This was a 120# lion that had been struck twice by .45 ACP hollow point rounds and still had an incredible amount of fight left in him.
SO?? That kind of thing does happen. I watched a guy shoot a 20lb skunk THREE times with 158gr .357 Magnum (from a carbine!!) without stopping it. The shooter, apparently having lost confidence in either his gun, or himself, then asked me to dispatch the skunk. I did, with one shot from the .45 Colt I was wearing at the time. One .45 through the head was much more effective than THREE .357s through the gut. (yes, he was that bad a shot) Its not as much WHAT you hit them with, as it is WHERE you hit them.
Don't count on ONE shot, whether from a .22 or a 12ga.So, if your assailant is a 215# guy, don't count on that "one-stop shot" ending the encounter!
You can find cases where everything has worked, and cases where everything has failed.
Now, on to those oft repeated sayings...
Not exactly.The .223 was developed for killing men in war,
Closer, but still not quite there...Actually it was developed from the .222, to wound, not kill.
this theory (military wants small arms to wound, not kill) has been tossed around for years, but I've never seen anything official that confirms it.
The 5.56mm (.223 Remington) was developed to meet certain specific requirements for bullet weight and velocity at a certain distance that the .222 Rem could not quite meet, AND do so while fitting in the AR-15 rifle. The already existing .222 Rem Mag could meet those requirements, but was a teeny bit too long to work in the AR rifle. Killing and wounding ability were not part of the specs.
And, you won't find anything "official" about the military desiring to wound, rather than kill. It's a BS story, made up as justification why it was ok to use the .22 cal AR rifle. Told to the gullible, and repeated endlessly in the half century since. The bean counters can show you the numbers, it is true that one wounded soldier takes 3 guys out of the fight (at least temporarily), but it isn't true that such a thing is a constant. It actually only applies to those forces who give aid to their wounded DURING the fight, and even then, the way we (and some others) do it, a wounded troop doesn't take anyone else out of the fight, except for the brief time his buddy(s) stay with him until medical help arrives. Medics and stretcher bearers aren't "in the fight" anyway.
The idea that the military actually sought out and adopted such a weapon as the best tool for the job is complete fantasy.
.......and statistically more people are killed with .22's than any other caliber.
We do hear this all the time. We never hear any actual numbers, or any names of people who have those numbers. Might be true, after all, our military has been using a .22 caliber as the main infantry rifle for over half a century now...
Statistically, old age kills everything...if you're attacked by a 120lb mountain lion, or a 215lb thug with roid rage issues, you can choose to sneeze on them, or wait for them to die of old age, but I prefer different options.Statistically the flu kills more people than violence does.
Although there are certainly plenty of people who have been killed with a single handgun wound, historically 80-85% of handgun gunshot wound victims have survived.
I've heard this one a lot, as well, and it always makes me wonder...just where these numbers exist as data, and what the parameters are...
Historically means throughout all time and there are so many different factors involved, a big one being the degree of medical aid available and another the amount of time between the shooting and any aid, and an even bigger one being the actual physical damage caused by the shot, that I just don't see how a blanket statement like 85% survive can be accurate.
And that leaves out the possibility of skewed analysis of the data, which is also always a possibility. If you've got 100 cases, and 85 of them were people shot in the foot (and lived), and 15 were shot in the head (and died), that data does support a claim of 85% "survivable", but how close to reality do you think it actually is??
back in the days of the old west, surviving a gunshot was always a 50/50 thing. You lived, or you didn't. Why would anyone think differently today?