Police officials said during a news conference on April 12 that they would ask for a test of their .40-caliber handgun ammunition because officers had raised concerns about the bullets’ firepower after two high-profile incidents in which suspects were hit multiple times but kept fighting.
The ammo lacking in “stopping power”? .40cal Federal HST.
Back in the day the 9mm, and to a lesser extent the .38 special, got a really bad rap for high round count “fails to stop” events. Now that we have high cap .45s and .40s we are consistently seeing these same sorts of events with those rounds as well.
My theory on how the 9mm got a bad rap includes poor firearms training combines with a pistol that gave one the ability to put lots of rounds into a bad guy before he went down, something that (back then) no other pistol could do.
Now we have larger calibers that allow one to get lots of rounds into the bad guy before they go down.
At any rate, a false idea of what service caliber handgun rounds can do is a failure in mindset prep IMHO, and this can lead to good guys getting themselves hurt by not being ready for the fact that the bad guy isn’t doing what they expected when shot.
At least the article kinda gets to the point in that shot placement is more important. I think more shots get fired now days simply due to high capacity semiautos. During the revolver era(pre 1990), the shooting pace was slower with less ammo capacity. These two factors slowed down the officer’s rate of fire, and with less ammo on hand it forced the officer to take more careful aim. Combine that with the fact that Bullseye shooting was the predominant shooting sport during the revolver era…training focused on marksmanship, not speed. This was also the age of the “one shot stop” model, which some blamed on caliber and ammo, when it more likely was a result of precision shooting as a result of using service revolvers.
I dropped a guy once with a single round of Speer 200 gr JHP from my M1911. Dark night, but he was stone dead when I got to him. Per our dept. policy, I immediately cuffed him. Patting him down, I didn’t find any blood on him . . . anywhere. He remained stone dead, until I told him he wasn’t. At that point he started hyperventilating and puking.
Marty Fackler has said that “stopping power” is 50% physiological, and 50% psychological. This guy was a classic example.
I’ll repeat what those who make a profession of either researching the topic have said or have given first hand accounts:
All handgun rnds in duty calibers are poor man stoppers. There’s all manner of threads explaining why by Doc Roberts et al, but it seems people still have a difficult time accepting that.
Not sure if you’re in that group, but people are tough animals and if nothing is hit that does not literally force them to stop and they don’t have any quit in them, will take an astounding amount of GSW before they stop what they are doing for which prompted their being shot in the first place.
A duty handgun is essentially a knife that allows you to stab someone from fifty feet away. The round can only damage the tissue that it touches. Good training would have provided these officers the knowledge that you keep getting hits until the assailant stops doing whatever it is that you want him to stop doing and if he doesn’t stop after hitting him where your aiming, you aim somewhere else. I’d suggest to them that they move to the face. As has been said before, there are not many creatures two legged or four that will not stop doing immediately what ever it is they’re not supposed to be doing when you shoot them in the face. The pelvic area is another good choice to move to, especially if the target is upright and moving because the pelvis tends be the part of the body that remains most “stable” during most movement.
On a serious note, I’ve seen this happen a lot in my career. Part of it is the Hollywood expectation that the guy is going to grab his chest, fall down and say: “You got me, copper!” and the other are wholly unrealistic expectations with regard to their weapon. The answer is training. Plain and simple. They be wise to read FBI SA Urey Patrick’s Handgun Wounding Factors and Their Effectiveness. It’d be a good place to start.
Excellent point. Even if the heart and vitals are hit, regardless of caliber, the perp can still run around for several seconds shooting back or doing bad things. If you have more rounds in the gun and proper training, you keep putting rounds on target. It’s likely the extra hits speed things along but not guaranteed. So more bullets=more hits=perseption that the bullets were less effective because “it took so many hits”. Sounds very valid to me.
People, especially the media and general public, like to over simplyfy things. “Stopping power” doesn’t exist period. A dirt bag can be stopped with (1) shot from a .22 and they can also continue fighting after taking multiple rounds from a .45. Shoot a subject as many times as you can and the likelihood of stopping him goes up dramatically period.
Police officials said during a news conference on April 12 that they would ask for a test of their .40-caliber handgun ammunition because officers had raised concerns about the bullets’ firepower after two high-profile incidents in which suspects were hit multiple times but kept fighting.
A common result in similar situations is to adopt the .45. When it is discovered that the .45 can fail too, there is no .46 to adopt. Knee jerk reactions to isolated incidents are no way to handle things like this but it happens alot.
I find it interesting that there are now cases where departments have gone back to the 9mm. Someone out there is thinking out of the box.
We carry 9mms on my job, and we are still carrying them after trying the .40 for awhile. That caused me no end of grief from the “you gotta have…” guys. None of whom could shoot worth a damn BTW.
One of our OISs is an example;
Suspect takes a hit through the rear shoulder while trying to turn and shoot a copper during a foot pursuit. Bullet goes through the scapula and exits the pec without hitting any of the big bleeders. Bad guy collapses in a heap and is incoherent from the hit. Local trauma unit run by a former SF medic turned MD fixes bad guy right up.
Some of our guys start bitching we need .40s/.45s because “that 9mm is bullshit”, because the bad guy survived.
I ask; when in the instantaneous collapse and incapacitation of said bad guy that the 9mm failed?
No comment, walk away grumbling…
Reading some Marty Fackler and the odd Doc Roberts posts, I finally realized how conceptually silly it is for even a 200 grain projectile traveling at subsonic speeds (or one a bit over half that weight in the transonic velocity region) to actually have any sort of stopping power.
Even in ideal situations where the bullet discharges maximum energy into the target, there’s still not much raw power, so it comes down to placement.
I shot my neighbor’s amstaff Monday as he was trying to use me as a chew toy, 2 shots from my G19 with 147gr Rangers sent him running but he was still walking around when I saw him last. It took the aggression out of him but he was still moving, wish I would have had a 12 gauge or 7.62 instead. Yeah, handguns suck.
My father got his CCW and I offered to help him select a new carry piece. He wanted a .380 - I insisted on 9mm/.38.
He has been shooting for 40+ years, and has shot dozens of deer with a 12 gauge and watched them sprint a good distance.
So imagine the look on my face when he explained he doesn’t like the 9mm because:
“A deer got hit on the edge of our property last year. The Sheriff showed up and shot him in the chest with a nine, and it took at least twenty seconds to die!”
