Interesting video. Interesting comments. I think stinkypete hit upon a significant factor in all this, popularity. Popularity in calibers and capacities has often come from a combination of marketing and actual field data, but the field data, as a whole for a caliber or bullet type, has been a single aggregate CORRELATED with performance that people will assume to be CAUSATIVE. It is not causative because each and every shooting is unique from every other shooting. Nobody can discern, looking at raw data, why X number of people failed to die (or be stopped, or be stopped fast enough) when using whatever is currently the ultimate stopper de jour. This is a significant problem with the one shot stop and similar studies. Far too many variables of the shootings could NOT be controlled for and they often could not be controlled for because the explicit detail needed to control for them was not available. More over, end users took one shot stop to be definitive of bullet performance, despite the fact that many one shot stops were psychological and not physiological (a guy shot in the shoulder or gut and gave up equated to one through the heart and spine and died instantly). However, this type of study is popular because it appears to provide a definitive answer on performance, which in reality it did not do because too many factors were not controlled for by the study.
What we can get from the aggregate data sets are some trends of possible or probable expected performance, if taken with a whole host of assumptive parameters, which we often discard from statement or consideration despite the fact that they are actually critical to the end results we are trying to understand.
So because the end data are not wholly reliable to glean what we want to know, we try to simulate it with a controlled media (ballistics gel) that comes with its own host of assumptions and considerations. While gel use is really cool and let's us "see" how the bullet performs in a uniform media, strangely, human and animal targets are not uniform media and what happens in living targets is not always a match for what happens in ballistics gel. I know what was said in the video about ballistics gel and what happens in the field, but there is no reason to assume that just because it does happen in gel that it will happen in the field. Again, lots of variables involved. Ballistics gel, for lack of a better description, is a sort of the ideal of what will happen and it really seems to tell us more about what happens to the bullet than what happens to actual living tissue. These ballistic gel results, like one shot stop studies, tend to narrow focus on a very select set of parameters, excluding all else, from which the data crunchers and end users tend to drawn conclusions that simply may not happen in the real world.
Are these helpful? Sure. Are they definitive? No. Do they resolve caliber superiority claims? No, not except for more extreme comparisons where the answer was already pretty obvious (like the .17 hmr/.45-70 comparison noted above).
I necropsy a bunch of the hogs that I shoot to see how bullets perform. It is interesting to see the same bullet model/load fired from the same gun perform in very different manners when hitting hogs. No doubt this is because not all of the hogs are hit in the exact same trajectory at the exact same distance (velocity), and not all hogs are exactly the same in composition (sort of like humans). One thing I have noticed to be true is that the consistently symmetrical, perfect, and pretty expanded bullets you see in the gel tests are very often not what I recover in the field which are often fragmented or lopsided and look almost nothing like their ballistics gel counterparts. And here I make an assumption, but if the bullets are coming out looking very different, then how they performed in animal tissue is also likely different that what is shown in the gel tests.
8 was enough because the pistols were used for shooting deserters and trouble makers, not fighting, historical doctrine.
The Luger was not adopted by the German and Swiss militaries for shooting deserters and trouble makers. Neither was the P38. They were adopted, like the 1911, as a combat weapons.
Yes, there are but we are talking about Germans in WWI and WWII. I believe only officers carried pistols in the German Army.
Not quite right. Officers, as was common in the US military often had pistols and not long guns issued to them, but officers were not the only people that carried them. They were issued to NCOs, air crews, machinegunners, etc. It was not standard for the average enlisted army soldier to be given a side arm, much like in the US military, where the 1911 was not adopted or used primarily for shooting deserters and troublemakers.
