Let’s talk about “stopping power”…
I often mention those conversations that will just send a forum into a flame war. The myth of “stopping power” is one of the most notorious of those topics (second only to “which is better: a Glock or 1911?”). I am in the “shot placement is far more important that bullet size” camp of thought. Many, however, believe that a .45 will kill anything in heaven or earth and create a small mushroom cloud in the process. The problem is, most “studies” have been conducted poorly and in a way that is guaranteed to confirm what the author already believes. In other words: most studies are crap. They use a lot of circumstantial evidence of hearsay and the results are about as dubious as the data that led to them.
Greg over at Buckeye Firearms, however, took a very good approach to the myth. He started by looking at pure data and all data, instead of trying to analyze ballistics gel samples or pick and choose data samples. In his own words:
For consistency purposes, they ONLY included hits to the torso and ONLY included cases where the person was hit with just a single round. Multiple hits screwed up their data, so they excluded them. This led to an unrealistically high stopping power percentage, because it factored out many of the cases where a person didn’t stop! I wanted to look at hits anywhere on the body and get a realistic idea of actual stopping power, no matter how many hits it took to get it. So I started collecting data.
Call it confirmation bias but his conclusion went right along with the one I’ve been saying for a long time: carry what you’re comfortable with.
The previous line was just the TL;DR version. Read the full article here:
http://www.buckeyefirearms.org/alternate-look-handgun-stopping-power
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