I'm going to go somewhere that no man really wants to go. I feel that wide diameter, and also penetration, as individual factors are both badly misunderstood. you can get both, tied together with high velocity and high bullet mass to enhance tissue disruption, and you are still going to wind up with nothing but bleeding or breaking.
Yep, that's what shooting is all about, even with a .700 NE, the plan is to break or tear things up and make them either bleed or just stop working. Damaging anything badly enough will make it stop working. It doesn't matter if you are blowing out a tire or shooting out a knee cap or large artery, all you can do is take the best shots you can with whatever you have chosen to carry and wait for God to decide. should you object to my use of god, substitute luck, fate, or whatever you prefer.
I think that you have a number of different ways to look at an expanding bullet. First, you are hoping to flatten the meplat so that displaced tissues are forced out more sharply. You want to widen the hole. You want to shred the meat a little more.
A round profile does none of the above, it slides through with minimal disruption, the fact that you get higher penetration
proves that you cause less damage along the wound path.
We have the flat pointed keith bullet, and the flat point and sharp shoulder do more damage than a round point because it causes greater damage to the wound channel for several reasons. A mushroom is flat and wide and at least the current incarnation of expanding bullets create sharp and jagged profile that creates an even bloodier shredded mess.
since the thirties we have had pretty good expanding bullets available but since the fifties, we have had something more important.
PICTURES.We've been inundated since that time with graphics like these that show us exactly what our bullets should do, they should form artistically perfect, nicely formed mushrooms that retained all of their weight.
Federal premium.com
Does that sound like a load of baloney?
here is a real world expanded pistol round, ugly, twisted, imperfect, and no, not perfectly and completely expanded. It could have been perfect, and expanded another 1/16th of an inch, and of course, it would have done more damage in the last few inches of penetration.
would that have mattered? would that last bit of expansion have made even a whit of difference regarding disabling or killing the target?
Ehh, probably not.
(Ammoland Shooting Sports News)
Currently we have far too much information for our own good. Back then, we bought bullets and we could count on getting the 'right one.' Get a power lokt or some such, whatever grandpa said, and you will get what experts supported. Then you had pictures to validate your decision. Now we have jello that tests and quantifies exactly what will happen when you shoot a dangerous block of jello with layered clothing, and we obsessively seek out the truth through millions of articles and blog posts, pictures, and everyone tries to take that data and make a gestalt image of what it's going to do under random real world use.
If we get twelve inches into a human body, will an extra 1/10th of an inch in diameter give it a real advantage, or is it going to be lost in all of the other complex issues?
Myself, I have come to believe that when choosing based on
jello based results charts sacrificing a couple of inches of penetration to get a wider surface for the end result isn't right. When you expend more energy pushing the wider mushroom through the tissues your penetration suffers. The question I want to ask is that when you are shooting live meat, is that extra energy that was
in theory causing enhanced damage along the wound track best used that way, or would it be better used adding two more inches to the length of that wound track?
two inches more can mean breaking through the spine or the tough heart muscle.
we get far too wrapped up in talking heads, infographics, charts, stats, and oh so sexy pictures of shiney, perfectly formed jello mushrooms.
none of those things will predict performance, and maybe we should put most emphasis on how deeply it will go.
no, overpenetration and subsequent injury to bystanders isn't a concern to me. If my pistol round which is rated for fifteen instead of twelve inches should actually penetrate past the 'promised' twelve inch limit of the other gun, bummer. The bystander should consider himself lucky that i wasn't using a round with 30" penetration ability. he should also be really glad that i shot through the bad guy first, instead of just recklessly spraying bullets at his head. Life isn't fair. I was just walking around living the good life and quite unexpectedly i had to save my own life and that darned ammo misbehaved. there's plenty of places to spread blame and dozens of excuses that can be made for such an event.worry about overpenetration when the time comes,rather than handicapping yourself in advance.