“Stopping Power.”

Are there any two words, when put together, that are more likely to start a heated internet debate in gun forums than those two?  (actually, probably “caliber wars”, but other than that, I can’t think of many).

I just did a big article on “stopping power” but I want to go a step further and expand on this a bit, because I think this is one of the most confusing, frustrating, misleading, and dangerous subjects in all of gundom.  (made up a word there — take that, spellchecker!)

So the topic of today’s discussion is an article published by Greg Ellifritz on the Buckeye Firearms Association website, entitled “An Alternate Look at Handgun Stopping Power”.  In this article, which has spread throughout the internet forums, Mr. Ellifritz compiled a decade’s worth of data on shootings, and compiled the data into some tables, that enable readers to make some comparisons.  Some very, very faulty comparisons.

Before I get into this, let me say that I really appreciate all the effort Mr. Ellifritz put into this.  It seems like he was seriously trying to make some sense out of what is a very confusing subject.  It must have been a lot of work, and I believe his heart was in the right place, just as I believe that Marshall & Sanow set out with the best of intentions to find the answers that people really wanted to know.

The problem is, they asked the wrong questions.  Or didn’t ask the right questions.  And in the end, that results in statistics that are highly misleading and can lead people to draw completely unwarranted conclusions from the data presented!  And that’s bad.  Regardless of how good the intentions were, the resulting posted information may lead (or empower) people to draw unwarranted, inaccurate, or just plain faulty conclusions.

The .380 ACP Is “The King Of The Street”???

Let me show you what I mean.  Let’s take the example of Ellifritz’s compiled data on the .380 ACP.  According to this article, you could easily draw the conclusion that the .380 is the overall most effective handgun round of all the common self defense weapons(!)  Bet that took you by surprise, didn’t it?  But if we take the data at face value, there’s no question — the .380 is better at stopping people than the .40 S&W, it’s better than the 9mm, it’s better than the .45 ACP.  Or, at least, that’s the conclusion one would be forced to reach, if they take the data at face value!  Look at these categories:

Those are (many of) the numbers reported in the article.  What immediately jumps out at you?  I’ll tell you what I see:

According to this data, the .22LR is the deadliest bullet on the market.  34% of the .22LR shots were fatal, versus (for example) only 24% of the 9mm rounds.  So should people ditch their 9mm guns and trade them in for .22LR’s?  Not so fast, let’s keep looking… what if you ignore killing power and just go for stopping power — what caliber stops people in just one shot?  Well, according to this data, that’d be the .380 ACP, which has a 62% rating of people being incapacitated by just one shot(!)  That’s a much higher percentage than, say, 9mm, which had only a 47% record.  So surely, .380 ACP is a better choice for self defense than 9mm (or, for that matter, 40 S&W, or .45 ACP, or .357 Magnum).  That’s what the data is telling us, right?

How about if you want the fight to stop quickly — as in, using the fewest number of hits before the attack stops?  Well, according to the data, you’d want to be using a .22LR for that — after all, people who are hit by less than 1.4 shots of .22LR stop attacking, whereas with .357 Magnum it takes 1.7 bullets, right?  Surely the .22LR is a more powerful manstopper than the .357 Magnum, according to the data, right?

Clearly all these conclusions are complete poppycock.  Anyone drawing these type of conclusions would be sorely and severely mistaken.  So what’s going on here?  Is the data faulty?  Or is there some “magical” property of the .22LR that makes it more effective in stopping people than a .357 Magnum is?  Of course not.  And Mr. Ellifrtiz doesn’t believe that either — he even states in his article that “I really don’t believe that a .32 ACP incapacitates people at a higher rate than the .45 ACP!”  Even though that’s what the data shows — his data shows that for a % of people incapacitated by one shot, the .32 ACP did it 72% of the time, whereas the .45 ACP did so only 51% of the time.

So what’s going on here?

The Problem Is That The Wrong Questions Were Asked

The data is woefully incomplete.  It doesn’t ask the right type of questions.  And because the data is incomplete, NO USEFUL CONCLUSIONS CAN BE DRAWN FROM IT.

What’s missing?  Here are a few examples:

1. HOW were the people incapacitated?  In fact, what was the definition of incapacitation?  As near as I can tell, the author is using the term “incapacitation” interchangeably with the notion of the person stopping their attack.  But there’s a massive disconnect here — there’s a huge difference between a person CHOOSING to stop, and one being FORCED to stop.  “Incapacitation” means (and should mean) that the attacker no longer has the capacity to attack — i.e., that they’ve been rendered paralyzed, unconscious, or dead.  No indication of this is given in the data; instead, anyone who stopped without landing another blow or firing another shot is considered “incapacitated.”  That’s grossly misleading, because it ignores the fundamental question of whether the person was CAPABLE of continuing the attack or not.

2. There’s data on the # of rounds that are fatal, but there’s no indication given as to WHEN the attacker expired.  And that makes a huge difference!  If someone is swinging a crowbar at your head, and you shoot him, does it matter to you if your attacker dies on the operating table 2 hours after they shoved that crowbar through your brain?  To me, whether they die or not is irrelevant; the important question is whether or not I stopped the attack before they did serious bodily harm or death to me or someone I was protecting.  If you shot someone with a .22LR in the gut, and they didn’t get treatment, they would likely die — in about three days, from infection.  But that would have zero determination on the outcome of your immediate fight!  Remember, self defense isn’t about killing your attacker, it’s about stopping them — so eventual fatality is irrelevant in the discussion.  Incapacitation (using the proper definition) is the crucial data point — and that’s what’s not properly represented here in this data.

3. What type of gun was used?  No indication in the data is given, but it makes a tremendous difference!  Let’s use .22LR for example — a 32-grain CCI Stinger from a 1″ barrel NAA mini revolver delivers around 40 ft/lbs of energy.  The exact same bullet, fired from an 18″ rifle, delivers 3x to 4x as much energy.  Three or four times as much!  Yet no indication is given (although we can presume that the rifle is irrelevant from the data above, as the author included a separate category for all rifles).  So let’s just stick with handguns — how about with the .357 Magnum?  Let’s use a 125-grain Hydra Shok.  Was that bullet fired out of a little Bond Arms derringer with a 2.5″ barrel?  If so, it’d travel at about 1100 feet per second and carry 335 ft/lbs of energy; but what if it was fired from a 4″-barrel police duty revolver?  In that case, it’d be traveling at about 1550 feet per second and carry 667 ft/lbs of energy!  Twice as much, from the exact same cartridge, all depending on just a simple change of barrel length.  It makes a difference.  It makes a big difference.

Heck, let’s take it a bit further — a 9mm normally uses a 124-grain bullet, and from a Glock 17 a Hydra Shok travels at about 1100 feet per second.  That’s the same diameter, size, weight, and velocity as the .357 Magnum from the 2.5″ barrel!  So can we draw the conclusion that a .355-diameter Hydra-Shok weighing 124 grains and moving at 1100 feet per second would perform fundamentally identically to a .357-diameter Hydra-Shok weighing 125 grains and moving at 1100 feet per second?  Of course we could; there’s practically no difference whatsoever.  So how are we to know what the data in the article represents?  Does the .357 Magnum data show the results of 335-ft/lbs, or of 667 ft/lbs?  We don’t know.  But it makes a difference.  Anyone thinking that the .357 Magnum cartridge is magical on its own, without considering the gun barrel it’s coming from, would be making a disastrously misinformed decision.

4. What TYPE of bullets were used?  We don’t know — the data presented to us makes no distinction whatsoever.  We could be looking at hollowpoints, or roundnose full metal jackets, or flatnose FMJs, or wadcutters, or ratshot shotshells, or frangibles.  We don’t know what weight of bullet (and bullet weight can vary widely within any given caliber; 9mm ranges from around 50 grains on up to 147 grains). Are we being asked to assume that a 50-grain frangible is exactly as effective in “stopping power” as a 147-grain hollowpoint, which is exactly as effective as a 95-grain roundnose FMJ?  Apparently we are, but that is a plainly silly thing to even consider.  Furthermore, Mr. Ellifritz’s data includes military shootings, which would usually mean FMJ/ball ammo, which is less effective in damaging tissue than hollowpoints are.  The 9mm data listed includes over half the shootings involving ball ammo, and that skews the data on the 9mm’s effectiveness (as Mr. Ellifritz rightly points out in his article).  But doesn’t that acknowledgement really point out the flaw in the whole exercise? Acknowledging that certain types of ammo are more effective than others, and then lumping them all together in the same category, prevents us from drawing the proper conclusions here.

5. Did the bullet WORK?  If it was a hollowpoint, did it expand?  We don’t know, because the data presented gives us no way to draw any sort of conclusion.  I for one would be very interested in knowing what percentage of bullets fired failed to work properly, and how that affected incapacitation, but we don’t know.  And I’m not complaining about Mr. Ellifritz’s efforts; he did the work he did, and I didn’t, so I don’t get to complain — but I still feel it is my obligation to point out why we can’t draw comprehensive conclusions from the data as presented.

So, in short — we don’t know what type of gun was used, we don’t know what the barrel length was, we don’t know what type of ammo was used, we don’t know what velocity the bullet traveled, and we don’t know why the person stopped attacking (i.e., did they voluntarily just choose to stop, or did the impact of the bullet force them to stop?)  How can you draw a reasonable conclusion from any of this?

Here’s the conclusions I think we can draw from it:

1. People do not like getting shot by bullets, and the pain, fear, shock, adrenaline, or panic that comes about by getting shot is frequently enough to stop someone from continuing to attack you.  And if someone is inclined to stop attacking you if they get shot, then the actual caliber they get shot with doesn’t seem to matter much.  If someone’s going to stop because they feel the pain of a shot and they see themselves bleeding, it probably doesn’t make much difference whether they got shot with a .22 short or a .357 Magnum; in either case there’s a loud bang, pain, and blood.  So for this subset of attackers, caliber probably doesn’t matter much.  For that matter, bullet type wouldn’t matter much in that case either (hollowpoint or FMJ), barrel length probably wouldn’t matter, heck, not much of anything matters other than having the ability to make a loud noise and poke some manner of hole in the attacker’s body.

I think this situation is fairly common, and represents a large portion of self defense shootings.  I don’t have the statistics so I can’t definitively prove it, but I believe this to be a reasonable conclusion based on the notion that about 6 out of 7 people shot with handguns survive.  True incapacitation (forced unconsciousness due to blood loss, or death, or paralysis) could reasonably be presumed to have a much lower survival rate.  Therefore, it seems reasonable to conclude that most people who stop an attack after getting shot, have CHOSEN to stop that attack, rather than been FORCED to stop their attack.

2. Sometimes people will not choose to stop attacking, even after being shot, and you will have to FORCE them to stop.  And in that case, caliber matters very much — as does gun size, bullet speed, bullet construction, bullet performance, shot placement, and all the other factors that go into the overall process of a bullet colliding with flesh.  If you are in a situation where you have to FORCE someone to stop, it will be through the bullet damaging their body in such a way that they cannot continue to act voluntarily.  And that means damaging their central nervous system (resulting in paralysis), or their brain stem (resulting in immediate death), or in the bullet damaging their circulatory system such that they bleed out rapidly and lose consciousness (a situation which, left untreated, will likely also result in their death).  Can your choice of gun and ammo, working together, accomplish that?  That’s the big question — and that’s the question that is left completely unanswered by the types of data examinations that we can conduct based on Ellifritz’s or Marshall & Sanow’s work.  I mean, let’s get real here — according to the Ellifritz data, a .44 Magnum is less effective in stopping attackers than a .32 ACP!  The data shows that 72% of people were incapacitated by  one shot from a .32 ACP, whereas only 53% were incapacitated by a single shot of .44 Magnum.  Yet a .44 Magnum is vastly more powerful and destroys much more flesh.  The .44 Magnum is far more likely to be able to cause a truly incapacitating hit than the .32 ACP ever would be.

So, really, where does that leave us?  I think it leaves us here:

A. If someone’s going to choose to stop attacking after being hit by a shot, any gun in any caliber is likely to work as well as any other gun in any other caliber, so this should be completely ignored in your choice of carry weapon and caliber.  It’s not that “caliber doesn’t matter”, it’s that it doesn’t matter in this particular case — therefore, you should most definitely NOT choose your gun and ammo based on “well, they’re all the same”; instead, you should ignore all such data because it can seriously mislead you into choosing something that’s underpowered.  Do you want to bet your life on the hope that an attacker will just choose to stop?  I know I wouldn’t want to bet my life on that, I’d want to put the odds more in my favor.

B. If someone’s not going to choose to voluntarily stop attacking, and you have to force them to stop, you would be best served by the gun/ammo combination that is capable of causing the most damage possible, and that you can shoot most accurately.  The specific caliber isn’t nearly as important as the amount of damage done to the target.  You have to view the gun and ammo as a complete system that results in damage being done to the target; a powerful bullet being fired from a tiny gun may likely not be as powerful or do as much damage as a less-powerful bullet being fired from a bigger gun.

C. Proper ammo tests can show you what type of damage you can expect a particular gun/ammo combination to deliver.  What performs excellently from a 6″ barrel might perform pathetically from a 2″ barrel.  You have to see the specific combination tested together before you know for sure what type of damage the gun & ammo combination can deliver.

D. In general terms, there actually really is a big difference between the amount of damage the small calibers (.22LR, .25 ACP, .32 ACP, and .380 ACP) can do, and how much damage the “service” calibers (9mm, .40 S&W, .357 Magnum/Sig, and .45 ACP) deliver.  A pocket 9mm is a much more powerful weapon than a pocket .380 ACP, for example.

Summary

You cannot assign a “stopping power” value to any particular cartridge, or any particular caliber, or any particular bullet weight, or any particular kinetic energy value, or any particular bullet velocity.  These things all have to work together to produce damage in tissue.  The more likely that the bullet & gun combo can reach the vitals and the more vital tissue that bullet damages, the more likely the attacker is to stop sooner.  You want 12-18″ of penetration capability through ballistic gel and, once sufficient penetration is achieved, you want as big of a bullet size as you can possibly get.  A big bullet penetrating deeply and impacting the vitals at high speed will cause damage, and that will stop the most determined attacker.  (of course, if you miss the vitals, all bets are off; a hit with a .22 beats a miss with a .44 Magnum any day of the week).

As a final word, I’d like to quote from Evan Marshall.  Marshall is the author of several studies on “street shootings” and “stopping power” and his work is often quoted by those who want to talk about “one shot stops”, and his work served as some inspiration for Ellifritz to do the study that’s been under discussion here.  So does police officer Evan Marshall rely on specific cartridges or specific calibers for “one shot stops”?  Of course not.  Here’s Marshall’s advice, quoted from a post made on his forum at Stopping-Power.net:

1st, let me be perfectly frank. I see no benefit from carrying a .380 when I have a 9MM that is sitting inside a front pants pocket inside a Blackhawk pocket holster as this is being typed.

2nd, we need to focus on the right aiming point. I’ve named it the “Golden Triangle”-nipples to nose.

…

Finally, shoot to lock back, drop the pistol, and shoot them with the 2nd gun repeatedly. I only reload after I’m convinced the Super Bowl is over.

If you are not carrying at least two guns you haven’t been paying attention.

My interpretation?  Forget the whole notion of “stopping power” by caliber or by cartridge.  Don’t try to draw conclusions from data that doesn’t ask the right questions.  Instead, choose a gun & ammo combination that delivers as much damage as you can accurately control, and just put your shots on target, and shoot until the threat stops.

One thing that I keep coming across in gun forums, gun magazines, and bookstore shelves, is this concept of the “one shot stop.”  This concept is frequently mentioned along with “stopping power” or “knockdown power”.  It’s extremely popular, and I can see why: people want to know what ammo will be most effective in stopping someone with a single shot.  They want to know that they’re going to be successful if they ever have to deploy their firearm to stop a threat.

Of course, the concept is ludicrous and doesn’t apply in reality at all!

You cannot, and should not, ever count on getting a “one shot stop”, and it’s easy to prove that handgun bullets don’t have “knockdown power” (i.e., a handgun bullet impact is not going to blast someone through the air and crash through windows, like you see on old Western films or TV shows).  Handgun bullets don’t have the power necessary to knock someone down, and the whole general idea of “stopping power” or “knockdown power” is an inherently fundamentally flawed concept.  It’s an attractive concept, certainly — not unlike the magical 200 mpg carburetor or the perpetual motion machine; we all wish it existed, but it simply doesn’t.

Handgun Stopping Power

The perception of the deadliness and power of the handgun is really quite exaggerated in our society, as versus the reality of just how frequently ineffective handguns are in stopping a threat.  And that means ALL handguns — .22’s, .380’s, .38’s, 9mm’s, .40’s, .45’s, .357 Magnum, .357 Sig… they’re all handguns.  And they’re all poor stoppers, as compared to a rifle or a shotgun.

If you can stand some graphic visuals (and some of the photos are VERY graphic), this presentation by Dr. Andreas Grabinsky does an interesting job of showing just how wide the gap is between the destructive power of a handgun bullet, and the power of a rifle.  It shows actual video of someone being shot by a handgun, and barely even noticing that it happened (at about 14:40).  Dr. Grabinsky also points out some interesting statistics, such as that 6 out of 7 handgun shooting victims survive.

Clearly, handguns are not some all-powerful death ray of one-shot stopping power.  Now — let’s be clear here — in self defense, we are NOT setting about to kill anyone.  If your intention is to kill, then that’s not self defense; there’s a different set of words that are used to describe that: “first degree murder.”  In self defense, the goal is to stop the attack as quickly as possible.  Whether the attacker expires from their injuries or they survive, that’s not your primary concern, that’s a consequence of the actions they took when they decided to attack you.  You do not intend to or set about to cause their death; you set about to stop them from attacking you.  You should call 911 and summon help as quickly as it is safe to do so, for the person that you were forced to defend yourself against.

The key concept here is: stopping the threat does not mean killing the threatening person.  It means that the attacker is either discouraged from attacking, or incapacitated such that they cannot attack.  That doesn’t require killing them, although you should be prepared to accept that it might; that can be one of the very serious consequences of employing deadly force in defense of yourself or innocent life.

It is possible that a single shot will stop someone, but it is relatively unlikely that they will be stopped just by the force of damage that a single bullet did to them.  People stop attacking for many reasons.  Sometimes people stop because they are scared of getting shot.  Sometimes they stop because of the pain of the impact, or the sight of their own blood.  And sometimes, they stop because they have been physically incapacitated.  An example of that would be the case of George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin; in that fight, a single shot to the heart ended that encounter immediately, and resulted in a fatality.  A one-shot stop can happen, but it would be foolish to think that it will be the likely outcome of any defensive shooting.  You shouldn’t count on it; you should be prepared to shoot until the threat stops.

Examples

Let me show you a few examples of defensive shootings situations that turned out very differently (i.e., no “one shot stop”).  In 2013, a Georgia mother retreated with her kids into the attic of her home to escape an invader.  The invader followed, and the woman was forced to empty a .38 revolver at her attacker.  She didn’t shoot just once and look to see what damage was done; she fired all six shots at her attacker, and she hit him five times.  He was hit five times, in the face and in the neck.  It would be difficult to imagine more effective shot placement than hitting an attacker five times in the face and neck!  In this case, the attacker got up, climbed out of the attic, walked away, got in his car, and drove away (although he did crash into a tree before he got out of the neighborhood).  The attacker was hospitalized for a month, has recovered, and was recently sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Point is — was he truly “incapacitated”?  He did stop attacking, so she did the right thing and as a result she saved herself and her children, but — if he was capable of climbing down a ladder, walking out of a house, getting into his car and driving, that should certainly imply that he would have been capable of continuing the attack, right?  In this case, it’s hard to argue that the attacker was stopped by the force of the bullets; instead it seems more reasonable to presume that he chose to stop the attack.

Second example: in this case, a man’s house is invaded by three attackers.  They shoot him, he shoots them.  But there was a vast difference in firepower: the home invaders shot him three times with a .38 (hitting him twice in the arm and once in the chest).  The homeowner fired back with — get this — a .22 Short mini-revolver.  Probably the smallest, weakest, lowest-power firearm generally available today — but it was enough to stop the attack.  He hit one of the invaders in the back.  When he started shooting, the invaders all left.  Which means that even though he was vastly outgunned, his little .22 Short revolver was enough gun to stop the threat.  He shot until the threat stopped.  But here’s where it gets interesting — even with three .38-caliber bullets in him, he managed to follow the invaders out to the driveway, write down their license plate number, then get in his car and drive 17 miles(!) towards a hospital, before he found a law enforcement officer and was airlifted to a hospital, where he survived.

Now, let’s think about this for a second — here’s a man who’s taken three .38 Specials (presumably), and .38 Special is a respectable self-defense round and was standard issue for the police for many many years.  He was hit three times, including a chest shot, yet — was he incapacitated?  By no means!  He retained the capacity to shoot back, and he could absolutely have continued the fight, had the attackers not chosen to leave.

Third example: police Sgt. Timothy Gramins now carries 145 rounds of ammo on him, every day, without fail.  Why? Because he was involved in a shootout where the bad guy just Would Not Stop, even though he was hit 14 times(!) with .45 ACP bullets(!)  From a full-sized Glock 21!  In general it would be hard to carry much more gun than a Glock 21.  Now, part of the internet gun banter is that “.45 ACP won’t just kill a man, it’ll also kill his soul”… or, another is to say “.45: because why shoot twice?”  But in Sgt. Gramins’ case, he had to fire magazine after magazine at this attacker, and he scored 14 hits, and at least six of those hits would have been fatal: the attacker was hit in the heart, both lungs, the liver, the diaphragm, and a kidney.  You cannot fault Sgt. Gramins’ shot placement!  And you can’t fault his choice of weapon or caliber; .45 ACP is about as good as it gets in handguns.  But the simple fact of the matter is, the perpetrator simply Would Not Stop.  All in all, Sgt. Gramins fired 33 rounds, hitting 14 times.  The attacker fired a total of 21 rounds from two different handguns.  Gramins finally took the attacker down with three shots to the head — but even then, the attacker was still alive when taken to the emergency room.  He would (probably) have died from any of those six shots before the head shots, but the big question is: when?  Certainly not immediately, and those shots didn’t take him out of the fight — he continued to fire at Sgt. Gramins, and could have potentially killed the officer, even though he would (likely) have eventually died from his injuries.  Again, it’s not about killing, it’s about STOPPING, and in this case the perpetrator simply would not stop, even though he’d been hit with lots of big .45 ACP bullets.

So much for that magical one-shot stop, right?

Fourth example is the murder of South Carolina Trooper Mark Coates by Richard Blackburn.  Blackburn knocked Coates to the ground and then shot him in the chest with a .22, but that was stopped by the Trooper’s bullet-resistant vest.  Trooper Coates fired at Blackburn with a .357 Magnum, at close contact range, hitting him.  Coates then retreated back to his car, calling for help, and continued firing — he hit Blackburn four more times.  With a .357 Magnum!  Blackburn then fired one more bullet from his .22 derringer, which (due to the angle that Trooper Coates was facing him) happened to find a gap in the armpit of the ballistic vest, and the bullet punctured Coates’s aorta, killing him.  And Blackburn, who was hit in the chest five times with the “king of the street” .357 Magnum? He survived, and is now serving a life sentence in prison.

Final example: Officer Jared Reston was shot 7 times, by Joel Abner.  Reston was first shot in the face (a shot that destroyed 3/4 of his jaw).  Abner fired 13 .45-caliber bullets at Reston, who was hit a total of 7 times in his thigh, his chin, his buttock, his elbow, and three times in the chest (which were stopped by his body armor).  Reston fired 14 rounds and hit Abner 7 times with a .40 S&W Glock 22.  The fight continued until Reston fired three Ranger SXT 180-grain bullets to Abner’s head.  Until that point, both had been hit multiple times, and both continued fighting.  There was no case of a “one shot stop” here, or (for Abner) there wasn’t even a 13-shot stop, even though he was using a .45.

The point of bringing up these examples? You cannot expect to fire one bullet, and then sit back and evaluate the situation.  You cannot count on any “magic bullet”, or “street stopper”, or “kinetic energy wave” or “hydrostatic shock” or anything else.

You shoot until the threat stops.

It may not even require firing a single bullet — maybe the attacker will turn and run away at the sight of a gun pointed at them. But it may require firing every bullet you’ve got — and even then, you cannot be sure that the attack will be forcefully brought to an end.

Shoot until the threat stops.

People flying through the air and crashing into tables, or “one shot stops”, those are for Hollywood.  When it’s your life on the line, do as the Georgia mother did — shoot until the threat stops.  And if you want to have the best chance of your bullets forcing the threat to stop as quickly as possible, use good-performing ammo that penetrates deeply and put the shots where they will be most likely to damage vital organs.  An attacker cannot continue the fight if a bullet has severed their spinal column, or their blood pressure has dropped below the level necessary to sustain consciousness.

So what was the common element in all these cases?  It’s simply this: if you don’t hit something vital, you cannot count on the person being stopped.  In the unfortunate case of Trooper Coates, he was hit by the tiniest of bullets, but that tiny bullet hit something vital (his aorta), and caused his death.  In some of the other cases, head shots brought the fight to an end (but, not all head shots will bring the fight to a quick end; remember that the Georgia mother hit her attacker five times in the face, and Officer Reston had 3/4 of his jaw destroyed in a shot to his chin).

The ONLY thing that you can absolutely count on to bring a fight to a quick end, is to destroy the attacker’s vital structures (heart, brain, circulatory system, spinal column, or brain stem).  You cannot count on anything else.

You can put the odds of success in your favor by choosing ammo that penetrates deep enough, and by choosing the most powerful gun with the largest bullets that you can comfortably and accurately hit your targets with.  Big bullets are no guarantee of success; in fact, several of these stories involve .40’s and .45’s failing to stop attackers.  But big bullets will do everything smaller bullets do, but they will also do more damage than smaller bullets do, and therefore they may give you a bit of an advantage in destroying vital structures that a smaller bullet might miss.

Proper shot placement of a deep-penetrating bullet is the only thing you can actually count on.  You may get lucky and your attacker will choose to stop, but if not — you may have to force them to stop.  And that may take a lot of bullets, so…

Shoot until the threat stops.