Pistol Caliber Effectiveness from a Medical Point of View
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It would be more accurate to say that any caliber is as likely as any other caliber to stop an attack with a non-critical hit.
That is, if the hit isn't critical then the stop will be due to the attacker's decision to give up--and it's not especially likely that the caliber involved will play much of a part in the decision making process.
Likewise, if the hit is on target and aimed at a critical organ then any of the service pistol calibers are likely to result in sufficient penetration to damage the organ.
It is possible that a larger caliber might nick an organ that a smaller caliber misses entirely, but the probability of that happening isn't all that encouraging.
I ran a very simplified simulation that compared the probability of hitting a target with an unexpanded .45 bullet that was missed by an unexpanded 9mm bullet. For the parameters of the simulation I set up, the .45 bullet would hit the target when the 9mm missed it less than 0.5% of the time. In other words, it would hit the target one more time than the 9mm out of about 200 shots.
Does that mean that all service pistol calibers perform identically? Well, that's not really the takeaway. The takeaway is that the differences in terminal performance are less impressive than many assume and therefore other selection criteria (shootability, rapid-fire accuracy, etc.) should be more heavily weighted than terminal performance.
DoubleNaughtSpy said:
Without allowing your attempts at thread derailment to succeed, I do need to then ask you why you wear a seat belt while in a motor vehicle? All things considered an accident is unlikely, but you prepare for it. It is still possible, albeit much MORE unlikely, that you will be involved in a collision where even a seat belt and some airbags won't save you. So why don't you wear a helmet? Why don't you zip on a Nomex suit? Why don't you install a 5-point harness, weld in a roll cage, and replace your fuel tanks with self-sealing fuel cells?
When I become more proficient at preparing myself for what is most likely of the unlikely to happen I may then practice at preparing for the least likely scenarios.
Possible Vs. Plausible Vs. Probable
Of all the engagement scenarios I can think of it is technically POSSIBLE that I am stalked by a highly trained team of Ninja SEALs while strolling through downtown Boston with my wife. It is PLAUSIBLE that some guy with a grudge brings a rifle and tries to gun me down from across a parking lot. It is probable that some armed thug wielding an edged weapon on handgun makes his wallet-stealing intent known within 7-yards.
The concept works even for finance!
Boncrayon said:
I pray that I never even have to use a .22 LR on another human, let alone my 9mm or 7.62x39.
Still, how many CIA requirements are met by your ammunition of choice matters not if you can't even hit the backstop reliably.
MOST of the world is not the target.
tin foil said:
And if you are comfortable, proficient, and adequately skilled with a .50 caliber handgun, go for it. However, DeShivs is absolutely correct. If all you could get your hands on in a firefight was a Ruger 10/22 you wouldn't look at it and go, "I'm not using something that small!"
I wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of a fully-automatic 10/22 with a 50-round teardrop...
AK103K said:
Bladed weapons have created some of the most gruesome injuries I have ever seen... They are alarmingly efficient wounding OR killing instruments.
Aluminum baseball bats and hammers are brutal, too. But they really lack the finesse of a small blade.
JohnKSa said:
Exactly. While I would LOVE to actually own a 1911 in .45 ACP the handful of times I shot one I felt like a fish out of water. I would NOT rely on my skills with that weapon to end or thwart an attack. I would feel MORE comfortable, at this point, whipping out my Mosquito and hoping I have some high-quality rounds that will fire reliably.
While I do plan on expanding my caliber palette and becoming proficient in everything I end up owning I am not going to walk into a store and plop a paycheck down on a larger caliber weapon to carry and defend myself with without training and practicing with it first.
And who knows, I may end up always being more comfortable and more accurate and a more reliable shot with my 9mm! If that is the case you know what I'll have inside my waistband.
Again, thanks for the lively discussion and general well-behaved tone here.
I welcome any other additions or related points you can bring to the table.
Why do you assume that everyone using a 10mm is using ammunition which will penetrate beyond the FBI penetration standard? There are several 10mm loadings which display penetration characteristics within the 12-18" window that the FBI recommends though full-power JHP loadings with heavier bullets (180 gr+) often penetrate towards the upper end of this. One of the nice things about the 10mm is that it is very versatile in that you can have ammunition that penetrates like all get out or, by simply changing the construction and/or weight of the bullet, you can have something that penetrates like a 9mm but expands more violently.
That is certainly true (assuming we're talking about similar guns, which is often an overlooked point) but it is also true that, with comparable loadings, a .40 or 10mm can also expand to a greater diameter and carry more energy than a 9mm can.
If we are to believe that the larger diameter and/or greater energy of the .40, 10mm, .45 ACP or any other larger/more powerful caliber isn't worth the loss of the 9mm's controllability, then why is the 9mm still preferred over even smaller/less powerful cartridges that are more controllable still?
So why 9mm then? A few .380 JHP's can still penetrate to the FBI's 12" minimum (though just barely) and almost any .380 FMJ can do it. A .380 out of a larger gun like a CZ-83 or Beretta 86 is very controllable (so controllable, in fact, that they're often recommended to arthritic or recoil-sensitive shooters). If diameter and energy are always secondary to controllability, why not go even smaller? A .25 ACP loaded with FMJ can reliably penetrate 12" and I think that a Glock 19 sized gun in .25 ACP would be extremely controllable and very high capacity to boot.
The point I'm trying to make is that the power/controllability balance is something that cannot be easily quantified and, as such, we really can't make blanket statements about it. There are numerous factors that play into how controllable a given cartridge is including the size and weight of the gun, the strength of the shooter, the experience level of the shooter, the power of the particular ammunition being used, the bore axis of the gun, and the fit of the gun to the shooters hands just to name a few. Without knowing all of these variables, predicting how well a given person can shoot a given cartridge is pretty much impossible.
Personally, I don't find the difference in controllability between my 10mm and my 9mm to be that great. However, my 10mm is a relatively large and heavy gun (S&W 1076). The way in which I choose to mitigate heavier recoiling calibers is to only use them in guns with enough size and weight to soak up the recoil (that's why none of my 4 .357 Magnum S&W's are J-Frames). In my experience, the problem for most of the people who try to carry/shoot "too much gun" isn't that the cartridge is too big/powerful, but rather that they've tried to shoehorn it into too small/light a handgun because it's more convenient to carry. I've simply accepted that if I want to carry a big, powerful cartridge, I need to be willing to do it with a big, heavy gun.
Bill DeShivs
New member
Yes- both of them....
ABSOLUTELY!!!
Unless, of course you are a bureaucracy, such as the FBI....(during the latter 80s). The main reason (my opinion) that we got the .40 S&W was the FBI scapegoating the 9mm, and then, finding out their chosen superior round (10mm) was too much in too big a gun for a sizeable percentage of their agents to be able to qualify with it. The first bureaucratic fix was to change to the 10mm FBI load (aka 10mm Lite), in the same guns.
Still to many agents with problems (the S&W 10mm pistol is pretty beefy for smaller hands). Enter the inspired solution, 10mm FBI load in a case that fit existing 9mm gun frame size, the .40 S&W. Now, a couple decades later, while the bloom on the rose has faded a little, it is still the go to round for a lot of agencies and individuals.
Model12Win
Moderator
Oh man, the 10mm gets me such in a tizzy!! 
Who wouldn't want high-end .357 magnum to low-end .41 magnum stopping power in a Glock 20 with 16 rounds overall? I think that would be the most effective fighting handgun ever devised.
Jeff seemed to think so.
Who wouldn't want high-end .357 magnum to low-end .41 magnum stopping power in a Glock 20 with 16 rounds overall? I think that would be the most effective fighting handgun ever devised.
Jeff seemed to think so.
Model12Win
Moderator
Not true.
The FBI found the 10mm full power Norma type loads to be too powerful for there short statured male agents and female agents. The power was reduced, leading to the "10mm lite" loads which led to the .40 S&W some years later.
The FBI found the 10mm full power Norma type loads to be too powerful for there short statured male agents and female agents. The power was reduced, leading to the "10mm lite" loads which led to the .40 S&W some years later.
In 1990 Charles Petty wrote an article for the American Rifleman on the FBI ammo tests that led to the adoption of the 10mm round.
The FBI first tried a 175 gr. jhp bullet at 1358 fps. Of all the rounds they tried this was the most effective. The gun was a Colt Delta Elite. But the recoil and muzzle blast were excessive in rapid defensive firing for all the agents who shot.
The FBI also found that the round that did the next best in meeting their test parameters was the 185 gr. 45 acp round at about and around 950 fps.
So they loaded the 10mm to this velocity with a 180 gr. pill and found it to be as effective as the 45 acp. in meeting their parameters and it was more controllable in rapid fire.
They tried 5 separate loads with the 180 gr. pill all in the 913-955 fps range. They achieved good penetration and expansion with the bullets they had at the time, the rough equivalent of the 45 acp. Even the full power loads they used expanded and penetrated to what the 45acp did, at times a bit less.
So they went with the lower 180 loads of the 10mm at the 950 fps range.
They went to the 40 S&W as it game them the same parameters in a shorter case.
http://www.americanrifleman.org/articles/2015/4/16/throwback-thursday-the-fbi-ammo-tests/
tipoc
The FBI first tried a 175 gr. jhp bullet at 1358 fps. Of all the rounds they tried this was the most effective. The gun was a Colt Delta Elite. But the recoil and muzzle blast were excessive in rapid defensive firing for all the agents who shot.
The FBI also found that the round that did the next best in meeting their test parameters was the 185 gr. 45 acp round at about and around 950 fps.
So they loaded the 10mm to this velocity with a 180 gr. pill and found it to be as effective as the 45 acp. in meeting their parameters and it was more controllable in rapid fire.
They tried 5 separate loads with the 180 gr. pill all in the 913-955 fps range. They achieved good penetration and expansion with the bullets they had at the time, the rough equivalent of the 45 acp. Even the full power loads they used expanded and penetrated to what the 45acp did, at times a bit less.
So they went with the lower 180 loads of the 10mm at the 950 fps range.
They went to the 40 S&W as it game them the same parameters in a shorter case.
http://www.americanrifleman.org/articles/2015/4/16/throwback-thursday-the-fbi-ammo-tests/
tipoc
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Unfortunately it's even more difficult to quantify terminal effect in terms of actual stopping power/incapacitation time/incapacitation probability/etc. So difficult, in fact, that no one has managed to come up with an accepted method in decades of trying. Various people measure diameter, energy, momentum, power factor, penetration, wound volume, etc., and endlessly argue why one parameter is better than another one for predicting effectiveness. But when you ask them what the measured differences will mean in terms of how much faster someone hit solidly will stop shooting at you, or how many fewer shots it will take to incapacitate someone using a caliber that scores higher things get very quiet.
On the other hand, when talking about controllability, it's reasonably easy to shoot a couple of drills with each caliber/platform and compare the times and accuracy to determine if one caliber/platform combination is noticeably superior or inferior. In fact, one can not only decide which is superior or inferior, one can even quantify the difference.
For example, last year, I shot the same match with two very similar guns, one chambered in 9mm and one in 10mm. The score (combined time and accuracy penalties) with the 10mm gun over the identical course of fire was 34% worse than the score shot with the 9mm gun.
I can certainly see how one could improve one's score with the 10mm with practice, but how would that improvement not also carry over to the 9mm and keep the difference more or less the same?
Sure, any time you can get something for essentially nothing, that's a good deal. The problem is that such a thing rarely happens. In the real world, you almost always have to give something up in order to get something.
It's like saying that if you can get a car with the performance of a race car and the mileage of a Prius for only a little bit more than a Honda Accord, I'd much prefer that over a Honda Accord.
Granted, I will concede that the difference in effectiveness between calibers can't be satisfactorily quantified. However, just because it cannot be quantified does not mean that there is no difference. Even if we cannot agree on which theory of wound ballistics is correct, the 10mm rates above the 9mm in almost every measurable way (energy, momentum, diameter, wound volume, penetration, etc.).
OK, so for you, with those particular guns, the extra power of a 10mm isn't worth the tradeoff of the milder recoil of the 9mm. That doesn't mean that the same will hold true for everyone with every gun. As I mentioned before, my 10mm is a particularly large and heavy gun, substantially larger and heavier than most 9mm's. This extra weight dampens the recoil to the point that, for me at least, the milder recoil of the 9mm does not outweigh the extra power of the 10mm. I'm not trying to say that the 10mm is universally superior to the 9mm, just that it's not universally inferior either.
It depends on what you're willing to give up doesn't it? In my case, I'm willing to give up carrying a smaller, lighter, less obtrusive gun in order to get the extra power of a 10mm. Granted a 40+ oz 9mm would be more controllable still, but for me at least the extra power of a 10mm is a much more appealing trade than the slight increase in controllability of an unusually large and heavy 9mm.
It really depends, I think, on where you make your baseline. I personally don't find the recoil of my 10mm to be prohibitive or unpleasant so that is where I draw my baseline. From my perspective, the most attractive feature of a 9mm is not that I can get substantially less recoil in the same size gun, but rather that I can get about the same recoil from a substantially smaller and lighter gun.
I also have no problem with carrying a 10mm. I don't carry it all the time but when the size and weight aren't acceptable I carry a 9mm and don't feel under gunned. The same amount of devotion to practice will always yield better time and accuracy from a 9 but I can get more than good enough results with the 10. That's why I carry it. If my performance were unacceptable I would move down to a caliber that I could shoot well enough. I'm probably not going to empty a whole magazine into an assailant but under stress I would most likely tap off 5 or 6 rounds to center mass. I believe that the 10 will give me better odds even accounting for the speed difference in follow up shots.
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