9mm hollow points vs .45 acp round nose

For most of its life, the US Army listened to its sergeants. They listened when they said that .38 cal ammo was not working on drugged up, pyscho Natives. They decided that going back to a 970 fps 255 grain bullet was superior in Stopping threats.

Tests proved that going back to a 230 grain 835 Fps round nose had very similar outcomes, and all sorts of drugged up, wound up, crazy types have found out that getting popped with a slow moving heavy load beats a fast moving light slug almost all the time. The only identified time where a small light fast bullet matched up is the 1450 fps .357 Mag load with the old w125 silver tips.
 
What came first the chicken or the egg?????
9MM V 45ACP, hollow point V hard ball !!! I would have to go with Shot placment, I remember seeing a story In I think Guns & Ammo way back In the 60s and the story was " How I killed a bull elephant with my 22LR pistol "
Now this is not a math story about a bumblebee and train, this was writen at the time by one of the staff writers from Guns & Ammo while being in Africa! the story goes as I remember It. While working on some stories In africa , it was night and I was In one of those huts on stilts, more like tree trunks and at night the elephants would come under them huts and rub up agenst the uprights and shake them something bad, and as I was trying to type my story and waiting for that hut to fall over I would take my 22LR pistol that I kept for snakes that would also like to visit them huts and fire It through the wood floor and scare away the elephants. the next morning coming out of my hut I see this very big bull elephant lieing dead under It! We just about had to destroy that hut to get that giant out from under, and cut that big fellow up and give the meat to the native workers and there familys, we let nothing go to waist In Africa! Looking at this big guy I was looking to see just what killed him If nything? I found a very little hole at the base of the skull and the spine meeting point and with with a little trickel of light colored blood, We dug in and found that the little 22LR bullet found a small hole In that very spot that some how cut that big fellows spinal cord. Now I well know that this Is a 10,000,000 to one shot but you never know. Some times truth is stranger than fiction:confused: If my memory serves me right I believe there were photos with the story showing that big bull under that hut, Just my 2 1/2 cents. Hank D.
 
Tests proved that going back to a 230 grain 835 Fps round nose had very similar outcomes, and all sorts of drugged up, wound up, crazy types have found out that getting popped with a slow moving heavy load beats a fast moving light slug almost all the time.
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This was true... in the early 1900s... before hollowpoints... against frequently ARMORED targets.

Your little "history lesson" has nothing to do with the discussion at hand.

The only identified time where a small light fast bullet matched up is the 1450 fps .357 Mag load with the old w125 silver tips.
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baloney.
 
Hi
I don't really like these cal wars but, Any one who says they would rather get shot with a 45 hardball than a 9mm HP is a dead man either way.
The 45 round nose with take a human or most animals down with out any problem.
The military still use round nose in 9mm in a lot of cases and that even does the job.:eek:
 
I find these threads funny as there is no perfect answer. I've carried my 1911s with FMJ and didn't feel under-protected at all. This being said, it's generally loaded with Gold Dots.

The best answer to this is find the gun/caliber you shoot well, use quality HD ammo (.45 is about the only caliber I'm comfortable using FMJ), and practice so you can hit what needs to be hit - multiple times.

And no, my .45s using FMJ have never lost a bowling pin match to a 9mm - even a 9mm using hollow points...
 
This reminds me of the tales of pieces of straw being blown into a telephone pole by a tornado. Of course, it didn't knock down the telephone pole. I'm also reminded of some History Channel program showing a man shooting a .45 automatic at a dummy dressed as a German soldier. He hit the helmet, proving that the shooter and the pistol (and the cartridge) were good enough to hit the helmet. But the helmet wasn't penetrated, so I'm not sure if it proved anything else. If nothing else, it helps to exaggerate how big "big" is and how small "small" is.

But the reputation of both the .45 ACP and the .45 Colt cartridges were made with plain non-hollowpoint ammuntion. I don't know when hollow points became available for those but hollowpoints of a sort were available for 7.63 Mauser as well as .455 Webley before WWI, usually referred to as "manstoppers." Everything since as merely been refinement and the issues themselves are older than any of us.

On the topic of the supposedly poor performance of the .38 long Colt, it should be noted that the .30 Krag was also replaced with a more powerful rifle cartridge as the rifle could also not always be counted on to stop a Phillipino.
 
There are also some old stories about the mob cutting an X into a Thomson machine gun round and it was called a Dum Dum bullet and another story about rubbing gariic into that X In the Dum Dum bullet so that the wounds from the 45ACP round would not heal and you would die of blood poisoning, I guess they were afraid that some of the other bad guys would not die after getting hit by 10-20 45ACP Dum Dum rounds!!! Better safe than sorry I always say, get me some more garlic! There are 7,000,000 stories in the city! Hank D.
 
FWIW, using a .45 with 230 grain FMJ on critters was a failure for me. I was so underwhelmed that I went to a 9mm with good JHPs and had much better results.

It's not at all uncommon around here to have one of my non-hunting pals actually shoot a critter and be shocked at how little damage some of the traditional bullets actually do. FMJ typically just pokes a little hole all the way through - and it's NOT a "cookie cutter". On deer and hogs, it's typically just a small (penny sized) bruised area with a small cut. JHPs tend to be more round and you can really tell the difference at the exit would.

Last three or four hogs I've killed were polished off with a 9mm, 124 grain Gold Dot JHPs. Works fine.

BTW, on another note, entrance wounds don't bleed much. It's the exits where you get your external blood loss. Bigger that hole is, the better IMHO.

I think handguns (with a few exceptions) are much closer to arrows for effectiveness than as opposed to rifles. No shock from a typical handgun, just blood loss unless you hit the CNS.
 
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I won't argue with the size of bullet holes, going in or going out, but I'd be surprised if a handgun bullet didn't produce some shock. That depends a lot on where the wound is and from everything I've been able to learn, it doesn't make a lot of difference what is making the wound, the result is almost the same, differing only in severity.

Have you ever been punched in the stomach or received a hard blow somewhere on your head? I believe those are the two kinds of wounds, including non-penetrating, that will put you down the quickest or cause the most pain without necessarily being lethal. Think boxers. I'm not absolutely certain how shock enters into it but those kinds of things produce instant results--usually.

It is rare to see an actual wound or a photograph of a wound. The old "Handgunner's Guide" from 50 years ago had a number of photos of various bullet wounds from different calibers. They weren't radically different from one another but they were all of corpses, so that tells you something. Then I recall the photo I saw of a man shot in the face with a shotgun. I was working for a photofinisher at the time and a local law enforcement agency was the customer. It would make you a true believer in shotguns.

I wonder what people argued about when gentlemen carried swords to settle their differences with?
 
Wow, we've really pulled out all the tired, old cliches for this one haven't we.

Originally posted by Dwight55
The 9mm has the option of spreading out, . . . becoming bigger, . . . and doing more damage. It also may not.

The .45 does not have the option of getting smaller, . . . doing less damage. AND, . . . it just may get bigger, . . . doing more damage.
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This may have been true 20-30 years ago when JHP's were less sophisticated, that's part of the reason why most police stayed with revolvers in calibers like .38 Special and .357 Magnum: they could use more reliable HP's that wouldn't feed in semi-automatics. Today, however, we have much better bullets such as Speer Gold Dots, Winchester SXT's, and Federal HST's that expand very reliably under a wide variety of circumstances.

Originally posted by kraigwy
Hollow points may or may not open up. They may penitrate or they may not. You can't tell what a bullets gonna do. It may be cold, the target may have heavy clothing on and the HP may open up too soon and not penitrate.
Then again it may be hot and the target may not have much clothing on and the HP may not open up at all.

I've been to enough autospies to know you can never determing what a bullet is gonna do.

But there is an old saying, THEY ALL FALL TO HARDBALL
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See my comments above, most manufacturers test their bullets under a wide variety of circumstances including expansion and penetration after passing through heavy clothing. I don't know what types of bullets you supposedly saw at the autopsies you've been to, but most of the medical examiners that I've heard weigh in on this subject state that they were unable to even determine the caliber of the firearm used, much less the make of the bullet, just by performing an autopsy.

The 45 Hard Ball is heavy, and big, it not the fastest round around but it takes a bit to slow it down. Its not a trick bullet, its a heavy plain old hard working bullet.

Ever wonder why the 45 ACP is king on bowling pin shoots. Never heard of a 9mm HP out preforming hard ball knocking over pins. Yet the 45 is already the size of a good 9 HP that opens up.

Go to a bowling alley, ever wonder why they use a big old slow bowling ball to knock over the pins instead a light ball, like a golf ball going a hundred miles an hour.
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bowling pins and people don't react the same way when shot. .45 ACP works better on bowling pins because it doesn't penetrate hard targets as well as 9mm does (in soft tissue, the penetration of .45 and 9mm FMJ is almost identical). Because JHP's require some hydraulic pressure in order to open, and because there's no water in bowling pins, most JHP's will expand little if at all if shot at a bowling pin. A 9mm with it's smaller, faster bullet will simply penetrate completely through a bowling pin while a .45 ACP won't and will knock it off the table instead. Try shooting a bowling pin with a centerfire rifle with FMJ ammo. I've done it with 7.62x54R: the bullets zipped right through the pin and never moved it. I'll keep this in mind if I'm ever attacked by a swarm of bowling pins.

When I went to the NW Traffic Institute studing accident reconstruction we showed, on paper using KE that a bubble bee, if fast enough can stop a freight train. Yeap it worked on paper. Zip up the speed and increase the KE of the Bee and it can exceed the KE of the train. Thats math for you, it works, on paper, but we all know in reality it total BS.
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So what was the speed of the bumble bee? As JohnKSa pointed out, it would have to be ridiculously fast in order to match the energy or momentum of the freight train and thusly is impossible to test.

Forget the math & KE tables and THINK

THEY ALL FALL TO HARD BALL
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No, they don't. They don't all fall to anything that can be fired from a handgun.

Originally posted by T.A.Sharps
The cavity you see in the ballistics gelatin does not matter, the FBI tested this already. The shock wave that creates the cavity in the ballistic gelatin is not a permanent cavity, the elasticity of human tissue causes it to return back to a "normal" state.
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Humans are not homogenous, and not all tissue is so elastic. Without going into all the complex anatomy suffice to say that temporary stretch cavity can cause damage to the tissues of certain vital organs.

What they found to be the most affective, NOT THE END ALL BE ALL, is a larger diameter bullet, because of the larger permanent wound channel it makes, without expansion, making it more likely to incompasitate faster.

The cartridges that performed the best were the 10mm, 45ACP, and one other that I can't remember right now.
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Yet they chose the smaller diameter 10mm, hmmmm:rolleyes: How, pray tell, does this explain the superior performance of a .45-70 over a .45 ACP? The diameter is close enough to be negligable, neither is traveling over 2000fps, and expanded diameters with JHP's aren't all that different.

http://www.brassfetcher.com/300%20grain%20Winchester%20Partition%20Gold.html

http://www.brassfetcher.com/230%20grain%20Winchester%20SXT.html

Also, they tested how effective HP's perform. Since you are very unlikely to be shooting at a naked bad guy, they covered them in light clothing material. What they found was the material actually clogs the hollow tip and does not allow the expansion to happen so well.
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Again, maybe the older bullets didn't perform reliably through clothing, but more modern bullets do.

http://www.winchester.com/lawenforcement/flash/win_flash.html

Originally posted by guntotin fool
For most of its life, the US Army listened to its sergeants. They listened when they said that .38 cal ammo was not working on drugged up, pyscho Natives. They decided that going back to a 970 fps 255 grain bullet was superior in Stopping threats.
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If, as I suspect, you are referring to our experience with the Moro Tribesmen during the Phillipine Insurrection, the .38 caliber guns you are referring to were chambered for the rather aneimic .38 Long Colt cartridge which is ballistically inferior to both .38 Special and 9mm Parabellum. Also, there were similar complaints about .45 Colt handguns and .30-40 Krag rifles failing to stop Moros as well.

Tests proved that going back to a 230 grain 835 Fps round nose had very similar outcomes, and all sorts of drugged up, wound up, crazy types have found out that getting popped with a slow moving heavy load beats a fast moving light slug almost all the time. The only identified time where a small light fast bullet matched up is the 1450 fps .357 Mag load with the old w125 silver tips.
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If, as I suspect, you're referring to the Thompson-LaGarde tests of 1904, these were completely unscientific, had conflicting results (the best performer in one of the steer tests was .30 Luger), and have been widely discredited. Also, Winchester Silvertip .357 Magnums are 145grn, the 125grn loadings I think you're referring to are Remington's Express 125grn Semi-Jacketed Hollow Point and Federal's 357B Semi-Jacketed Hollow Point.

http://www.winchester.com/products/catalog/handgunlist.aspx?cart=MzU3IE1hZ251bQ==

http://www.remington.com/products/ammunition/ballistics/results/default.aspx?type=pistol&cal=5

http://www.federalpremium.com/products/handgun.aspx
 
pretty close

I'd say for muzzle energy,they are so close.Take winchester ammo for example,a .45acp fmj has a muzzle energy of 356 ft lbs energy,and their 9mm 115 grain hp has a muzzle energy of 383 ft lbs,thats actually more energy to the 9mm,which is very impressive,by the time the hp expands,it will be about the same diameter as the .45,so in this comparison the 9mm wins,however,if someone has a .45acp,they arent going to be using fmjs,they will use hps,and winchester for example makes a .45acp hp bullet with 411 foot lbs energy.All in all,there is a slight edge with a .45acp,but for it's small size and less recoil,a 9mm is quite impressive.
 
How do 9mm hollow points compare to .45 acp round nose as far as stopping power?
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Who cares???? Why would you use a .45 FMJ round?

Compare 9mm JHP to .45 JHP, and then figure out if the advantage is enough to make you want to carry a .45.
 
I don't think this is a silly question at all, or if it is, then a lot of people still don't know the correct answer. Not for nothing does the FBI say the 45 is a better stopper. Go back and read the data about the 1986 FBI-Miami shootout. There are a lot of lessons to remember from it, but this is one that every LEO should never forget: Agent Jerry Dove fired a "perfect" shot at a BG with a 9mm hollow point round. From a bullet placement perspective it should have killed the BG instantly, and it probably would have, except that the bullet's energy was dissapated by the expansion of its hollow point and it stopped just short of the BG's heart; whereupon the BG killed Agent Dove and killed and wounded several other Agents before being killed himself by a wounded Agent with a 38 Special.

Conclusion #1: Bullet placement alone is not enough. The round must penetrate.

Conclusion #2: A 9mm or a 45 ball round placed exactly where the 9mm HP hit the BG that day in Miami would have blown a hole through the BGs heart and kept on going right out the other side and would have stopped him instantly.

Conclusion #3: Although in the Miami shootout case it appears that either a perfectly placed 9mm ball round or a 45 cal ball round would have penetrated to the heart of the BG and killed him, in other cases where such perfect accuracy isn't achieved, the 45 bullet makes a much bigger wound channel.
 
Come to think of it, why would fabric from clothing clog up a hollowpoint bullet but not flesh from any part of the body? Also, some animals have pretty thick hides (as do some people) but I also realize that there are hollowpoints and there are hollowpoints, some being designed to work differently than others.
 
I don't think this is a silly question at all, or if it is, then a lot of people still don't know the correct answer. Not for nothing does the FBI say the 45 is a better stopper. Go back and read the data about the 1986 FBI-Miami shootout. There are a lot of lessons to remember from it, but this is one that every LEO should never forget: Agent Jerry Dove fired a "perfect" shot at a BG with a 9mm hollow point round. From a bullet placement perspective it should have killed the BG instantly, and it probably would have, except that the bullet's energy was dissapated by the expansion of its hollow point and it stopped just short of the BG's heart; whereupon the BG killed Agent Dove and killed and wounded several other Agents before being killed himself by a wounded Agent with a 38 Special.
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The FBI's testing as a result of the '86 shootout is full of assumptions and overlooks a lot of important factors. The FBI chose to single out one particular bullet over dozens that were fired as a failure rather than admit failures in their tactics.

Conclusion #1: Bullet placement alone is not enough. The round must penetrate.
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Maybe, but had some of the dozens of bullets that the FBI agents fired been better placed or not missed entirely, the outcome of the fight may have been very different.

Conclusion #2: A 9mm or a 45 ball round placed exactly where the 9mm HP hit the BG that day in Miami would have blown a hole through the BGs heart and kept on going right out the other side and would have stopped him instantly.
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Not necessarily. A heart shot is not a guaranteed instant incapacitator. Only a CNS shot can guarantee instantaneous incapacitation.

Conclusion #3: Although in the Miami shootout case it appears that either a perfectly placed 9mm ball round or a 45 cal ball round would have penetrated to the heart of the BG and killed him, in other cases where such perfect accuracy isn't achieved, the 45 bullet makes a much bigger wound channel.
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There's no guarantee that a less-than-ideally placed shot with a .45 would have made any difference. The majority of the shots that hit Platt were in non-vital areas (legs, arms, hands, etc.). No handgun cant guarantee quick incapactitation from a shot to an extremity. There is no handgun bullet big enough to compensate for poor shot placement.

What you're also ignoring is the type of ammunition that the FBI was using. The 9mm 115grn Silvertips that the agents were issued do not penetrate as deeply as most current premium JHP's do. The shot that supposedly failed to stop Platt performed exactly as Winchester designed it to: fairly rapid expansion and relatively shallow penetration. Most current premium JHP's in major calibers (.38 +P/9mm and up) penetrate at least 12" which would have been more than enough to reach Platt's heart.

The FBI's logic regarding the '86 shootout is shaky at best. Couple that with the fact that premium JHP's in all calibers perform much differently than the dated Winchester Silvertips that were issued at the time and you hardly have grounds to condemn 9mm JHP's as inadequate.
 
in short,I'd give an edge to the .45,but for it's low cost,super performance in such a small size,the 9mm is an amazing round capable of almost the stopping power of the .45
 
My ex was an ER medic,so she saw half dozen 45 acp victims, they all survived but in those where there was witness testimony, the 45 230 gr lrn put them on the ground almost instantly.Whereas the 9mm or even 38 special in a jacketed hollow point would many times pass through the victim but the larger wound channel meant they were more likely to die from blood loss. It was Teddy Rooseveldt that initiated the military's switch to 45 ACP, as the 38 cal. side arm was passing through the enemy, but not putting them on the ground. The rough riders suffered heavy casualties from a charginng enemy who was essentially dead but continued his charge.
 
It was Teddy Rooseveldt that initiated the military's switch to 45 ACP, as the 38 cal. side arm was passing through the enemy, but not putting them on the ground. The rough riders suffered heavy casualties from a charginng enemy who was essentially dead but continued his charge.
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TR did not not initiate the Army's switch back to .45, it was the experience with Moro tribesmen during the Phillipine Inssurection and subsequent Thompson-LaGarde tests of 1904. TR reported that the Spaniard he shot with his .38 Long Colt revolver "crumpled like a jackrabbit," so he seemed perfectly satisfied with that cartridges performance. The Rough Riders faced heavy casualties because of the rate of fire and flat trajectory of the Spanish 7mm Masuers which outmatched their .30-40 Krag-Jorgansen carbines.
 
I agree that the 1986 FBI-Miami shootout exposed a lot of tactical flaws, marksmanship flaws etc., none of which has anything to do with the question that spawned this thread. However, there was one lesson learned(?) from that shootout that does bear directly on the question that was posed in this thread and that is this: In that Miami shootout a so called "perfectly placed" shot with a 9mm hollowpoint failed to stop the BG because it was slowed down and stopped short of the BG's heart by the energy loss expended in its expansion.

Just about everybody that I've ever talked to agrees that if that particular bullet had been either a 9mm ball round or a 45ACP ball round, we'd have had a dead bad guy instead of several dead and wounded FBI Agents.

It may be true that the Miami shootout "exposed" the silvertip, and sent the hollow point designers back to the drawing board, and ushered in a somewhat slower to expand jacketed hollow point, which may have done a better job than a silvertip in that shootout.

But the two most critical issues are bullet placement and bullet penetration, and hollowpoints of whatever description, if they expand at all, are always detrimental to penetration. Period.

If you want to make a big hole, use a 45.
 
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