more hunting = less belief in "stopping power"

[jakemccoy]

This whole thread sounds like arguments for FMJ.

 

[Double Naught Spy]

There is a school of thought that says shooting the pelvis (and breaking it) is the most effective 1 stop shot (against a human).

The pelvis is structural, so if its broken it doesn't matter how determined, drugged up or full of adrenalin someone is, they're still going to fall down (now if they're armed with a gun they're still a major threat).

The pelvis should also be easier to hit than a bobbing head.

It is an interesting notion, but not backed up with much hard data. You can break off significant chunks of the ilium and still not have a structural collapse of the pelvic girdle...the ilium being the largest bone of the pelvis.

Hitting the pelvis should be easier than hitting the head, you would think, but most folks don't truly know where to shoot on a clothed person in order to hit a portion of the pelvis that is susceptible to breakage and hence collapse of the girdle.

I get a kick out of firearms instructors who promote this notion of shooting the bad guy in the pelvis and then they point to their hip bones, which are the iliac blades. This isn't the best place to try to made the pelvis collapse, as noted already.

Other times, I have seen them point to the outside of their leg, between the front and rear pockets. It is closer to the correct area, but the bone they are closest to touching is the femur, not the pelvis. If you can shoot the head or neck of the femur and break it, that will do the job as well, the head being in the acetabulum (socket) of the pelvis, but it is a luck shot because there are no actual exterior landmarks that readily identify the small target.

Lots of people shot in the low abdomen go down and it may be that the shooter was hoping for a pelvic shot, but you don't hear much about the pelvis being broken and collapsing such that locomotion is actually unsustainable. Instead, they go down simply because of the trauma, even if it is just soft tissue.

 

[Kimber1911_06238]

I've shot enough deer with a rifle in the lungs/heart and seen them go up to 100 yards.

I have no delusions about any human being dropped with one handgun shot to the chest. It simply isn't realistic. I don't care how hot you load 'em, whether you use double tap ammo, whether it's a .45, 9mm, .40 S&W, etc. Handuns are just not even close to as powerful as a rifle. If a deer can run that far with both lungs liquified by a rifle, imagine what an angry person could do when shot with a handgun...