Doc,
There seems to be a fair amount to argue with in your last post. What jumps out is the experimentally un-demonstrable, and therefore gratuitous assertion about same shot placement for a .22 and a larger caliber having the same incapacitation effect. Bigger bullets corrupt more tissue volume, so you are basically arguing that greater tissue damage has no additional likelihood of producing a stop. Everyone from Fackler to the physiologist of your choice is likely to disagree with that assertion.
An example: A couple of decades ago there was an incident reported in, I think, TAR's Armed Citizen column, in which an abusive man violated a restraining order to assault his ex. She shot him with a 25 Auto, piercing his aorta. He responded by getting mad and wresting the gun from her grip and then striking her with it, breaking bones in her face and knocking her unconscious. He then walked a couple of blocks, sat down at the curb and died. You're telling me a .45 tearing through the same spot would not have stopped him any sooner? The .25, pretty similar in shape and size to a .22 LR bullet, had basically created a small but leaky hole. The bigger bullet hitting the same location would have made a much faster leak, and may even have bisected the aorta completely. And you don't think that would have stopped him any faster? Maybe I'm wrong and you are right. I just find it difficult to accept that he could complete wrestling the gun from the woman much less walk two blocks with a severed aorta. Also, even though the woman lived, I have a hard time considering that an example of really successful defense with a gun. It didn't do an adequate job of stopping him to prevent her further injuries. Death is not the only criteria at either end of the stick.
By your definition, the closest thing to the *ultimate* private weapon is probably a shotgun, as there are few folks who won't run from the business end of one. I recall reading of an incident in which a gang banger dropped his 9 and surrendered to an officer armed with a .45, saying "that's no fair; you got a .45". No question, the no-shot-fired weapon with the greatest stopping power is the one that is scariest looking to the bad guy. However, the size of the hole at the muzzle generally promotes scariness in that regard, and thus, if the officer had used a .22, it seems likely he'd have found himself in a gunfight. I can't prove it, but suspect strongly there will be a greater chance you will actually have to shoot if you present a small gun for the bad guy's consideration. Any number of these folks have been shot multiple times in the past and don't have normal fear of it.
There was an example of that lack of normal fear written up in Esquire some years back. I still have the article somewhere. IIRC the author was either a playwright or a screen writer, and wrote the article under a pen name to avoid Hollywood knowing his real identity. He described a confrontation in which the leader of a group of thugs demanded his wallet. The playwright drew his licensed 9 mm. The leader said "(Expletive), you aren't going to shoot me", and proceeded to advance on the author, who lowered his muzzle and shot the thug in the thigh. The thug went down, repeating the same expletive several times, and then looked at his crew and pointed out he'd been shot and demanded to know if they weren't going to do something about it? They weren't. The author crossed the street away from the gang. They didn't pursue. He wrote that he considered calling an ambulance, but then asked himself, "would they have called an ambulance for me?" So he didn't and never reported the incident to authorities. After all, the thug wasn't going to tell police he got shot trying to mug somebody. Nobody was dead, and nobody was robbed or beaten, either. The real world level of justice seems about right, even if it wasn't right under the letter of the law. Let the thug deal with doctors, police questions, and so on. He made an effort to bring it on himself, so he earned it.
Regarding energy, your comment about nothing but a big game rifle having enough capacity to disable via energy transfer sounds like a confused bit of physics. Any terminal ballistic event involves the transfer of energy, so your statement literally says that handguns can't incapacitate anyone and only a big game rifle can. That would be an odd position from which to champion the .22 rimfire rounds. Instead, I expect you meant that only high power rifles create temporary cavities that exceed the elastic limit of the tissue in a wide enough radius to disable without a direct hit on a vital area. That is generally true, but can depend on where the bullet hits. A handgun bullet's permanent wound channel is normally no greater for a hollow point than it is for a solid. Indeed, Fackler comments that at autopsy you cannot typically discern whether a hollow point or a solid handgun bullet made the wound. However, if an expanded bullet strikes the liver, which has a low elastic limit and poor tensile strength, it will do damage well beyond its diameter and incapacitate all but the most effectively drugged person.
Where I think we will agree is that power cannot make up for poor shot placement. Cooper always advised using the most potent round you can control, but no larger, as that maximized the chance of getting a stop. Why don't the Ellifritz stats seem to confirm that? They may, with the graph Frank pointed to. But the reality is most people don't limit themselves to rounds they can actually control well under stress, and most don't practice enough to control them all that well even when not under stress. They
do make the mistake of assuming the power of the round will make up for their control deficiencies. So there's a good chance, even limiting the information to head and torso hits, that you are comparing more poorly placed higher power shots with better placed lower power shots. Identical shot placement for comparison almost never happens in real life as even slight changes in angle of impact and differences in personal anatomy can alter bullet paths considerably.
There are a couple of odd things in the Ellifritz study, too. He has rifles producing no more one shot stops than handguns. But a Florida emergency room study a few years ago showed only 10% of single wounds from handguns are fatal, while 80% of single wounds from rifles and shotguns were. Also, he shows the .44 magnum making head and torso shots more frequently than most other guns, including .22's. I find that hard to imagine without there being some unexpected explanation or it being the random result of an inadequate number of data points. It doesn't match what I've seen average folk able to do at the range.
We have, from
Kleck's work in the 90's that there are something on the order of 6,600 incidents of self-defense with firearms a day in the U.S. About 80% of criminal assailants run when they see the intended victim has a firearm. No shots fired. Something like 95% of the remaining 20% run, too, but only after a shot that doesn't hit anyone, whether intentionally or not, is fired, thereby serving as a warning shot that convinces the criminal their easy opportunity has ceased to be easy. So, in pure mechanistic theory, a total of 99.5% of the time a realistic looking blank gun is all you need for self-defense. It's only the other 0.5% of the time we have to worry about actual "stopping power".
That's nice. I still wouldn't carry a blank gun. Cooper taught that most fights are won by mindset rather than with shooting skills. But to project a convincing dominant mindset you need confidence you can control the battle with your weapon and skills. It's what we learned in martial arts class long ago: you learn how to fight so you don't have to. The body language you display to a prospective opponent is probably more important than any specific weapon. And if you truly have confidence in your .22, then the statistical difference in outcomes is likely to be close the same as it will for me and my .45. But I wouldn't have the same confidence with the .22, and I want my gun to be scarier than a .22 to maximize the chance I won't have to shoot. If I want to present mindset that dominates the confrontation scenario, the .22 won't work for me without an awful lot of proof that additional bullet damage is no help.
