As ignorant as this may potentially sound, I've been doing some reading up on this lately and that is actually where my curiosioty stems from. I know that JHP is the by far more commonly accepted self defense round, but why? It's penetration capabilities have been proven to be inadequate in many instances with many different brands of ammunition; the so called temporary wound channel or stretch channel has been proven to be basically worthless in terms of actually producing any real damage on living tissue, and even though many expanding bullets may increase to twice their original size, the permanent wound channel they create is often smaller than the actual unexpanded diameter of the bullet, due to the elasticity of tissue/ballistics gelatin. So where exactly is their advantage over FMJ? In particular I am interested in flat point FMJ or wadcutters because it seems like the sharp edges of the round would be more efficent at cutting and displacing tissue than a regular smooth round nose bullet. So can someone please explain to me why I should choose a JHP over an FMJ for a defensive load? (excluding the possibility of overpenetration for this argument- given the statistics of percentages of actual hits during a stressful situation, I would think that missed shots present a much greater danger to standerbys than any overpenetration anyways)