Hydrostatic Shock & Stopping Power: Fact or Fiction?
When you hear people talk about pistol caliber, it is rarely more than a couple sentences before the word “stopping power” shows up. This is one of those funky things that, over time, has become misrepresented to the point that it has different meanings for every person. Ultimately, the concept of stopping power means “how many bullets does it take to effectively stop someone”. In the grand scheme of things, the answer is one no matter what the caliber is. Many have argued for a long time (myself included) that shot placement is far more important than shot caliber. There have been more than enough cases of people hitting the ground and dying after 1 shot to the chest with a .22 and people taking 12 rounds from a .45 to the chest and still charging to effectively disprove the whole concept of “stopping power”.
Or has there?
New studies are lending some credence to the concept of “hydrostatic shock”. According to Wikipedia, Hydrostatic Shock (or HS, because I’m too lazy to type it out moving forward) is “the observation that a penetrating projectile can produce remote wounding and incapacitating effects in living targets through a hydraulic effect in their liquid-filled tissues, in addition to local effects in tissue caused by direct impact.” In plain English, it means that the impact force of the bullet is carried by the liquid in your body and damages other parts as a result.
Think of it like a tsunami. An earthquake off shore causes a pressure wave in the ocean that eventually devastates the shoreline miles away. It’s the same thing, except with the water in your body. It’s pretty nasty to think about.
E. Harvey Newton from Princeton University originally brought up the idea and his theories were bolstered by trauma surgeons in WWII. They were seeing hemorrhaging in the brain even though the bullet wounds were center mass or lower. A while later during the Vietnam war, a trauma surgeon/wound ballistics researcher by the name of Dr. Martin Fackler (along with a handful of others), concluded that the tissue damage from pressure waves was bunk. Shortly after that, the Wound Data and Munitions Effectiveness Team (WDMET) concluded that there might be something to this whole pressure wave thing after examining data on wounds sustained during the Vietnam conflict. You might have noticed there’s been a bit of back and forth over the years.
Over time, more and more research is showing that there is, in fact, a chance of damage from the pressure waves caused by bullet impact. They have shown, through testing (you don’t want to know, trust me), that there is a measurable impact on the brain when the wound is as far back as the thigh.
What does this mean for stopping power? Not a thing. The FBI still recommends that, for self defense, a round capable of penetrating at least 12 inches into ballistics gel is more than adequate. That, as you might have guessed, accounts for most bullets out there. As I said at the beginning, shot placement is far more important. It doesn’t matter if you have a .22, a 9mm or a Magnum 500 if all you can do is graze their shoulder in a pinch.
*Image Used under Creative Commons from perpetualplum.
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