Another terminal ballistics question

R

ramsfan

Inactive
Would a .45acp ball that shoots all the way through produce more permanent tissue damage than an identical shot with .30 caliber military rifle bullet (like30-06, 7.62x51 or 7.62x54) would (.45 caliber hole is much larger than a .30 caliber hole)?

Assuming no bone is hit, path just involves elastic tissue (muscle and lung).

As I understand it, the streamlined rifle bullet traveling point forward will not create much of a temporary cavity. Also any temporary cavity would have a limited effect on elastic tissues.

If there is more tissue damage from the .45, that would make it more "effective" in this situation. Is that a possibility?
 
The .30 rifle bullets have enough velocity so that shock waves can cause much more damage than just the .30 hole. If they were moving at the same velocity as the .45, then yes the 45 would produce more damage.
 
Long pointy rifle bullets will "tumble" in tissue, short fat handgun bullets don't normally tumble and if they did their side profile isn't significantly larger than the frontal profile.

But when you are talking permanent wound channel (the hole actually drilled by the bullet) then caliber is the determining factor in how much that hole can bleed.

The temporary wound channel is the tissue not permanently displaced by the bullets movement through tissue. The temporary wound channel is not a really good indicator of lethality.

A better comparison is looking at wounds caused by equal caliber rifle and handgun bullets. Say a 45-70 vs that 45 ACP or a 32 ACP vs 308. Obviously the bullet traveling faster will have the larger temporary wound cavity, but on a "through and through" shot, the permanent wound channel will be the same.

Jimro
 
I have studied terminal ballistics for many years. I have in my collection well over 100 projectiles removed from various animals. I also have studied the bullet paths of many game animals, so I do have some experence. Fmj military spitzer I have little experence with. I have shot a few head of game with the 45 ACP, so have some limited experence there. The 45 ACP was used on a 100 pound antelope and the ammo was Winchester 185 grain Silvertip hp. I shot the antelope a total of 7 times at close range with virtually no visual effect on the antelope. All bullets showed excellent expansion but very poor penatration. A javalina weighing 32 pounds was lung shot with the 45 ACP using 200 grain Speer hp ammo. The bullet went broadside though the lungs. The animal simply ran away to be recovered 50 yards away. A small wounded but very much alive and mobile bull elk was shot with the 45 ACP using hot loaded 200 grn cast swc bullets. The first shot hit it in the neck dropping it but needing a finishing shot. On all these animals they had so little tissue damage that I could eat right up to the hole. I have shot or seen many head of game with 30 caliber soft point ammo but no fmj ammo. There are a couple velocities in projectile fire that creates vast wound cavities in either fmj or soft point ammo. Of course soft points penatrate less but destroy more tissue than fmj of the same weight and speed. Once 2200 fps is obtained deep penatration can be achieved. At 2800 fps very violate tissue distruction is obtained with soft nosed bullets. The great African hunter Bell shot over 2000 elephants and so much smaller large game he couldnt count. He detested soft nose bullet " of his day" and used fmj ammo on all his game, claiming very few losses. Most of his shooting was done with what we would consider mild deer cartridges. I can not even being able to compare the destructive power of the 45 ACP and say a modern 30-06 fmj loading. IMHO
 
Bullets damage by crush and stretch. The rifle bullet causes enough radial stretching to damage surrounding tissue and that is how a .30 caliber bullet can produce more tissue damage than a larger diameter pistol bullet. This makes sense to me.

What causes me to question it is when I read sources (not hard to find) that seem to downplay any effect of the stretch in elastic tissue.

1) It is easy to find sources that say the temporary cavity is the most significant wounding factor with a rifle round.

2) Then there are sources that indicate even with a rifle there is little effect on elastic structures.

Which of the above is true?
 
1) It is easy to find sources that say the temporary cavity is the most significant wounding factor with a rifle round.

2) Then there are sources that indicate even with a rifle there is little effect on elastic structures.

Which of the above is true?
Click to expand...

They are both true. Not all structures in the body are elastic, nor are all structures equally elastic when they are elastic. Structures that are less elastic will be more likely to rupture and/or tear and become part of the permanent cavity.

To give an example, look at this test in ballistics gel of a .44 Magnum. Note that even though the gel itself is a nice solid square, the temporary cavity of the gel expanding outward was enough to break the board that the block was sitting on. The gel, being elastic, stretched and then snapped back into place. The board, being neither very strong nor elastic, split down the middle.

Muscle and skin are pretty elastic and tough as well. They can stretch quite a bit and return back to shape. Large organs filled with incompressible water are not going to do as well with pressure waves.

And the temporary cavity is the most significant effect of a rifle wound - otherwise, you'd get a better result from a .380 FMJ than you would from a .30-06 FMJ. You've read the two comments as being mutually exclusive; but your second comment includes limiting languages - temporary cavity does not have a significant effect on elastic structures. Though to be fair, a lot of the human body is pretty elastic.
 
FMJ military ammunition does not cause the kind of damage an SP/HP would. The "old" .223/5.56 Viet Nam era bullet would tumble as the barrel would not stabalize the bullet and cause serious damage. Newer military ammunition in current issue firearms is stabalized and makes a fairly clean wound so much so that the bad guys in the middle east don't have much respect for our 5.56 and neither do our soidiers and it shoots "clean" through the target. What really gets their atttention is a 12 guage in house to house combat. The .45 ACP should make a larger permenent wound channel even with ball ammuntion if the .30 cal is stabalized. The development of hard cast LBT bullets with large meplats made a stir back in the day as hot loaded .45 Colt bullets with large meplats would have similar effects to a .300 magnum in terms of killing power on large animals. A large blunt bullet causes some serious damage. If you take the time to study the results of the Linebaugh Seminars and the "Bone Box" you will see that hard cast handgun bullets blow the doors off serious rifle calibers for hunting large/dangerous game when you get penetration measured in feet as opposed to inches and serious damage as well.
Note post below but comments on hard cast large meplat bullets are awesome still relevant
 
Last edited:
The "old" .223/5.62 Viet Nam era bullet would tumble as the barrel would not stabalize the bullet and cause serious damage. Newer military ammunition in current issue firearms is stabalized and makes a fairly clean wound so much so that the bad guys in the middle east don't have much respect for our 5.62 and neither do our soidiers and it shoots "clean" through the target
Click to expand...

This is not correct. You are confusing two different concepts, stabilizing the bullet in air in order to hit the target with stabilizing the bullet in tissue. Originally, the AR15 was 1:14 twist. During the Artic tests, it was discovered that accuracy suffered in colder climates, so the twist was increased to 1:12. later, as NATO adopted the SS109 round, the twist was increased to 1:7 to stabilize the longer M856 tracer round.

Some have argued that this reduced the lethality of the roun. This is based on the mistaken belief that the faster twist decreases the likelihood the round will yaw inside the target. It does not. In order to spin-stabilize a bullet in tissue, you would need a much, much faster spin than any rifle has ever contemplated using. The difference between 1:14 and 1:7 is like the difference between 1,000 tons and 1,000 tons with a feather on it. There is a difference; but if you are underneath it, you won't notice it. The science explaining this can be found here.

The .45 ACP should make a larger permenent wound channel even with ball ammuntion if the .30 cal is stabalized.
Click to expand...

As stated earlier, you can't spin stabilize a projectile inside tissue using any modern rifle twist. All spitzer-type bullets, regardless of caliber, will eventually yaw. This happens because the front of the spitzer bullet is lighter than the rear. The front loses momentum faster than the rear and eventualy, the rear "passes" the front and the bullet yaws. The only question is whether this happens before the bullet passes through the target completely - which depends on the target, bullet design, velocity, etc.

Even if the .30cal rifle bullet doesn't yaw before passing through a person, it is still possible to make a larger permanent wound channel than the .45ACP because the .45ACP can damage tissue via crushing that tissue directly in its path. The .30 rifle round will both crush tissue in its path and stretch surrounding tissue via the pressure wave - any tissue that exceeds its elastic limits will detach and become part of the permanent wound cavity.

You can see examples of this in this post on the Terminal Ballistics of Common Military Rifle Rounds:
http://thefiringline.com/forums/showthread.php?t=342468
 
Can't dispute this other than numerous stories about bad guys in middle east taking through and through hits from 5.56mm and wounds described as clean with little damage. Same reports from our guys saying the .22 cal blows.
P.S. Read up on this and yes, not that I doubted it, but you are correct, and newer 5.56 ammunition is heavier to induce yawing.
 
Last edited:
I think you might have been watching too much TV. The 45 ACP is not a killer round like most would like to think. My running bud took a full clip to the body and he survived. My sisters boy friend took a full clip, two were head shots but not brain shots, and he's fine. The 45 just makes for a fairly good sized but clean hole. A spitzer type bullet does bring more tissue damage as it becomes unstable once it strikes. It's almost like getting hit by a mini meat grinder and the wound channel is not necessarily straight in.
 
It would take something the size of a large man, large deer or an elk to get a 308 bullet to yaw 90 degrees and fragment. Otherwise the bullet is an oversized hypodermic needle. I have seen small animals take 308 fmj (even multiple hits) to the vitals and run off as if they were never hit. One small hole in the front... one small hole in the back.

223 55 grain should yaw and fragment in a small man, small deer but on small animals once again it is little more than an oversized needle to the belly.

in that case if a 45 can penetrate completely it may actually kill more reliably. But that is a BIG if because sometimes even a small man is sufficient to prevent a 45 from penetrating completely through the body.

Hydrostatic shock may come into play if you can get that bullet traveling pretty fast which in my opinion is well over 3000 fps and not the velocity of 2800 often touted. You would really need something like a 204, 220 swift or 22-250 if you are firing a fmj to really see a lethal dose of hydrostatic shok from such a round.
 
jmortimer said:
Can't dispute this other than numerous stories about bad guys in middle east taking through and through hits from 5.56mm and wounds described as clean with little damage.
Click to expand...

I can explain that too; but it gets a lot more complicated. Suffice it to say that about 15% of the time, even with good velocity, M855 travels more than 7 inches before yawing which means it can exit before it yaws. There is also a phenomenon called "fleet yaw" that is related to this. The military first went to the heavier match rounds because these behaved more consistently; but with M855A1 and Mk318, the new rounds are not dependent on yaw at all to be effective.

Come and take it said:
It would take something the size of a large man, large deer or an elk to get a 308 bullet to yaw 90 degrees and fragment.
Click to expand...

Not necessarily. A lot depends on how the .308 bullet is constructed. However since the yaw is related to the momentum a bullet has, a heavier bullet is typically going to travel further before yaw compared to an identically designed smaller, higher-velocity bullet.

Hydrostatic shock may come into play if you can get that bullet traveling pretty fast which in my opinion is well over 3000 fps and not the velocity of 2800 often touted.
Click to expand...

Well, I am confused by this. Often I see people using the words "hydrostatic shock" when what they really mean is the type of stretching and tearing that occurs due to the temporary "stretch" cavity. In that sense, I'd just say that tissues can be detached by stretching at velocities much less than 2,800fps - especially if fragmentation is involved.

The other way I see the phrase used is to refer to a theory that pressure waves can travel up the blood vessels and burst capilliaries in the brain and kill animals. That theory is uh, controversial among wound ballistics researchers, to put it mildly. The only big proponent of it is also a member here and you can research endless round and round discussions of it.

As a result, I try to avoid using the term entirely since it tends to be imprecise and often results in a discussion that goes nowhere; but goes there loudly and quickly.
 
Hydrostatic shock may come into play if you can get that bullet traveling pretty fast which in my opinion is well over 3000 fps and not the velocity of 2800 often touted. You would really need something like a 204, 220 swift or 22-250 if you are firing a fmj to really see a lethal dose of hydrostatic shok from such a round.
Click to expand...

As long as the bullet is traveling faster than the speed of sound it will produce hydrostatic shock when traveling through water rich tissue.

What you are sort of saying is the old "energy dump" theory of lethality. That the more energy a projectile sheds inside an organism the more lethal it will be. Which always comes back to the question, which is more lethal the bullet that passes through or the bullet that stops in the organism?

But in the end, lethality is about biology, not ballistics. A bad shot with a 458 Win mag will just **** off a water buffalo while a good shot with a 9.3x62 will end it. With ALL pistol calibers you either have to hit the CNS or cause enough blood loss to deny the brain oxygen. And velocity alone will not cause enough "hydrostatic shock" to reliably kill a human being, which is why bullet fragmentation is such a hot topic with 5.56x45 ammunition (because without proper yaw the bullet won't fragment).

Jimro
 
And the temporary cavity is the most significant effect of a rifle wound - otherwise, you'd get a better result from a .380 FMJ than you would from a .30-06 FMJ.
Click to expand...

The above really gets to my question.


If the wound path traverses just elastic tissues of say muscle and lung, would you expect to see any difference in the damage caused by a .380 fmj and the .30-06 fmj?

I expect that the damage would be very similar. At the same time it is hard to believe that the rifle could possibly produce no more damage than the pistol.

There is no doubt that the rifle round will do much more damage to non-elastic structures.
 
Last edited:
I have to agree with LOADER9 that the 45 ACP is no wonder round. First let me state that is an excellent handgun round and the one I have beside my bed for the last 45 years. However from my limited experence on much smaller game it is simply a large punch that lets alot of blood out fairly fast. I cant count the number of times I hear the phrase " I shot him in the (insert your favorite body part) and it literally threw him backwards, dead and disemboweled with one shot". Just aint so.
 
I was just using the .45 in my question because it's a much larger diameter than the .30 caliber fmj spitzer.

It seems that the .30 cal spitzer used by military rifles (.30-06, 7.62x51) has the same legendary reputation among rifles as the .45 does among pistols.

Here's my confused reasoning:

It's just a .30 cal diameter, so how can it cause more tissue damage (and be so much more effective) than a larger caliber handgun round?

I guess temporary caviation is how.

But if the .30 cal spitzer passes point forward through only elastic tissues, then wouldn't temporary cavitation be insignificant?

Resulting in just a tiny .30 cal hole in and out. Which would be less damage than the larger caliber handguns (like a .45).
 
Empirically they work

Technical mumbo jumbo aside, I think there is plenty of empirical evidence that .45 and .30 rounds are lethal most of the time.

I think a lot the discussion stems from hunting. High powered military rounds could over penetrate the prey, leading to a small hole, little blood trail and a lot of tracking. Potentially wounded animals are never found and left to suffer. Many states outlaw hunting with FMJ rounds and require soft point, expanding bullets to minimize this risk. My state bans deer hunting with .223's completely. You want to take the animal as fast and with as little suffering as possible.

Ironically, the military (or the Geneva Convention) takes the opposite view. Expanding / exploding bullets are a no-no because they are too lethal.
 
Last edited:
ramsfan said:
If the wound path traverses just elastic tissues of say muscle and lung, would you expect to see any difference in the damage caused by a .380 fmj and the .30-06 fmj?
Click to expand...

I'm not informed enough about the differences in tissue elasticity to say; but I would expect that tissue that is more elastic than the energy in the bullet would look pretty much the same if the bullet didn't yaw.

wwd88888 said:
Ironically, the military (or the Geneva Convention) takes the opposite view. Expanding / exploding bullets are a no-no because they are too lethal.
Click to expand...

It was the Hague Conventions that outlawed the use of expanding bullets or bullets "calculated to cause unnecessary suffering" for military use under the laws of war - and it wasn't because the bullets were too lethal but rather because this was prior to the discovery of antibiotics. A wound that did not kill you might lead to you dying slowly and painfully of infection. FMJ bullet wounds were considered easier to treat than the wounds caused by expanding bullets of the day.

The Hague Conventions were just fine with you killing enemy soldiers. They just were trying to limit some of the horrific aftermath among the wounded at that period in time.
 
Yeah, velocity. Maybeso compare the relative amount of bruising from a slow-pitch softball vs. a max-speed hardball. Same sort of deal...

Something else: That "temporary" wound cavity is a volume of tissue damage; it doesn't close back up in an unharmed condition. Muscle messed up from being torn, blood vessels ruptured. Higher velocity = bigger cavity = more damage.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top