When the goal is to determine cartridge efficacy, it must be done per shot.
I understand EXACTLY what you are saying. Trust me. I get it. What I'm saying is that in order to look at only cases where ONE shot was involved one must discard a LOT of real world data.
Now, if one wants to know what happens in cases where a person is shot only once, and only in the torso, then that might start to make some sense. IF we...
- Ignore that the torso encompasses a fairly large area with a fairly large range of organs which have a very significant range of immediate necessity to the person who owns the torso.
- Ignore that hitting a torso from different angles dramatically affects the chances of hitting multiple organs or maybe missing everything important.
- Ignore that different people respond differently to pain.
- Ignore that chemical impairment, mental attitude, and physical conditioning can dramatically alter the physical and mental response to injury.
- Ignore that the issue of whether bone is hit is nearly random and can certainly affect the outcome.
- Ignore the fact that even when we restrict things only to torso shots, we still don't exclude all of the CNS (the spine is in the torso) which tends to react the same to a hit regardless of caliber.
- Ignore that psychological stops are by far the most common method of "incapacitation" and outnumber all other kinds of stops by 4 to 1 and have virtually nothing to do with where the target is hit at all.
But unfortunately all of those things are true. So now it turns out that we didn't really isolate the variable we cared about at all. In fact, we didn't even come close to the goal. All we did was throw away a lot of real world data.
As SOON as you can figure out a way to REALLY isolate terminal effect due to caliber in shootings, I'm going to be right there looking at the data. But this "pseodo-isolation" doesn't begin to accomplish the goal. What it does is give the illusion of validity while actually obscuring reality by excluding actual data that can provide useful insight.
...hope that you would come to the conclusion that multiple hits on a single target cause huge problems with defining results from data.
Not if you just accept the data as it stands. If you just look at the data, what it's telling you is very clear. It's only if you refuse to accept what it says and feel like you need to look for something else that it gets complicated. Just look at the data. Don't throw out the data that you think is problematic. Don't only focus on the part that you feel might show the effect you want to find. Look at ALL of it and just go with the results.
So on the one hand, you complain about variables, on the other you want to introduce more variables that muddy the waters far worse.
That's an absolutely backwards way of looking at it. I didn't introduce any variables at all!
Those variables are all already there in the data and they are combining to produce the overall effect. I didn't put them there. You believe that it's possible to "unsum" the data and get rid of the variables that you don't want. That's simply not reality. In addition to the one or two variables the particular strategy for throwing away real data you choose to endorse might minimize slightly, there are many others that aren't minimized at all and can still have huge and essentially random effects on the outcome.
The water IS muddy, but I didn't make it muddy. The variables are already there--I didn't introduce them. What I'm telling you is that even though the water is muddy and all the variables are inextricably wrapped into the data, it's still possible to look at the results and draw very useful conclusions.
If I gave you 20 different 9mm handgun loads to test (as many of each cartridge as you wanted), and as many 180lb pigs as you needed, what would your test parameters be?
Ok, if you really wanted to do this, here's what it would take.
Just having them be the same weight would not be enough--shooting a bunch of pigs that are all the same weight would just be a waste of pigs and ammo.
They would all need to be:
- Very similar in weight.
- In very similar physical condition.
- The same sex and age.
- Very similar body fat percentage.
- In a similar state of arousal/calm at the moment of shooting.
- Xrayed or otherwise scanned to verify that their internal anatomy was sufficiently similar. Internal organs can vary in size and even in arrangement in different individuals. Ribs can vary in size and thickness, etc.
Each shot would need to be taken with the pigs precisely positioned and with a precise aim point and shot angle to keep things as close to identical as possible for each shot. As a starting point, each aim point/shot angle/loading would need to be repeated at least 10x, each time on a different pig to try to eliminate individual variability and slight differences due to aiming/angle errors. That might need to be increased as we get into the experiment, based on how the results start to play out, but I think 10x would be a good starting point.
One would want to use a number of aiming points, I'm thinking a minimum of 12 "frontal" shots (4 midline, going down the body, 4 on each side of the front going down the body) and at least 4 from each side.
For each aiming point, you would need at least 5 shot angles. Straight in, angled up/down/right/left at say, 30 degrees.
So for each loading, we would need to shoot (12+4+4) x 5 x 10 = 1000 pigs. We might have to increase the number of repetitions later if we see that we're still not isolating the variable enough and need to increase the number of shots per aim point/shot angle/loading.
For 20 loadings, we're talking about 20,000 nearly identical pigs shot under very tightly controlled conditions. I think that would have a chance of showing loading differences.
Now, when we finished, what would we have? Would we have something that told us how likely one round was to be effective on the street compared to another one? No, of course not--because all the variables we strove to eliminate in the careful testing still exist on the street. We would have managed to prove what we already knew to be true. That, if very carefully isolated, terminal performance differences can affect incapacitation times. But in the real world, chaos still prevails and it dominates the outcomes, not the puny terminal effect differences due to caliber selection that can only be seen under artificially controlled conditions.
How do we find out what happens in the real world? Look at the real world data. Which is convenient (and fortunate for the pigs) because we already have it. It will tell us that what really makes the difference in the real world doesn't come in a 20 round box or in the form of a number stamped on the side of a gun.