I appreciate the work and the effort behind these efforts, but I question what exercises like this tell us.
I have heard the argument that ballistic gelatin doesn't predict with accuracy how any given bullet will behave in the human body, and that is true.
However - a general correlation about bullet effectiveness based on average performance in ordinance gelatin was postulated, and the validity of that postulation has been accepted by the FBI and most major law enforcement agencies in America.
The theory is that a bullet that penetrates to around 14" in ordinance gelatin, is generally going to be effective at stoping hostilities / ending aggression, with a frontal shot, center of mass, by disrupting vital tissue found in the human body.
The theory is not that a bullet that penetrates to 14" in gelatin is going to penetrate to 14" wherever you shoot a human. That's not the idea. The idea is a loose correlation that projectiles that penetrate to 14" in ordinance gelatin will on average, consistently disrupt vital tissue. The larger diameter the projectile, the more tissue damage occurs.
Recent bullet design has utilized ordinance gelatin as part of the design process. The major bullet manufactors don't make their design tweaks based on shooting into phone books or gallon milk jugs of soggy newspaper, or into water.
There is a reason the major ammunition manufacturers don't test their designs on phone books or milk jugs filled with water - it's because the major LEAs in this country don't put stock in whatever data those tests reveal, and if an ammo maker actually designs their bullets using that medium - they may find that they fail in head to head comparisons that LEAs are going to do using ordinance gelatin when a department makes their purchasing contracts fo supply the department with ammo.
If someone wants to do statistical regression analysis on phone books, jugs of water, bales of soggy newspaper - and see how much penetration/expansion in each alternate medium equates to how penetration/expansion in bare ordinance gel - then that's great, but I haven't seen it yet.
The same exercise would have to be repeated with 4ply denim, etc...
It's pretty expensive to create a statistically valid sample. Someone would have to purchase and fire 5 or 6 different brands, firing 5 rounds in gelatin, 5 rounds into phone books - that's a lot of phone books not to mention the ordinance gelatin.
When I read about tests like these about the only thing I take away from it is:
"note to self - don't try to hide behind a phone book when being shot at"
