Replies

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.