#StoppingPower

Hello TFB, and welcome to a new column I’ve devised with the not-so-loyal and sometimes-helpful advice of the TFB Discord entitled “Love, Grampa Fudd” where with input from you readers, the TFB Staff, and members of the Discord, we’ll be tackling some of the most pernicious Fuddlore that still rears its ugly head. Without any further ado, let’s beat to death an argument that we’ve hashed out a million times.

I always love hot takes on gun subjects from big, fancy publications whose contributors really don’t know shit about guns, but they take a hard stance on the issue nonetheless because “By God, we are the [ New York Times / Washington Post / USA Today etc. ] and we couldn’t possibly be wrong.” [Inserts picture of an AR-15 with a chainsaw bayonet]

In yesterday’s article, we took a look at examples of two different methods of design, which I called “preference-driven” and “process-driven”. For these examples, I supposed two engineers from two different cultures – called “Romulan” and “Vulcan” after the aliens from the Star Trek universe.* In the “Romulan” example, we explored preference-driven design, where a final product is outlined by amalgamating preferred characteristics from previous works to create a desired whole. For the “Vulcan” example, we examined the more elaborate method of developing processes that can be fed data to procedurally generate characteristics as an example of process-driven design.

If you were designing the next small arms round, how would you do it? What methods would you use to determine its physical characteristics and performance attributes? How would you know what was too large or too small, too powerful or too weak? Perhaps more critically, how do different methods for answering these questions compare to one another? Could some methods be better or worse than others?

Today I want to address something that has come up in small arms ammunition development several times in the past 150 years: The small caliber bullet problem. For the sake of this article, I’ll characterize this problem as a perceived trend recognized on several occasions of small caliber (below 0.277″/7mm) cartridges producing wounds that are ineffective at stopping or killing the enemy.

Since we know that gunshot wounds follow physical laws – Newtonian mechanics, specifically – we can use physical quantities to describe what happens to a bullet when it enters a fleshy target. In a previous post, we were introduced to three physical quantities: Force, work, and kinetic energy. To see how these apply to a gunshot, let’s use the example of a hollow point bullet as it impacts and penetrates 10% ballistic gelatin.

One of the primary focuses of my study of modern small arms has been that of their terminal effectiveness, i.e. their “lethality” or “wounding”, although neither of these latter terms are exactly correct. Over the past several years, I have read a good deal of scientific and medical documents, first hand accounts, and treatises by experts, to come to the opinions I have today about the subject; Opinions which – I should note – are still evolving.

I don’t consider myself more than a hobbyist when it comes to ammunition – I reload a little, play around in SolidWorks a bit, and read dry, dusty tomes full of other people’s hard work collating every minute detail about ammunition. I’m, frankly, an ammo nerd, but not really a true expert. Once I began writing, however, I found that very few people are ammunition nerds, at least in the same way that I am.

I received this email from a reader a little less than a week ago:

Home defense is one of the leading reasons for many gun purchases, partly because many people who either do not bother or are not comfortable carrying concealed still want to have a firearm in their home. That’s a discussion for another day, though. Today we’re taking a look at the ins and outs of a household appliance for providing cover. Remember, there’s a difference between cover and concealment, and there are also a number of stories and hypotheses going around regarding the ability of various appliances or pieces of furniture in those areas. Understanding the difference is important as is taking it into consideration in a home defense situation.

One of the great innovations in the past 50 years pertaining to the study of what projectiles do in flight and why is the advent of ultra-high-speed photography – the kind that can keep a rifle bullet in focus. This sort of endeavor is not for the novice photographer, but the results speak for themselves in terms of empirical and artistic quality.

Cowan of Breech Bang Clear wrote a very intriguing article about Stopping Power. It is actually a good article about the anatomy and the importance of knowing how it works with regards to bullet placement.

Caleb over at Gun Nuts posted 5 myths about guns that should just die.

There is a lot of speculation about handgun ammunition performance in the gun community.  Flame wars break out instantly on the internet by zealots on all sides of the debate any time the words “stopping power” enter the conversation.