40S&W…Have you seen the deals?

Unfortunately, I cannot provide you with any official sources which verify that the US Army has indeed adopted Ballistics Torsos because as far as I can tell, no such sources exist. It doesn't appear to be information which is highly publicized, just a lot of hearsay from folks online who claim to be in the Army or know someone in the Army, so that portion of my argument is essentially null and void.

As for the rest, it comes mostly down to opinion as well as the results of admittedly amateur testing I've seen on YouTube, so if all you are willing to accept is verified, scientific laboratory testing, then there's no point in me directing you to videos comparing 9mm to other cartridges in Ballistics Torsos in which the differences when said bullets strike bones are readily apparent.
Besides, you seem to have made up your mind on the subject regardless, so frankly I see no reason in spending a portion of my Easter attempting to convince you otherwise.

As you yourself have said, folks tend to have confirmation biased on the subject, and I am admittedly biased in my opinion that .40 S&W along with other more powerful cartridges are more effective than 9mm. I have seen no convincing evidence that 9mm is objectively better outside of the narrow parameters of the FBI Protocol which simply doesn't account for any of the advantages of .40 S&W, because all of which are tied directly to its characteristic straight line penetration through hard barriers.
Ballistics Torsos illustrate this advantage because they include simulated bones which react far more dramatically when struck with .40 S&W than they do 9mm.

It is my opinion that shattered bones have a higher probability of resulting in incapacitation than bones which merely have holes in them or have fractured, ergo bullets which result in more damage to bones are preferable to those which do less.

Feel free to disagree and have a Happy Easter.
 
40S&W…Have you seen the deals?

Forte S+W said:
Unfortunately, I cannot provide you with any official sources which verify that the US Army has indeed adopted Ballistics Torsos because as far as I can tell, no such sources exist. It doesn't appear to be information which is highly publicized, just a lot of hearsay from folks online who claim to be in the Army or know someone in the Army, so that portion of my argument is essentially null and void.

As for the rest, it comes mostly down to opinion as well as the results of admittedly amateur testing I've seen on YouTube, so if all you are willing to accept is verified, scientific laboratory testing, then there's no point in me directing you to videos comparing 9mm to other cartridges in Ballistics Torsos in which the differences when said bullets strike bones are readily apparent.
Besides, you seem to have made up your mind on the subject regardless, so frankly I see no reason in spending a portion of my Easter attempting to convince you otherwise.

As you yourself have said, folks tend to have confirmation biased on the subject, and I am admittedly biased in my opinion that .40 S&W along with other more powerful cartridges are more effective than 9mm. I have seen no convincing evidence that 9mm is objectively better outside of the narrow parameters of the FBI Protocol which simply doesn't account for any of the advantages of .40 S&W, because all of which are tied directly to its characteristic straight line penetration through hard barriers.
Ballistics Torsos illustrate this advantage because they include simulated bones which react far more dramatically when struck with .40 S&W than they do 9mm.

It is my opinion that shattered bones have a higher probability of resulting in incapacitation than bones which merely have holes in them or have fractured, ergo bullets which result in more damage to bones are preferable to those which do less.

Feel free to disagree and have a Happy Easter.
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To some extent I think you’re fair to say you think I’ve made up my mind, as I could see how my skepticism above would come across that way. However, my comments above are less about me demanding scientific rigor (though that is important in testing) and more about me being cynical. The firearms space is awash in rumors, many of which never pan out or amount to a seemingly endless game of telephone with no one knowing the true source. I have been bitten multiple times by sharing “facts” I was told by what I thought were good sources, so now I am skeptical of everyone. It’s not personal.

If you don’t want to share those videos, it’s your call. At this point I’ll take any evidence other than people saying there’s evidence and then not sharing anything. If those videos are amateur in nature, so be it, I will have to accept that going in as I do understand the costs associated with getting data (I admitted as much above). I do think making claims and then not presenting evidence of claims is a growing trend that I personally find problematic.
 
I have seen no convincing evidence that 9mm is objectively better outside of the narrow parameters of the FBI Protocol which simply doesn't account for any of the advantages of .40 S&W, because all of which are tied directly to its characteristic straight line penetration through hard barriers.
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Is the FBI really saying 9mm is better? I haven't seen anything like that. What I've seen is them saying it meets their pass/fail criteria.
 
40S&W…Have you seen the deals?

JohnKSa said:
Is the FBI really saying 9mm is better? I haven't seen anything like that. What I've seen is them saying it meets their pass/fail criteria.
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If you look in the white paper I linked above that was published by the FBI Training Division in 2014:
https://www.gunnuts.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/FBI-9mm-white-paper-2014.pdf

There is this bullet point in the Executive Summary on the first page:
9mm Luger now offers select projectiles which are, under identical testing
conditions, I outperforming most of the premium line .40 S&W and .45 Auto projectiles tested by the FBI
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I’m not sure which are the select projectiles referenced here. As best as I can tell in a quick Google search, this is what the FBI is using now:
https://www.shootingillustrated.com...bi-9mm-full-size-service-ammunition-contract/

In reading the white paper I don’t know that I would say that the main argument from the FBI is that 9mm is better. The larger argument seems to be the emphasis on shot placement and the fact that most shooters, experienced and otherwise, can shoot faster and more accurately with 9mm. There is also a strong emphasis on the importance of projectile design and bullet penetration.
 
The larger argument seems to be the emphasis on shot placement and the fact that most shooters, experienced and otherwise, can shoot faster and more accurately with 9mm.
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Sure, that's why the practical pistol sports penalize "minor" calibers.

I looked through the 2014 white paper and I'm not impressed. I think their overall conclusion makes sense, but I disagree with a lot of how they rationalize it.

I don't see how the 9mm is going to provide better terminal performance than .40S&W unless one cherry picks rounds. But it is certainly true that no one seems to be able to show that the terminal performance benefit of the .40S&W over the 9mm translates to better outcomes in real-world shootings.

My thoughts on the whole mess are:

1. The FBI didn't want to focus on the real issues that drove the outcome of the Miami shootout so they focused on caliber. They built a house of cards on the foundation that differences in terminal performance (measured in gelatin) could reliably predict advantages to defenders in real-world shootings. You can read Urey Patrick's paper on this and it's obvious from the contents that he realizes caliber differences are not driving the outcome of real-world shootings, but he then draws conclusions that don't follow from that knowledge.

2. The FBI continued to espouse this reasoning/strategy until it became obvious that it was unsupportable with real-world data. But then rather than admit they had been wrong all along, they justified their change by overselling the improvements in ammunition technology and their effects on 9mm loadings as tested in their performance protocol (measured in gelatin).

It is, in my opinion, unfortunate that so many people are still spending so much time and effort and thought on this topic. If they want practical benefit, they should spend the time shooting/training instead. Once you get beyond luck, winning gunfights is the result of skill, not of numbers stamped on a pistol or on the case head of a round of ammunition.
 
40S&W…Have you seen the deals?

JohnKSa said:
I looked through the 2014 white paper and I'm not impressed. I think their overall conclusion makes sense, but I disagree with a lot of how they rationalize it.
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To be clear, I did not share the paper because I thought it was impressive. I shared it earlier to provide some context of the decision to move back to 9mm that went further than “limp wristed males and clerical women”. I shared it again because you stated you hadn’t read the FBI saying 9mm is better, and at least partially in the white paper they do state that. I am not sharing that information as my own endorsement of the idea, but rather that I think it is important to keep in mind what the FBI did or did not claim. Forte was right that to an extent the FBI claimed better performance out of 9mm.
 
JohnKSa said:
2. The FBI continued to espouse this reasoning/strategy until it became obvious that it was unsupportable with real-world data. But then rather than admit they had been wrong all along, they justified their change by overselling the improvements in ammunition technology and their effects on 9mm loadings as tested in their performance protocol (measured in gelatin).
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I found it interesting in the white paper that the paper touts the improvements to projectiles from 2007 and onward, but from what I can tell all of the references to wound studies in the paper itself are from 1987, 1989, and even 1958. If the projectile technology really jumped as was stated, you would think the FBI would include some data on that or references to where that can be seen.

From what I can find online for release dates of 9mm “duty” ammunition, the Speer Gold Dot, which meets the FBI criteria, was released in 1991. Federal HST was released in 2002 and also meets that criteria. Hornady Critical Defense and Critical Duty were released in 2008 and 2011 respectively, so maybe those are the bullets being referenced (and those were the ones the FBI seems to have adopted most recently). However, you can look at the Lucky Gunner ballistics testing and see similar performance among those, at least in clear gel with the caveats from above. I don’t see much evidence that 9mm projectiles from 2007 and onward represent a dramatic leap in performance.

In my own opinion the paper goes too far. I think the differences in accuracy and speed as a function of less recoil and the fact that there are 9mm loadings that meet the FBI protocol in terms of penetration are meaningful, but the paper seems to want to say 9mm is better in all categories. I feel like that last part is a stretch, and an unnecessary stretch. It also comes across to me as a doubling down on the kind of logic that saw them adopt the 40SW in the first place. Similar to what I believe John is saying, I see this as a way for the FBI to get around admitting they were wrong.
 
Originally posted by Forte S+W
Quote:
Originally Posted by Webleymkv
I suspect that many of the LE agencies that replaced their .40's with 9mm's did so at the time they did because many of the .40 S&W pistols were nearing the end of their service life and would need to be replaced soon anyway.
You'd think so, but in my experience, it isn't so. All but one of the .40 S&W police trade-ins that I purchased only had light wear. A few years ago I purchased an unissued Glock 22 Gen 4, and many of the earliest .40 S&W police trade-ins to hit the market were marketed as such.
For whatever reason, a lot of PDs dropped .40 S&W despite having a large amount of lightly used if not completely unissued pistols in their armory.

The only exception is my California Highway Patrol 4006TSW, which the CHP only dropped because Smith & Wesson no longer produced the 4006, not even for special orders, so the CHP switch to the M&P40 in 2017. Regardless, my 4006 is nowhere near the end of its service life, and has more wear outside than it does on the inside.
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When I say "end of service life" I don't necessarily mean the guns themselves are worn out. Government agencies often replace things that are still quite useable based on a set usage schedule or timetable. For example, I once test drove a very lightly use Ford Crown Victoria that had been a ex-police car. The car had no mechanical issues and less than 70k miles on it, but was 10+ years old at the time and the department it came from had upgraded to newer cars (later body style). I suspect that many departments may also replace their pistols not based on the guns being worn out, but rather based on them being in service for a set period of time or having had a set number of rounds fired through them.

Also, Police agencies often replace equipment in batches and relatively new equipment is often replaced alongside that which is severely worn. Considering the very low price that barely used .40 S&W pistols are being sold for, I doubt that a ratty, shot-out one would bring enough money to be worth the distributor's efforts to attempt to sell. I think it's entirely possible the the barely used .40's you're seeing on the market may actually be the "cream of the crop" of the totality of those being replaced. If you can only get $200-300 for a barely used or unissued pistol, then a distributor is likely to simply part out or scrap the ratty ones rather than invest the time, energy, and money in trying to sell them.

Finally, as I said in my previous post, I think that the cost of the ammo plays a big part in all of this. At sgammo.com, you can currently buy 1000 rounds of Winchester White Box .40 S&W 165 gr FMJ for $499 while 1000 round of Winchester White Box 9mm 115 gr FMJ will cost you $259.80. So for 1000 rounds of ammunition you've got a difference of $239.20. Considering that it's not uncommon for polymer-frame, striker-fired guns to sell for as little as $300 when bought in large quantities by police agencies, the savings in the cost of the ammunition might come close to, or even cover, the cost of new pistols. Like I said before, if the new 9mm ammunition can deliver comparable performance to the old .40 S&W ammunition, which most departments were quite satisfied with, then it makes financial sense to switch to 9mm. The new .40 ammunition might very well deliver superior performance, but you're getting into a case of "better is the enemy of good enough."
 
With regards to ballistic gel, I think it is misunderstood. Ballistic gel is a tool that is useful in predicting what a bullet will do when it strikes a target. It has been in use long enough to show that, while not perfect, it is about the best test medium we have and that, outside of very unusual circumstances, a bullet will usually do similar things in living flesh to what it does in ballistic gelatin. What ballistic gel does not and cannot do, however, is predict how the intended target of a living organism will react to being shot. Every shooting is a unique event unto itself and there are a nearly infinite number of uncontrolled variables that will influence the outcome of a shooting that cannot be predicted or replicated in a lab.

Unlike uniform, strictly calibrated blocks of ballistic gelatin, living organisms are not homogenous and can have great variances in size and anatomy from one specimen to another. If you shoot two rounds of ammunition from the same box through the same gun into two block of ballistic gelatin that are calibrated the same way, you would expect to have very similar, if not identical, results. However, if you shoot a 5'6" person who weighs 120 lbs and a 6"4" person who weighs 350 lbs in the same spot with the same ammunition from the same firearm, you cannot reasonably expect to have identical results because the size and anatomy of the people who are shot are very different. Likewise, you would not expect to have the same outcome in a shooting where the person was shot in the upper chest as one which was shot in the lower abdomen.

Finally, while a "good" result in ballistic gelatin often, if not usually, positively correlates with "effective" results in actual shootings, such is not always the case. If we use 9mm as an example, many of the older 147 gr JHP loadings were adopted by police agencies because they gave "good" results in ballistic gelatin and were perceived as the solution to the penetration issues of the lighter 115 gr loadings available at the time. When put into actual use, however, it was found that these older 147 gr 9mm loadings often expanded little or none despite their favorable results in ballistic gel. By contrast, many of the fast +P and +P+ 115 gr 9mm loadings performed "poorly" in ballistic gelatin due to overly aggressive expansion, fragmentation, and inadequate penetration, but when used in actual police shooting developed favorable reputations for stopping aggressors.

The fact of the matter is we really don't fully understand why people react to being shot in the way that they do and, therefore, don't really have a completely accurate way to predict how a person will react to being shot. The best we can do is predict how the bullet will react to being shot into the target and then try to correlate that with how people react to being shot with said bullet in the real world. We have observed that people tend to react more dramatically to being shot with bigger and/or faster bullets than they do to being shot with smaller and/or slower ones and we also have observed that people tend to react more dramatically to being shot with expanding bullets than with those that don't expand. We have also observed that people shot in vital organs tend to lose their ability to continue doing whatever they were doing faster than people who are shot in extremities or non-vital organs.

The debate about ballistic gelatin is really a debate over whether laboratory testing or case study is the best way to predict the outcome of a shooting when, in factuality, both methods have benefits and drawbacks. Ballistic gel tests in a lab give you the ability to predict what a bullet will do under controlled circumstances and therefore allow you to compare one loading to another with objective criteria. Ballistic gel cannot, however, predict how the bullet or more so the target will react once the uncontrolled variables of the field are introduced into the equation. Anecdotal reports and case study, on the other hand, can tell us what did or did not work well in the field, but because it isn't verifiable, falsifiable, or repeatable like laboratory testing, it can't really tell us much about why something did or didn't work. The best we can do is to look at what does and does not tend to work well in the field, examine the lab testing results of it, and see if there is any correlation to be found, but we must remember that correlation does not equal causation. Unfortunately, there seems to be a lot of tribalism regarding one method over the other which leads to arguments regarding "one shot stop percentages" being taken as gospel and unproven theories about what kinetic energy and temporary stretch cavity can and cannot do being presented as settled fact.
 
One final post on the subject regarding the FBI and the Miami-Dade shootout in 1986. A lot of people tend to focus in on the so-called "shot heard round the world" 9mm Silvertip that penetrated the assailant's arm and lung but failed to reach his heart. While that certainly is a data point worthy of analysis and discussion, it must be borne in mind that it was one data point amongst many variable which played into what happened that day. In nearly every re-telling or analysis of the events with unfolded during said incident, I am of the opinion that better preparation and better marksmanship on the part of the FBI agents would have made a much larger difference in the outcome of the shooting than their choice of 9mm ammunition. I don't think that too many people would argue that, in a gunfight against opponents armed with handguns and shotguns, a high-capacity semi-automatic rifle is a force multiplier. I also think it's pretty obvious that had the suspect with the Mini-14 received more gunshot wounds to his vital organs as opposed to the many that he received to his extremities, that he'd probably have been incapacitated sooner. I think it's entirely likely that, had the FBI agents shown up with autoloading rifles of their own and put more shots in the suspect's vital organs, the outcome of the Miami-Dade shooting would have been very, very different.
 
Who would have ever thought a US Government agency could spend too much money on a project to end years later doing a complete circle back.

So they come up with a more powerful round, that fits in the same size gun, (unlike the 41Mag vs the 357Mag of yesteryear) that offers too much recoil for one of our elite organization’s agents to shoot well.

Maybe we have a different problem?
 
Originally posted by Pumpkin
Who would have ever thought a US Government agency could spend too much money on a project to end years later doing a complete circle back.

So they come up with a more powerful round, that fits in the same size gun, (unlike the 41Mag vs the 357Mag of yesteryear) that offers too much recoil for one of our elite organization’s agents to shoot well.

Maybe we have a different problem?
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Honestly, I always found the notion that the FBI is the premier authority on defensive handgun performance to be ironic. The FBI isn't the largest police agency in the country (that's NYPD), they don't get in the most gunfights (that's the Border Patrol), and they aren't the oldest Federal police agency (that's the U.S. Marshalls). They had a situation where two agents got killed and several more severely injured due primarily to poor preparation and marksmanship, but to save face they blamed their handgun ammunition, picked bigger and more difficult to shoot calibers, and somehow came out as the premier source of law-enforcement handgun selection criteria? While the FBI has provided some good information and data points, given their history I find the taking of their conclusions as definitive to be, well, ironic.
 
Well said!
They probably have the most disposable income to fund such studies and their opinion on anything holds little water for me these days.
 
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I'd blame the Dickey law long before I'd blame a group with only some allowed data.

Nothing political in that statement. As a data person, it's a total joke.
 
Originally posted by wild cat mccane
I'd blame the Dickey law long before I'd blame a group with only some allowed data.

Nothing political in that statement. As a data person, it's a total joke.
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I'm not quite sure what an amendment prohibiting the CDC from using its funding to promote gun control has to do with the FBI's expertise or lack thereof or the .40 S&W cartridge :confused:
 
When the FBI declared the .38 Special (357 Magnum) obsolete, agencies dumped their revolvers. They were on the open market for nothing.

When the FBI declared the 9mm obsolete, Agencies dumped their 9mm’s and, they were on the open market for nothing.

When the FBI said the .40 was obsolete, and the 9mm was just as good…

There’s a common denominator here.
 
Pumpkin said:
Who would have ever thought a US Government agency could spend too much money on a project to end years later doing a complete circle back.

So they come up with a more powerful round, that fits in the same size gun, (unlike the 41Mag vs the 357Mag of yesteryear) that offers too much recoil for one of our elite organization’s agents to shoot well.

Maybe we have a different problem?
Click to expand...
They briefly adopted the 10mm, but their agents couldn't handle it.
 
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