Quote:
Originally Posted by Rick Lee
Ok, so what's with those ballistic gelatin slabs that show a garden variety JHP penetrating 10-12" with heavy clothing in front of it? I also have never heard of an overpenetration issue in a defensive shoot. But I know my own center mass less than 12" thick and I'm kind of big and usually not wearing anything thicker than a t-shirt. Aren't those ballistic gelatin slabs made to simulate human tissue in thickness and resistance?
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Ballistic gelatin tests only do one thing - they demonstrate how ell bullets penetrate and expand in ballistic gelatin. That stuff in no represents a living, breathing person's tissue. A great deal of effort has been put forth to somehow correlate how a bullet behaves in that stuff to how it behaves in real living tissue, but has been so far unsuccessful. The stuff is too consistent, too homogenous. It has no fiber, has no bone, has no variation in density, and no variation in fluid content as flesh and organs do.
Advertising types love it, though, because of how nicely hollowpoints are formed into pretty mushrooms in it, and how "shocking" the initial wound channel looks in it. It makes the temporary wound channel look permanent and quite impressive, so the ad guys love to tout the "shocking" qualities of their particular hollowpoints. Problem is, one we get above about the size of a ground hog (rock chucks out here) and below the velocity of a .220 Swift or .22-250, "shock" becomes a myth as well. It just doesn't happen.
Death is caused by the permanent wound channel. Incapacitation is not caused by "shock" in anything near the size of humans. Incapacitation is most effectively caused by hitting the central nervous system, with causing rapid blood loss in second place. Entry wounds generally don't bleed anywhere near as much as exit wounds, and hitting anything important in either the central nervous or circulatory systems requires penetration. Not expansion.