Freethinker
| This thread piqued my interest so I went to the Fort Smith site to see what I could find out about the ammunition. First, the site doesn’t list an 80 grain load for 380 Auto, only 95 grains; is that what you have? If it’s 80 grains, do you know what the velocity is? (That was difficult to find for the 95 grain load.) Whenever someone expresses concerns about how far bullets penetrate through test media like gelatin I do offer my opinion that we should never depend on bullet performance to avoid hitting people that aren’t our target. For example, if we’re thinking that because a bullet penetrates only some arbitrary distance in gelatin then we don’t have to worry about a third party who’s standing behind the bad guy, that is a mistake. The first reason it’s a mistake is because a lot of bullets fired in self-defense situations miss their targets entirely. Studies have revealed that police officers hit their targets with their shots from less than 10 percent to perhaps 20% of the time. Even if we’re convinced we will do much better than that in a fight for our lives, how much better? Then there’s the fact that the hits we do achieve might include tissue that’s not as dense as “ballistic” gelatin. A shot to the chest that happens to miss the ribs (as I saw in one case I investigated) will usually penetrate much farther than one into the heavy muscles and femur of the thigh. Ballistics tests are useful for comparison purposes, but they don’t tell us everything there is to know about their real life performance. I won’t get into all my other knowledge and opinions about wound ballistics other than to point out that in the vast majority of self-defense shootings by non-LEOs or military personnel it doesn’t really matter how well the bullets perform in test media. I look for those results when choosing defensive ammunition for myself, and I do have some definite personal preferences, but I wouldn’t walk away empty-handed and empty-gunned if those were my options because I couldn’t get what I preferred.
► 6.4/93.6 |
| Posts: 47951 | Location: 10,150 Feet Above Sea Level in Colorado | Registered: April 04, 2002 |
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