior to the nine. With equivalent hits, I doubt that much if any difference will be seen. If one does better with the 9mm, I’d cast my lot with it. Once you have a caliber capable of adequate penetration and expansion, placement is power.”
http://www.snubnose.info/docs/No_faith.htm
There is also a very good discussion found here:
Thank you for the links Mr Rogers. I have been out of the gun industry since the late 70s. . . and obviously there has been a lot of work done on this subject since then. Thank you for the education. I appreciate it.