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.

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.