Category Archives: Ballistic Performance

Sometimes Less Is More

Interesting thing about “conventional wisdom” or “things everybody knows” — they’re frequently wrong. You know, simple examples like “the earth is flat” or “the sun revolves around the earth”… these are plainly obvious things to anyone with eyes, right? Look around you, and you’ll see that the earth is flat — except for the tiny complication that, in fact, it isn’t. And the prevailing notion that the sun revolved around the earth was not only widely accepted “fact”, it was literally heresy against the Church to say otherwise… even though, in actuality, it was wrong.

It doesn’t really matter how widespread a belief is, does it, if it turns out to be wrong?

Sometimes I think people hide behind false beliefs because “there’s strength in numbers”. If lots of people believe the same thing, then nobody could blame YOU if you believed it too, right? You know, the old “everybody’s doing it” argument?

But — wouldn’t you rather be “right” than “popular”? Hmmm, even as I type that I can acknowledge that there’s probably a lot of people who would disagree… oh well, to each their own, I guess… I know I’d certainly rather believe what is true, regardless of how many other people agree.

Where am I headed with this? Just that I’m challenging one of the most dearly cherished beliefs among shooters: Muzzle Energy, Muzzle Velocity, and specifically the idea that More Kinetic Energy Is Better.

Shriek! Sacrilege!

Of COURSE more is better! How could anyone suggest otherwise? Heretic!

Yeah, I know… heretic. Kind of like that whole sun-revolves-around-the-earth thing, right? Here’s the thing — to me, it doesn’t matter what we WANT to believe, all that matters to me is what is TRUE. I’ll gladly change my beliefs to line up with the truth, any time. Never been one to go along with the crowd anyway.

So let’s talk about “Muzzle Energy”. This is one of the most common ways, and most obvious ways, that shooters judge the effectiveness of ammo. The more “energy” a round has, the better, right? Who could argue with that? I mean, the common conception is that the faster the round, the better. Seriously, if you had a choice between two rounds that use the identical same bullet, and one is rated at 1000 feet per second, and the other is rated at 900 feet per second, and they’re the same price, wouldn’t you have to be a raging idiot to buy the 900fps version?

What if I told you the 900fps version actually penetrates deeper and performs better than the 1000fps version?

For some of you, that feeling you’re experiencing right now is called “cognitive dissonance” — where your brain hurts, trying to reconcile two conflicting “truths” — you know (or at least want to believe) that I’m right, or else why would you be reading this article? But simultaneously, you also know that “more = better” because … hey, come on, it’s faster, therefore it MUST be better, we all know that…

Testing Trumps Theory, Every Time

So here’s where testing comes into play, and where I can demonstrate what I’m talking about and how it’s different. Let’s take the example of Speer Gold Dots in .380 ACP. I got pretty solid results with these out of the 2.84″ barrel Taurus TCP, averaging about 920 feet per second and 11.71″ of penetration through ClearBallistics gel. From a Bersa Thunder 3.5″ barrel, I got substantially higher velocities, averaging 980 feet per second. That’s great, right? That’s “better”, right?

So here’s the head-smacking part — why did I get an average of only 9.5″ of penetration from the 980 fps Bersa Thunder, whereas the exact same bullets delivered 23% more penetration from the shorter-barrel, slower TCP?

It’s Not What You’ve Got, It’s How You Use It

Unquestionably, the Bersa Thunder’s longer barrel resulted in more energy in the bullet than the TCP’s shorter barrel did. By my calculations, the TCP delivered 169 foot/lbs of muzzle energy, whereas the Bersa delivered 192 ft/lbs! That’s a pretty huge difference, yet the relative effectiveness of the bullets were exactly the opposite — the TCP bullets penetrated deeply enough to cause an incapacitating hit, nearly meeting the FBI’s specification for a minimum of 12″ of penetration, whereas the exact same bullet from the Bersa came up way short, not even reaching 10″.

Why? Because the bullets from the Bersa, travelling at such a higher rate of speed, impacted the ballistic gel much faster and spent all that additional energy on EXPANSION, not on PENETRATION. The bullets from the Bersa did indeed have a lot more energy, and they spent it on forcing the bullet to open up to a bigger diameter. The bullets from the Bersa expanded to an average diameter of .515″, whereas the slower bullets from the TCP expanded to only .447″. That’s a difference in overall diameter of about 15%, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it made a much bigger difference in the penetration (about 23%). The smaller bullet was able to slip deeper into the ballistic gel than the bigger bullet could, even though the bigger-expanded bullet had a lot more energy to it. And, all other things being equal, the bullet that penetrates more is more likely to reach the vital structures of the body and cause an incapacitating hit, than the shallower bullet.

If More Isn’t Better, Then Why Is More Better?

So here’s where we bring it full circle. The natural inclination is to want more, and it seems obvious that we should want more, but — it all depends in how you use it. You CAN do more, with more. Having more energy at your disposal gives you more options than you’d have with less energy. But if it’s not used wisely, it won’t help, and that’s the key. As a bullet designer, spending too much of your available energy on expansion can result in an excessively shallow-penetrating bullet (as I discovered in my tests of the Winchester PDX1, for example). Spending too much of your energy on penetration can result in wasted energy (as in the case of full-metal jacket bullets, which usually penetrate way too deeply and frequently will overpenetrate and exit the body, thus wasting their energy). The ideal situation is where the designer crafts a bullet that expends enough of its energy on getting adequate penetration (ideally 15″, a minimum of 12″, and a maximum of 18″) and then uses any leftover energy for expansion. That would be the ideal tradeoff resulting in the most effective bullet design for self defense purposes. And if there’s so much energy at your disposal that even after you’ve achieved adequate penetration and nice expansion that you still have energy to spare, you can make good use of that additional energy by making the bullet heavier; the more energy you have, the heavier the bullet you can push. And in that context, having more energy can be a great thing — take the example of 9mm vs. .380 ACP. It’s a great illustration because the bullets are in fact identical diameters; the .380 ACP is also known as the “9mm Kurtz” or “9mm Short” or, sometimes, by the 9x17mm nomenclature, whereas the 9mm is also known as the “9mm Luger” and as a 9x19mm. Same diameter, sometimes even the same bullet, but the 9mm Luger cartridge is capable of much higher power. Whereas the .380 is a marginal cartridge in terms of power, the 9mm is much more powerful, and while the .380 requires very careful and meticulous controlling of expansion to achieve the desired penetration, the 9mm has so much energy that it can easily achieve both great expansion and great penetration, even with heavier bullets (the typical .380 hollowpoint is usually about 90 grains, whereas with the 9mm they are usually at least 115 grains and can be as heavy as 147 grains).

So more can be better, when it’s used appropriately. Or more can ruin the balance and give you results opposite of what you intended! Don’t get caught up in thinking that “more always = better”, especially when it’s applied to a term like Muzzle Energy. More can actually get in the way of better performance, as demonstrated by my .380 Gold Dot tests, or my tests of HPR XTP, where the HPR rounds are specifically loaded to less muzzle energy than the Hornady Custom, and actually perform better than the Hornady Custom, even though Hornady Custom uses the exact same XTP bullet, just with more muzzle energy.

Okay, So How Do I Choose The Best For MY Gun?

So how do you know when the ammo makers get the balance right? That’s not an easy question to answer, but the first thing to do is: IGNORE THEIR MARKETING. Ignore claims for muzzle energy and “energy transfer” and “energy dump” and “hydrostatic shock” and “stopping power”. Marketing is marketing, it’s designed to appeal to emotions, which is exactly the opposite of what you should be basing your decisions on. Only valid testing can reveal what will work best — and, only testing that is conducted from a barrel similar to that in your gun, will provide answers that are valid for you! As given in the example above, Gold Dots from a TCP might be quite effective, and the exact same Gold Dots from a Bersa Thunder might be much less effective!

The ideal solution would be for you to test your ammo from your gun. Knowing that not everyone will, or even can, conduct such testing, the next best thing is to look for tests and reviews that were competently done, by people who know what they’re doing, and that were conducted from guns with similar barrel lengths to yours. For the .380, I’ve conducted extensive testing from a TCP, which has a 2.84″ barrel, and as such my results should be directly applicable to those with similar barrel lengths, such as the Ruger LCP (2.75″ barrel) or Beretta Pico (2.7″ barrel) or Sig 238 (2.7″ barrel), etc. But my results would likely not be directly applicable for a Bersa Thunder (3.5″ barrel) or Walther PPK (3.35″ barrel). Those barrels are long enough that they make a significant difference in velocity and muzzle energy, and those differences will mean that the bullet may very well behave differently in how it allocates that energy (in terms of the balance between penetration and expansion).

There is probably an ideal-performing round for your gun, whatever the barrel length. But you can’t rely on “muzzle energy” or “muzzle velocity” comparisons to find that round. Only proper testing will reveal what the best round is — and it may very well be the round with the least muzzle energy, or the slowest velocity. As an informed member of the self defense community, we have to be okay with that. It’s not about bragging rights, it’s about effective performance. After all, I’m okay with my bullet moving slower, so long as it renders the attacker incapacitated.

How Effective is a Hit from a Raging Judge?

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As a follow-up to my recent article http://shootingthebull.net/blog/how-effective-is-a-hit-from-a-judge/, I decided to find out how effective a .454 Casull hit would be from a Raging Judge Magnum. Now, I’m not advocating that you use a .454 Casull as a personal defense weapon; the sheer power of the cartridge introduces complications that may not be worth the benefit — the massive recoil would make getting a second shot off rather tricky, the overpenetration would be extreme, and if you happened to miss, the destructive power of that wild round and the liability concerns (if it misses your target, it’s still going to hit something) all lead me to think that it’s probably not the best idea to use a .454 Casull as a personal defense round.

But — it should make for some pretty spectacular footage, right?

So I took the Raging Judge to the range, loaded it up with a Speer Handgun Hunting Deep Curl .454 Casull rounds, and fired one into a block of ClearBallistics synthetic ballistic gelatin. And the results were… noteworthy. But before I show you what the Raging Judge .454 did to the gel block, let’s first put it into context — I’m going to show you what a full-power full-size service pistol with premium defensive ammo does. So in the video below you’ll find two shots: first is a Glock 21 .45 ACP, firing the excellent Federal Premium HST +P hollowpoint rounds. This is about as good as it gets for a conventional handgun, and you can see the shock of impact and the penetration and damage that a premium big-bore hollowpoint can do. Then, it’s followed up by the Raging Judge Magnum shooting the Speer DCHP .454 Casull into another ClearBallistics gelatin block. Enjoy.

The .45 ACP hits hard, sure, but nothing at all like the .454 Casull. It picks up the entire 18-lb block of gel, entirely off the table, and shoves another 18-lb block clean off the screen! It destroyed the table, and the temporary stretch cavity is so huge that it’d likely rip and shred flesh just like a high-powered rifle would. Nor surprisingly, considering the .454 Casull round is delivering rifle-caliber energy and while the velocity isn’t quite up to high-power rifle levels, the bullet is nearly twice the weight of a standard .308 rifle’s projectile, so there’s still a tremendous amount of damage being done.

.45 ACP is one of my favorite calibers, and it’s a potent and proven manstopper, but this sure does put it in perspective!

How Effective Is A Hit From A Judge?

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As anyone who’s googled “Taurus Judge” knows, there’s been an ongoing (and frequently vitriolic) debate over how effective a Judge is, as a defensive weapon. Most will acknowledge that the .45 Colt is an effective round, but there’s tremendous controversy over the effectiveness of buckshot from a Judge.

I attempted to address this in my video review of the Judge Public Defender Part 2: As A Shotgun, below:

However, I’m still exploring ways to quantify just how effective a hit from the handgun shotgun revolver would be. We know that the Judge (with the proper ammo) can penetrate very deeply; in my own ballistics gelatin tests and in tests from others, we’ve seen well in excess of 16″ of penetration, even up to 20″. But how do four .36-caliber buckshot balls compare, in terms of incapacitating effectiveness, against an expanding hollowpoint from something like a .45 ACP? Is there even any way to compare them?

Comparing the effectiveness of different cartridges, and finding a way to quantify their relative effectiveness, has been a popular topic since at least 1904, when the Thompson-LaGarde tests were conducted to find out how many shots from various calibers it took to incapacitate a steer. Since then we’ve seen a variety of “factors” or “formulas”, such as the TKO (“Taylor Knock Out Factor”) or the Marshall-Sanow “One Shot Stop” percentage, all attempting to classify or compare relative cartridge power, and all substantially flawed in one way or another. The Thompson-LaGarde steer tests are in fact very valid for hunters of large animals over 1,000 pounds, but for the purpose of defending against an attacking human they’re much less relevant because they’re based on dropping massive animals. The TKO factor is highly unscientific and was never meant to be applied to handgun rounds anyway, and the Marshall-Sanow database has been seriously discredited by several leading members of the IWBA.

So where can we turn to get an impartial, scientific, quantifiable assessment of the damaging factor and the incapacitating capability of a particular handgun round? As in — how can we reliably speculate on how effective a bullet will be in stopping an attacker?

The FBI, the International Wound Ballistics Association, and leading trauma surgeons, combat medics, emergency-room physicians and others came together in multiple summits and determined, by consensus, that a bullet needs to be able to penetrate at least 12″, and ideally no more than 18″, in order to be able to inflict an incapacitating wound. You can read the FBI report here.

The conclusions from the FBI report are pretty simple to grasp — a bullet needs to penetrate deep enough to hit the vital organs, and the larger the bullet, the more tissue will be damaged, so bigger = better, so long as adequate penetration is achieved first.

However, that doesn’t help us determine how to rank bullets against each other in terms of comparative effectiveness. The FBI report gives us a metric to measure “pass/fail” of any particular bullet, but in reality that’s a pretty strict measuring stick — a bullet that penetrates 11.5″ would be classified as a “fail” even though it should seem pretty obvious that an 11.5″ penetrating bullet is by no means guaranteed to fail. It won’t be as effective as a 14″-penetrating bullet, sure, but that doesn’t mean it would be totally ineffective either!

So how can we address the popular need of wanting to be able to determine, classify, and compare bullet effectiveness? Duncan MacPherson, NASA rocket scientist and founding member of the International Wound Ballistics Association, publishes his attempt at a Wound Trama Incapacitation (WTI) factor in his excellent book “Bullet Penetration: Modeling the Dynamics and the Incapacitation Resulting from Wound Trauma“. Unfortunately the book is out of print, and the only way to get a copy is to scour ebay or used bookstores or buy a used copy off Amazon, but if you’re interested in the subject, it’s a fascinating examination of what really, really happens when a bullet impacts flesh.

In the last chapter of the book, MacPherson presents a mathematical model for determining the incapacitation likelihood of any particular cartridge. Now, by “incapacitation”, he means damaging the attacker so much that the attacker is forced to stop attacking. MacPherson approaches it from the medically-validated aspect of how much tissue is damaged, and how deeply the bullet penetrates. He doesn’t rely on mysticism like “energy dumps” or “hydrostatic shock” or other non-quantifiable and highly disputed concepts; instead he relies on the science of wound ballistics, the examination of trauma victims, the realities of bullet hits, and the use of science to determine how much damage a particular bullet will do, and how much damage a typical human attacker could withstand before their body forces them to shut down.

Taking 300 pages of utterly brilliant mathematical modeling and physical science and boiling it all together and distilling it down to a simple number is a bold task, but once all is said and done, the conclusion reached is that a bullet that penetrates deeply enough and destroys 40 grams of tissue is a pretty good candidate for incapacitating a target. There’s much more to it than that, of course, and if you want to truly understand it you’ll have to get the book, but the model MacPherson uses assigns different values and weighting to different penetration depths, it takes into account velocities, it assigns different factors to hollowpoints, or wadcutters, or roundnose projectiles, etc. It’s quite detailed and excellently done, but once it’s all boiled down and accurately accounted for, the net result is: how much tissue is disrupted? If it’s a big-enough hit, and deep enough, it stands a good chance of incapacitating the attacker.

Based on his model, I’ve calculated the mass of tissue destroyed for my favorite rounds from two Judges, the Public Defender (the smallest of Judges and the “weakest”) and the Raging Judge Magnum (the largest of Judges and the “most powerful” Judge pistol).

The two rounds I’m using are the Federal 410 Handgun 000 buckshot, and the NobelSport .40-caliber buckshot.

In the Federal .410 000 round, there are four pellets of .36″ diameter and 63.5 grains apiece in the 2.5″ shell, for a total payload of 254 grains of lead. In the 3″ shell, there’s an additional pellet, bringing the lead payload up to almost 318 grains.

In the NobelSport cartridge, there are three pellets of .40″ diameter and 90 grains apiece in the 2.5″ shell, for a total payload of 270 grains of lead. In the 3″ shell there’s an additional pellet, bringing the total lead payload up to 360 grains(!)

Using the proper mathematical formula, the proper weighting for penetration, and the diameter of the bullets themselves, yields the following tissue damage results:

2.5″ Nobel: 66 grams

2.5″ Federal: 65.6 grams

3″ Nobel: 84 grams

3″ Federal: 82 grams

Each of these is well in excess of MacPherson’s desired threshold of 40 grams; the 3″ shells are actually over double the level necessary! Now, does this mean that each shot from a Judge will result in immediate incapacitation of an attacker? Of course not, there are never any “guarantees”, but in dealing with averages, it does mean that the shots from a Judge will likely be quite effective indeed. It should at least address the silly and baseless internet argument of “buckshot will just bounce off an attacker”.

For comparison, I ran a calculation on a .45 ACP +P round, Hornady Critical Duty 220 grain, at 951 fps, and 15″ of penetration. According to the Schwartz Quantitative Ammunition Selection formula for calculating the mass of the permanent wound cavity, and then applying the MacPherson WTI calculations, we get 69.82 grams of tissue disrupted. That’s right on par with the 2.5″ buckshot shells, and not quite as much as the 3″ shells. A good round of .45 ACP has long been known as an effective manstopper; the Judge 2.5″ rounds don’t destroy any more tissue despite having multiple projectiles, but on the other hand — they have multiple projectiles, which gives them multiple wound paths, which raises the prospect of turning a near-miss into a hit on a vital structure in the attacker’s body. The 3″ shells do provide more tissue disruption than the single .45 ACP hollowpoint, but not significantly more; their main advantage is not so much in the 19% additional tissue they disrupt, but in that they create four or five wound paths instead of one. Again, that gives more opportunity for a near-miss to become a hit.

So how effective is a Judge in stopping an attacker? Each blast from the 2.5″ shotgun shells (presuming you’re using the right ammo!) will disrupt as much tissue as a premium .45 ACP hollowpoint, but will give you three or four separate wound tracks, thus giving you three or four chances at hitting a critical or vital structure (such as the heart, major artery, or central nervous system). And if you’re using 3″ shells, you’ll get around 20% more tissue disruption than the 2.5″ shells, and another projectile for yet another opportunity at hitting something vital.

While we can’t predict the actual results in any actual individual shooting scenario, we can reasonably draw a broad conclusion: would a Judge with Federal .410 Handgun 000 buckshot or NobelSport buckshot be an effective manstopper? The test results say “hell yes.”

Why the Judge is more powerful than you think…

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In my recent review of the Taurus Judge Public Defender, I demonstrated its performance relative to another popular pistol. Now, before rehashing that, let’s just ask a simple question:

Which would you expect to be more powerful?

A .45 ACP pistol with a 3.3″ barrel
A .45 Colt pistol with a 2″ barrel

Seems like an easy question, doesn’t it? I mean, seems like a complete no-brainer: obviously, to any reasonable person, the 3.3″ barrel is going to produce higher velocities than the 2″ barrel, right?

Well, yes.

And no. Not when the 2″ barrel is on a Judge.

And that’s where it gets fun, when theory meets testing (and testing always wins!)

Now, in reality it is a well-established axiom of ballistics that longer barrels = higher velocity, up to a point. The longer the barrel is, the more distance the bullet will travel while still being contained in the sealed environment of the barrel, and that means the expanding gases from the burning gunpowder can push on the bullet longer, thus increasing its velocity. This is all obvious and well-understood. And the knock against a short barrel has always been that it’s possible for the bullet to exit the barrel before the expanding gases have fully expanded, so any further expansion they do will be out into the atmosphere and not pressing against the bullet. Accordingly, really short barrels have usually been pretty bad at generating decent velocities. And an inch or two can make either a significant difference, or a miniscule difference; it really depends on where the barrel length difference comes in. The difference between a 6″ barrel and an 8″ barrel might be minor, but the difference between a 1″ barrel and a 3″ barrel will be huge! In the longer 6″ barrel the expanding gases may have done most of their job pushing the bullet by the time that bullet exits the barrel; there may not be much more that will be gained from the 8″ barrel. However, on a 1″ barrel, the gases very likely will have just barely have started expanding by the time the bullet pops out of that tiny barrel! Any further expansion is just wasted.

And yet — I’ve just completed testing on the Judge Public Defender (2″ barrel) against the Springfield XDS (3.3″ barrel) and found them to deliver almost identical velocities when shooting identical-weight bullets loaded to the same ballistic performance. How is this possible?

Barrel Lengths Are Measured Differently

The first key to understanding this mystery is to recognize that not all barrels are measured the same. The official barrel-measuring technique for rifles, shotguns, and semi-automatic pistols is to run a dowel down the barrel until it reaches the breech face (or where the back of the loaded cartridge would be); mark the dowel at that point, and then pull it out and measure it.

Using that technique with the Springfield XDS, we find that the marked dowel matches 3.3″, exactly what it should.

But with a revolver, that’s not how a barrel is measured! With a revolver, you only measure from the front of the revolver to the back of the barrel’s forcing cone. You don’t include any part of the cylinder. Measuring the Public Defender’s barrel in this way, we get exactly what we’d expect: 2″, just like the printed specifications say it should be.

And yet — when we stack the two pistols back to back, we see that they’re pretty much the same size, right?

And when we compare the ballistics, we find that they perform almost identically: Critical Defense 185 grain produces 870 feet per second from the 2″ Public Defender, and 901 feet per second from the 3.3″ XDS. And with “hot” loads shooting 200 grains at the highest pressure and fastest speeds I could find, the 2″ Public Defender shot at 940 feet per second, and the XDS shot at 970 feet per second. That’s a difference of about 3%, while the XDS’s barrel length is 65% longer than the Public Defender. How is this possible? How is the Public Defender delivering comparable performance, from a barrel that’s barely over half as long?

It’s The Cylinder, Silly!

Look at this picture of the Public Defender, and what stands out about it?

That giant cylinder, right? When you hear criticisms of the Judge, frequently the cylinder will be mentioned as a drawback because it’s what makes the gun so big. Interestingly enough, it’s also what makes the gun so much more powerful than you would otherwise expect!

Understand that with any revolver, the fact that they measure the barrel without including the chamber means that you’ll always have more performance from a revolver than you would from a semiautomatic of the exact same barrel length (because some of the semiauto’s barrel length is occupied by the bullet.) But in the Judge, it’s even more of a difference. Here’s a picture that shows the Public Defender with a .45 Colt bullet overlaid.

You can see that there’s about an inch of “free bore” from the end of the bullet to the start of the forcing cone. My actual measurement was 1 1/8″. How does that “free bore” affect the ballistic performance? Basically it adds another inch of “barrel length.” So, yes, in effect, any 2.5″-cylinder Judge actually has the ballistic performance of a gun with an inch longer barrel than it says it is, and any 3″-cylinder judge performs like a gun with a 1.5″ longer barrel than it’s rated as!

Verifying The Hypothesis

My hypothesis is that ballistically, the “free bore” area is basically extra unrifled barrel. The bullet doesn’t “know” whether it’s technically in the “barrel” or not; it just knows that it’s trapped in a sealed environment and that there are gases pushing against the back of it (and, okay, it doesn’t “know” that either, but I think you get what I’m saying). So whether the bullet is in the rifled “barrel” part or still in the freebore of the cylinder, it’s still in a sealed environment, being pushed forward by expanding gases, rifling or not. That additional time spent with the gases expanding results in additional velocity, exactly like a longer barrel would have. Whether it’s labeled “barrel” or “cylinder”, the result is the same.

This idea seems reasonable, but I wanted to take it a step further and actually test a 2″-barrel .45 Colt pistol against a 2″-barrel Judge, to see if there was a real-world, measurable difference in performance. While 2″-barrel .45 Colt pistols do exist, they’re not easy to find, and I was unable to source one; however, I was able to do the next best thing: I went to www.ballisticsbytheinch.com and looked up their performance results for .45 Colt rounds, and found that in the “real world weapons” section, they had indeed tested a 2″ .45 Colt (the Taurus 450 Ultralight). Using Federal 225-grain Semi-Wadcutter Hollow Point rounds, they got an average velocity of 681 feet per second from the 2″-barrel Taurus 450. So I went and chronographed that exact same round out of the 2″-barrel Public Defender and got … drum roll… 844 feet per second! A huge performance increase; the velocity was almost 25% faster out of the Judge Public Defender’s 2″ barrel, than it was from the Taurus 450’s 2″ barrel. Since the barrel length was identical (and probably was the same barrel, seeing as they’re from the same manufacturer), then what could account for the difference? Only the longer cylinder.

The net result is: for a Judge with a 2.5″ cylinder, you’re getting about an inch extra performance than you might otherwise have thought. And for a Judge with a 3″ cylinder, you’re getting about 1.5″ extra performance. A 3″-barrel, 2.5″-cylinder Judge will perform about as well as a 4″-barrel .45 Colt revolver. And a 3″-barrel, 3″-cylinder Magnum Judge will perform about as well as 4.5″-barrel .45 Colt revolver.

Now, what about when used as a shotgun? Here, the additional barrel length advantage is even more significant. Because a shotgun is typically measured back to the breech face, in order to get comparable measurements with the Judge we’d have to measure back to the breech face.

That’s almost 4 and three quarters inches; and that means that on the Judge Public Defender, it performs about comparably to a .410 shotgun with a 4.75″ barrel. That’s still tiny, but it’s a darn sight better than a 2″ barrel! And when you get into the longer-barreled Judges, the shotgun performance starts to get downright respectable: a 6.5″ barrel Raging Judge Magnum, with a 3″ chamber, is about effectively equivalent of a 9.5″ shotgun barrel. That’s not huge, but it’s pretty darn substantial.

So, take heart, Judge users: the cylinder giveth (performance), and it taketh away (compactness). But that big old cylinder isn’t “wasted space”, it’s actually working to make your pistol more powerful than you thought it was.

Bullet Size – The Other Major Factor In Bullet Effectiveness

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In my previous article I discussed at length about ballistics gel testing and penetration. In this article I’d like to look at some other factors that have a substantial impact on the effectiveness of a given shot being able to produce an incapacitating hit.

Is Penetration “Everything”?

There are several factors that work together to create an effective incapacitating hit. Those factors include (in no particular order) placement, penetration, bullet type, and bullet size. All are important factors, and isolating one over the others would be foolhardy. It’d also be quite common! But it’s not wise. All of the factors need to be carefully considered.

Penetration is important, but it is not all-important. It is just one of many factors you must consider. If your bullet cannot penetrate deeply enough to deliver an incapacitating hit, then you cannot rely on it to produce incapacitating hits — no matter how good your placement, no matter how big the bullet expands, if it doesn’t penetrate deeply enough, it’s all for naught. So adequate penetration is important, and avoiding overpenetration is also important. As mentioned in the previous article, a shallow-penetrating bullet isn’t worthless, it may still be very effective in discouraging an attacker from continuing an attack, but it likely can’t force the attacker to stop.

What About “Placement Is Everything”?

Hang around any gun forum and it won’t be long before you run into people repeating the mantra “Shot Placement – Shot Placement – Shot Placement”. The argument goes that a good hit with a .22 beats a miss with a .45 any day. And that’s true, obviously. But is placement everything? Definitely not!

(I can hear the keyboards revving up now, with people preparing to blast me for daring to say that placement is not everything, so … hear me out…)

Shot placement is important. It is vital. A poorly-placed shot is not going to be effective. So shot placement is highly important. But it is also, of all the other factors, the only factor you CAN’T control. You can buy deeply-penetrating ammo. You can buy widely-expanding ammo. You can test for reliable performance of your ammo. Those are things you can control. But shot placement, that’s almost certainly going to be completely out of your control! Consider that the NYPD has been compiling shooting statistics for decades, and they find that when their officers are involved in a shooting, only about 1 of every six shots fired actually hits the target. At all. Meaning five out of six shots miss completely! Not that they just missed getting perfect shot placement, it’s that they missed the target entirely! The above-linked article is just a recent news report on the most recent decade’s statistics, but the NYPD has been compiling statistics for many decades and the results are reasonably consistent. Other police departments occasionally release their shot-to-hit statistics, and some of them are comparable, some a little better, but the best I’ve ever seen reported was 49%. Meaning that trained police offers are still missing the target ENTIRELY more than they are hitting it. When people assert “shot placement” as the primary factor, it’s difficult to reconcile that against trained police officers missing five out of six shots. Clearly the factors of stress, adrenaline, danger, panic, and other factors all combine to make hitting a living target a substantially more difficult factor than range practice!

We WANT to place the shots perfectly. We all have that goal (including, I dare say, every one of those police officers who were involved in those shootings!) But we may not be able to place those shots perfectly. And that’s why we need to have the best ammo on hand, to help us out, and to hopefully turn some of those not-quite-perfectly placed shots into good incapacitating hits anyway.

Now, this isn’t to say that you can’t train under stress to get better and better — you should, of course. The more trained you are, the better you’re likely to perform if you’re ever unfortunate enough to actually have to participate in a defensive shooting. Just don’t confuse training and target practice with equaling great shot placement in a real-life shooting scenario. I think sometimes those who advocate shot placement so heavily, are likely hunters, used to targeting their prey with a scope, and being able to precisely pick the spot where they intend to shoot. That may work for hunting, but against humans that type of target selection would be called “first degree murder.” If you have that much time to carefully select where you’re going to hit a person, then a prosecuting attorney may very well be able to argue that you weren’t in immediate danger of substantial injury or loss of life, and that your choice to shoot was premeditated and calculated (even if the choice was made in the course of a few seconds). Having time to carefully select your shot placement isn’t too likely in a defensive shooting situation. It is far more likely that when the bullets start flying you’re going to be drawing and shooting as quickly as you can, as best you can, but there won’t be any careful aiming, and deliberate shot placement may be an elusive goal. You always want to aim as carefully as you can, of course, and you are morally and legally obligated to be as responsible with your shots as possible, but when you’re experiencing the Mother Of All Adrenaline Dumps along with the tunnel vision and other physiological effects that occur during this most stressful period that most any human will ever face, precision targeting is likely to be difficult to attain.

Besides, you can have the very best shot placement and still be totally ineffective. If you are able to place a shot directly on an attacker’s heart, but the bullet stops an inch short of the heart, then — what have you accomplished? Your attacker can keep attacking. Shot placement can be perfect, yet completely ineffective. Shot placement alone will not guarantee you success. But shot placement, combined with adequate penetration, and enhanced by a larger bullet size, will greatly increase your odds of achieving an incapacitating hit.

About Bullet Size

Ah, caliber wars — the stuff internet gun forums are made of. People love to argue about which calibers are “effective” and which aren’t. The FBI’s report on Handgun Wounding and Effectiveness determined one simple rule — all other things being equal, the bigger bullet is more effective. Period.

That’s a definitive statement, yes. But it’s also reasonable. The bigger the bullet is, the more tissue it crushes during its journey through the attacker, and the more likely a larger bullet is to hit something vital. That’s not to say smaller calibers aren’t or can’t be effective; obviously they can be. But if all other things are equal, the bigger bullet may hit something vital that the smaller bullet misses. Imagine a situation where you have two bullets, one from a .22LR pistol, and one from a .45 ACP. Both of them have been tested to deliver 12″ of penetration in ballistics gelatin. Why wouldn’t the .22 be considered just as effective as the .45? It penetrates deeply enough, after all, so — what’s the big deal?

The deal is in the “big”. A .22LR full metal jacket round has a diameter of just about 1/5 of an inch. It may penetrate deeply, and if it hits a vital organ or major artery it may very well cause an incapacitating hit. But the odds of it hitting something vital, are lower than the odds of a bigger bullet hitting something vital. Imagine a case of where a major artery is near the spinal column. It’s entirely conceivable that the tiny .22LR bullet might slip right between the artery and spinal column, exiting out the back and hitting nothing substantial. Whereas using a .45 ACP hollow-point (which expands to a maximum size of around 1″ across), it is approximately 20x larger than the 22LR bullet! If it was fired to that exact same spot (between the artery and spine), the bigger bullet might smash through the spinal cord on its left side and also cut through the artery on the right, whereas the .22LR went right between them hitting nothing. Size, in this case, does matter, and the bigger the bullet you have can compensate (to some degree) for less-than-perfect shot placement.

That’s not to say that only a .45 ACP will be effective! Any of the major calibers (9mm, 10mm, 357 Sig, 357 Magnum, 40 S&W, 44 Special, 44 Magnum, 45 Colt, 45 ACP, etc) all are capable of creating deeply penetrating wounds with expanding bullets. All are capable of being effective manstoppers, and the choice among them shouldn’t be about “only a .45 is good enough” or other such absolutist dogma, rather it should be about capacity, recoil, reliability, familiarity, affordability, and other such factors. The gun you practice with, the gun you can shoot well, the one you can carry conveniently, the one you can reliably hit your target with and the one that works with 100% reliability, is the one you should consider for your primary defensive weapon, and only after you’ve satisfied those requirements should you worry about the caliber (assuming, of course, that it’s chambered in one of the above-mentioned calibers or comparable).

Also, different bullets expand to different dimensions. Some bullets are tuned for “maximum expansion”, some are tuned for “controlled expansion.” It’s possible that you could find a 9mm hollowpoint bullet that expands to a larger diameter than a given .45 ACP hollowpoint. Assuming that both were capable of reaching the 12″ minimum in ballistics gel, this hypothetical 9mm bullet could possibly be a more-likely-to-incapacitate round than this hypothetical .45.

When evaluating bullets for incapacitation potential, the simplest possible formula is that you want the very biggest bullet you can get, that also penetrates between 12″ and 18″ of ballistics gel. That’s the simplest rule. Once you get the desired penetration performance, you then want to see as much expansion as possible. A bullet that expands too much, won’t be able to penetrate as deeply; think of an expanding hollowpoint as like a “parachute”; as the bullet opens up it really slows the bullet down and limits its penetration. Ideally we’d like to see a bullet that could travel through about 14 – 15″ of ballistics gelatin and expand to the biggest diameter possible. But that’s not the only consideration! You also want to consider recoil, muzzle flash, muzzle flip, all sorts of factors that could come into play in affecting your ability to get a second shot off. As an example, here are two .45 ACP rounds; on the left is a Federal Premium HST +P 230-grain round, on the right is a 185-grain Hornady Critical Defense (note: I’m showing the backs of the bullets because it exemplifies the relative expansion more dramatically).

In the above example, both are .45 ACPs, both penetrate to about 12-13″ in ballistic gel, but clearly the Federal HST expanded to a much, much bigger size than the Critical Defense. How can this be? Well, the Federal is a 230-grain bullet, and the Hornady is only a 185-grain bullet. And, the Federal is a “+P” round, whereas the Hornady is a standard-pressure round. The net effect on the shooter is that the Hornady is a “softer-shooting” round than the Federal is. A shooter who can handle the increased recoil and increased muzzle flip of the more-powerful +P round might benefit from the additional expansion, whereas a shooter who values the greater controllability of the softer-shooting round may not mind trading off some expansion in exchange for the greater control they would receive.

And that’s why ammo selection becomes a personal thing, and not a “right or wrong” decision. For some shooters, a .380 is all they want and all they need. Some shooters want the biggest, deepest-penetrating, biggest-expanding round they can get. And some shooters want a Glock, because they like the way it shoots and they like the way it feels. And some want a .357, because they have lots of .357 ammunition on hand. And some want a 9mm, because they want to have 17 rounds of capacity in their Glock G19. All of these are fine decisions, and none of them (with the possible exception of the 380) will lead to an inadequate performer that’s incapable of providing incapacitating hits.

Choose what you will use. Choose what you can handle. Choose what you can shoot effectively and accurately. And, I’d suggest, choose ammo for it that provides the penetration and the expansion to give you the best opportunity for an incapacitating hit.

Bullet Effectiveness — what’s the big deal about 12″ penetration anyway?

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In my ongoing quest to find the ideally suitable .380 round for a Taurus TCP, I’ve specified that I’d like the ammo to be able to meet the minimum 12″ penetration as specified by the FBI’s ammo testing protocol.

Needless to say, that’s generated some comments from various people, who want to know: Why? Questions such as “Why do you need 12 inches? The average bad guy isn’t even 12″ thick.” Or “Why do you need to follow the FBI protocol — you’re not the FBI.” Or “I don’t fancy myself some SWAT agent, so I don’t care what the FBI protocol is…”

Truth be told, I understand where they’re all coming from. The most recent question was a simple one, in relation to one of my videos showing that the ammo would barely penetrate 10″, a person asked “why is 10 inches bad?” I went on a writing rampage to try to explain it, and figured that instead of being buried as a forum post, it might make a decent article for the blog here.

Accordingly, here is what I might call…

A Beginner’s Guide to Ballistic Gel Testing Standards

In reference to the question “why is 10 inches of bullet penetration bad?” — It’s not that 10 inches is “bad” — in fact, I’d dare say that a lot of folks would be content with 10 inches, and that a bullet that penetrates 10″ of ballistic gel may possibly be an effective manstopper, under the right conditions.

But don’t confuse 10″ of gel penetration with 10 inches of torso thickness — they’re not intended to be the same thing!

Here’s the thing — some of the best minds in the business got together to evaluate handgun performance and come up with some standards that would result in repeatable, predictable, effective ammo performance. A disastrous shootout in Miami resulted in calls to find out what went wrong, and how to prevent it occurring again. The results are published in the FBI report “Handgun Wounding Factors and Effectiveness”. You can read the entire report at www.firearmstactical.com, just google “Handgun Wounding Factors and Effectiveness“.

What is Ballistics Gelatin?
Ballistics gel is designed to mimic the properties of human tissue, and a bullet’s penetration in ballistics gel should be comparable to how the bullet would have penetrated through muscle tissue in a human being. Ballistics gel is made from boiled-up animal tissue (hide, ligaments, tendons, etc) that is then distilled down to a powder (gelatin powder) and then mixed at a precise ratio and under precise conditions to result in a product (ballistic gel) that mimics the properties of flesh (to such forces as resistance, shear, stress, and tearing). Mainly because it is flesh, just boiled and mixed together to make one big homogenous block. It’s not exactly the same thing as flesh (you can easily tear off a chunk, for example) but as far as its response to a bullet, it is an excellent and highly accurate simulant. It has been extensively correlated against actual shootings and wound examinations of trauma victims, and the penetration and expansion characteristics have been verified as being quite accurate to actual trauma wounds.

As said before, ballistics gel provides a tissue simulant that is homogenous (all consistent, all the same). But humans aren’t homogenous. We’re made of all sorts of different densities — lungs are basically empty, bones are comparatively dense, then there are super-stretchy tissues like intestines and not-stretchy tissues like the liver… we’re not homogenous. So ballistic gel isn’t designed to exactly mimic the human BODY, it’s designed to mimic a relatively homogenous tissue such as muscle tissue.

“I’ve never been attacked by a block of Jell-O”…

I hear this a lot, from people who just don’t seem to understand — shooting into ballistic gel isn’t designed to mimic shooting into a human body. Shooting into ballistic gel is designed to create a repeatable, standardized testing method that replicates the average performance of a bullet through a body, but does so in a way that is predictable, controlled, repeatable and directly comparable. Because shooting into a body is one of the most unpredictable things we can do. There are so many variables, it’s nearly impossible to account for them all! Whether a bullet tumbles or not, whether it expands or not, whether it strikes a bone or not, whether it strikes that bone head-on and passes right through, or it strikes the side of a rib and is deflected; whether it strikes a critical organ or whether it sails straight through without hitting anything vital, whether it cuts an artery or only passes through a lung, and on and on and on… there’s no way to predict what will happen.

So we don’t try. What we do, is we try to come up with a way of ranking the power of bullets through a homogenous medium of flesh. I know people that get all bent out of shape about “jello shots” because “it’s not a body” but that’s not the point — what it is, is a way of saying “if you shot this bullet into muscle tissue, this is the results you’d get.” And those results have been highly correlated against actual shooting victims. And then you can directly compare the ballistics gel results from one bullet, to what you’d get with another bullet. If one expands more and penetrates deeper, then you can unequivocally say “this bullet would produce more damage in a human body than that one, all other things being equal.”

Why Do I Want My Bullets To Be Capable Of 12″ (or more) Of Penetration?

So here’s a question that people seem to get confused over — does 10″ of ballistic gel penetration mean 10″ of penetration through a chest? Not necessarily. Maybe. Maybe not. It depends on the shot. And it depends on the chest — if our attacker is a 105-pound waif supermodel, who is literally skin and bones, that 10″-gel-penetrating bullet might pass clean through her. If we’re being attacked by a professional bodybuilder with a 52″ chest that’s all muscle, the bullet might stop well short of hitting his vitals. If we’re being attacked by a 350-lb barbecue-and-gravy aficionado with a 52″ chest that’s all fat, the bullet might penetrate further through his chest than it would in the bodybuilder’s, but still stop well short of his vitals. We don’t know what our actual shooting scenario will be, until we’re in it.

But what we DO know, is that if the bullet is able to go through 12″ of ballistic gel, it will also be able to punch through pretty much all of their chests and reach their vitals. And that’s what counts. Think of it as a relative power ranking, because, well, really, that’s what it is — a more powerful bullet could push through more inches of gel. And, accordingly, no matter what tissue it hits in the body, it would be able to push through more of it, than a less-powerful bullet would be able to, if that less-powerful bullet were to have hit in exactly the same spot on a genetically-identical body.

So the penetration question is not about the chest thickness, it’s about however much tissue the bullet can penetrate through, regardless of what type of tissue it encounters (bone, lung, bowel, muscle, fat, etc). The 12″ minimum takes account of factors such as having to shoot through bones, and at odd angles. It’s all already factored in.

And bullet penetration is influenced by a number of design factors — the weight of the bullet, the type of bullet (a solid FMJ or an expanding hollowpoint), the speed of the bullet, the diameter (or caliber) of the bullet; all of these things have a direct influence on how deeply the bullet will penetrate. Which is why we have to test. And why we need a standardized testing medium to test in; one that will deliver consistent and comparable results.

The 12″ penetration figure the FBI arrived at is also a MINIMUM. They would actually prefer to see about 14-15″. The acceptable range for them is 12″ to 18″ of penetration; if it penetrates over 18″ then it would probably exit most bodies and therefore be not as efficient in delivering a wound, and also pose a threat to whatever/whoever is behind the target. If it penetrates less than 12″, then it may not possess enough energy to reach the vital organs and cause an immediate incapacitation of the target.

What Stops An Attacker?

Now, keep in mind — an 8″-penetrating bullet may hurt like hell, it may cause a lot of bleeding, it may make the person who got shot drop their weapon and say “no more!” That all may happen. But it may not. The target may be feeling no pain, they may be on drugs or feeling so much adrenaline that they don’t actually recognize that they’ve been shot, they may continue attacking even after having been shot. That 8″ bullet may actually kill them eventually, too, through aggregated blood loss or through infection or any number of reasons. But when talking about having to shoot in self defense, we’re not trying to kill our attacker, we’re trying to STOP our attacker — immediately. And the only way to force a quick stop is to either hit the central nervous system (brain/upper spine) or damage the circulatory system such that it causes a rapid bleed-out and thus loss of blood pressure, which will deprive the brain of oxygen and cause them to fall unconscious. That’s the goal — stop the attacker from continuing their attack. We’re not trying to “kill” someone, we’re trying to stop them from killing us.

An attacker will stop for several reasons that are completely voluntary: sometimes just seeing a gun in your hand would cause an attacker to stop. Sometimes seeing a gun pointed at them would cause them to stop. Sometimes feeling the pain of a bullet hitting them would cause them to stop immediately. Sometimes they may experience a psychological shock upon being hit, that causes them to drop to the ground. But all of those rely on the attacker WANTING to stop, or choosing to stop. And, frankly, sometimes they don’t want to stop, sometimes they choose not to stop, and you may have to force them to stop. The only way to force them to stop is to take away their ability to attack — either through a central nervous system hit, or through rendering them unconscious (or dead.) This is called an “incapacitating” hit — it’s when you take away their capacity to attack, so that they have no more capability of attacking.

Any type of bullet could cause any of the voluntary reasons to stop. A tiny little .22LR or .25 ACP is just as capable of causing pain and fear and psychological shock as a .45 ACP. Any gun is better than no gun, and many guns can provide enough incentive to get an attacker to choose to stop. But in order to FORCE them to stop, you need to have the capability of rendering an incapacitating shot.

If you are relying on your weapon to render them unconscious/unable to move (or dead), then you need a bullet that can penetrate deeply enough to hit those vital organs and force their physiology to shut down. The FBI testing came to the conclusions that a bullet needed the ability to penetrate through 12″ of gel in order to have the minimum amount of power necessary to (with proper placement) force the attacker to stop attacking. And that penetrating 18″ or more was undesirable too. It’s not about “the most penetration”, it’s about “enough penetration to hit the vital organs”.

Obstacles And Barriers
Here’s a key thing that many people don’t seem to factor in — you won’t always have a clean shot at the attacker’s chest. In fact, you frequently won’t have that clean shot. There will or may be barriers in the way. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen video of attackers and defenders just standing facing each other, pointed at each other in classic Isosceles stances, trading chest shots, but I don’t think it’s too frequent! The most common barriers you’ll encounter are clothing, and other limbs. For example — if the attacker decides to shoot at you sideways, you may find yourself having to shoot through their arm or shoulder to even get to their chest — and that arm might be three or four inches thick or even more. Or, a more likely scenario, what if you and the attacker are pointing guns at each other — in order to hit his chest, you may very well have to shoot through his forearm. At an angle. So the bullet might have to penetrate the outer layer of skin, traverse five or six inches diagonally through a forearm, and then push through the inside layer of forearm skin before it can even get to his chest. That’s going to eat up a tremendous amount of the bullet’s energy; by the time it hits his chest it will already be expanded, and have lost much of its energy, and may not have enough power left to penetrate very deeply at all. It’ll cause pain, sure, but the odds against it causing an incapacitating hit are much lower. You’d need a really powerful bullet to be able to remain effective after encountering such a barrier — a bullet that would probably be able to travel through 14″-15″ of ballistic gel.

Now, law enforcement officers will face barriers that the general public aren’t as likely to; law enforcement officers may need to shoot through windows, windshields, car doors, etc., and so they need ammunition that they can count on that can overcome those barriers (and that’s why the FBI ammo test protocols include testing against bare gelatin, against “heavily clothed” gelatin, against windshields, and other barriers). I would argue that in a personal defense scenario, we are not as likely to encounter such situations. If there are substantial barriers between us and our attacker, that’s something you’re going to have to consider in the overall context of “are you in immediate danger of suffering severe injury or death” (or whatever your particular State’s legal standard is before the use of deadly force is justified). In a standard mugging scenario, none of these barriers will likely apply, but in a carjacking situation, it’s possible that they may.

The point of all this is — you don’t know what your shooting scenario is going to be, other than that we can all pretty much assume it’s not going to be textbook perfect! It’s very unlikely that if you’re involved in a defensive shooting, that you’ll be standing with a two-handed isosceles grip pointed at a defender who’s perfectly open to you, like a silhouette target. You’ll be moving, they’ll be moving, there’ll be arms and clothing in the way, and you don’t know what angle you may hit the target at. You may be on the ground shooting up, you may be turned at odd angles to each other, you just can’t predict what the scenario will be.

In order to account for all those variables, and to make sure that the bullet would have enough energy to do its job in any of the reasonably foreseeable scenarios, the FBI conducted tests and determined that 12″ of gel penetration would be the minimum power level their ammunition should deliver.
Is 12″ the minimum penetration standard you should consider? That’s a personal decision, only you can decide what you’re comfortable with, but as for me and those I consult with, we feel that the 12″ minimum is a reasonable standard and one that would be a good starting point for anyone to carefully consider. I would not want to rely on a pistol/ammo combination that can’t deliver 12″ of penetration. I know that sometimes we may have to compromise, but my preference would be for a defensive round that can meet the FBI minimum of 12″ of penetration through ballistics gel.

Shooting The Bull

We Bullieve in dispelling Bulloney.