One shot stops

[VARifleman]

By my calculations that would have about 5 million footpounds of energy, possibly enough to vaporise all surrounding tissue until it runs out of tissue to vaporise. Unless it hits a limb in which case the limb will be promptly removed.

Now that is a one shot stop folks! When you shoot someone in the gut and their spine turns to base protein molecules.

No, it's not 5 million, it's about 1 and a half million.

1/2 * m * v^2 = 1/2 * 0.031081 * w * v^2

w= 6 lbs, v = 4000 ft/sec

0.031081 lbs per slug * 6 lbs = .186486 slugs = .186486 pounds per feet per second squared

4000^2 = 16,000,000 feet^2/seconds ^2

1/2 *(.186486 lbs * sec^2/ ft )* 16,000,000 (ft^2/sec ^2)= 1,491,888 ft*lbs

 

[JShirley]

I've seen it happen...

 

[Kurush]

One more thing, when I say "one shot stop" is a myth, I don't mean that it's impossible to stop in one shot. A 22lr (or a 9mm or an 1890 cannon ) at close range into the eyeball will stop a person cold. The problem with these "statistics" (actually faked and misrepresented anecdotes) is that they're based on the claim that:

"The issue of lethality is strictly one of shot placement; the issue of stopping power is more one of energy transfer." -- Street Stoppers Marshall & Sanow

Which is simply untrue. There is no magic bullet that, regardless of shot placement, makes the opponent collapse dramatically like a victorian ballroom dancer with one shot. The only way to reliably stop an opponent (or game animal) is to damage their central nervous system or cause hypovolemic shock through blood loss. With that in mind, it becomes obvious that collecting statistics (even legitimate statistics) of shootings and recording only the caliber is pointless, because the caliber has little to do with whether the bullet hits the CNS.

 

[Vern Humphrey]

Which is simply untrue. There is no magic bullet that, regardless of shot placement, makes the opponent collapse dramatically like a victorian ballroom dancer with one shot.

The closest approach I can make to the truth is to say, "It's the hole that kills." That is to say, given equal shot placment, a bigger and deeper hole will destroy and disrupt more tissue, and the target will bleed out faster.

 

[jashobeam]

Thanks JShirley

Thank you for your response.

 

[Vern Humphrey]

Most guys will be stopped by a single chest hit with a decent load. However, most just means "more than half", which is not very comforting. He's REALLY full of it about the shotgun. It's very rare for a blast of buckshot, if it is well centered on the chest, to fail to stop a man. Yes, it has happened, but such things are 1 in 50 or 1 in 100 rarities. No, their "momentum' does not keep them coming. Their knees buckle and the only possible forward movemnt is their torso falling the 4 ft or so distance of their knees to their faces.

I had a good friend in Virginia who was a Medical Examiner. He tells of a case where a man was shot in the chest with a shotgun and walked a block and a half and sat down on his front step to die. He performed the autopsy and described the heart as "shredded."

On the witness stand, a lawyer challenged him, "Do you expect me to believe that a man walked that far with no heart at all?"

And my friend replied, "I don't care what you believe, Councilor. That's what happened."

 

[JohnKSa]

The closest approach I can make to the truth is to say, "It's the hole that kills." That is to say, given equal shot placment, a bigger and deeper hole will destroy and disrupt more tissue, and the target will bleed out faster.

You can get closer than that. It's not the hole that kills, it's WHERE the hole is that kills. There are a huge number of ways and places to shoot a person that will not kill them or even significantly incapacitate them. Regardless of caliber. And there are even more ways and places to shoot them that will incapacitate or kill them, but not for a long time. You can't expect any qualities or parameters of the bullet to do anything significant if the hole isn't in the right place.

 

[Vern Humphrey]

You can get closer than that. It's not the hole that kills, it's WHERE the hole is that kills.

Far be it from me to argue with bullet placement. But all things being equal, the bigger the hole, the better.

An example might be the Gallant Major Ringold, shot through both thighs at Palo Alto -- by a cannon ball (which also passed through his horse.) He died quickly from a wound that might have been survivable with a musket ball.

 

[JohnKSa]

Sorry bout that, I was in the midst of an edit and things on my end went gefurkt. Since you've already replied, I'll just repost with the entire post in edited form: Added one parenthetical at the very end of the post after reading your reply.

The closest approach I can make to the truth is to say, "It's the hole that kills." That is to say, given equal shot placment, a bigger and deeper hole will destroy and disrupt more tissue, and the target will bleed out faster.

You can get closer than that. It's not the hole that kills, it's WHERE the hole is that kills. There are a huge number of ways and places to shoot a person that will not kill them or even significantly incapacitate them. Regardless of caliber. And there are a huge number of ways and places to shoot them that will incapacitate or kill them, but not for a long time.

You can't expect any qualities or parameters of the bullet to make a significant difference if the hole isn't in the right place.

Conversely, if the hole IS in the right place, a few hundredths of an inch of diameter difference or a few thousandths of a square inch of frontal area difference won't make a significant difference either.

All of this is predicated on the assumption that we're comparing performance within a general class of firearms--i.e. comparing one service pistol caliber to another, not magnum hunting loads to rimfire calibers. (Or cannons to muskets.)

 

[Vern Humphrey]

Conversely, if the hole IS in the right place, a few hundredths of an inch of diameter difference or a few thousandths of an inch of frontal area difference won't make a significant difference either.

Yes and no. A .22 Short to the brain will kill as quickly as a .458 Lott hitting the same spot. On the other hand, a hit in the butt by a .458 Lott is liable to be a lot more disabling than a hit by a .22 Short.

 

[JohnKSa]

Yes, and NOT no.

All of this is predicated on the assumption that we're comparing performance within a general class of firearms--i.e. comparing one service pistol caliber to another, not magnum hunting loads to rimfire calibers.

 

[Vern Humphrey]

Yes, and NOT no.

Originally Posted by JohnKSa
All of this is predicated on the assumption that we're comparing performance within a general class of firearms--i.e. comparing one service pistol caliber to another, not magnum hunting loads to rimfire calibers.

Okay, make it a .25 ACP versus a .45 Colt, "Ruger Only" load.

The point is, there is little advantage between one cartridge/bullet combination and another if you make a perfect shot. But for less than perfect shots, better bullets, larger calibers and more velocity have the advantage.

 

[JohnKSa]

Vern,

No one argues about the effectiveness of a .25ACP compared to the.454Casull.

People understand the basic classes of handgun performance:
When I say pocket pistol, no one thinks .357Magnum even though there are a few .357 guns that might qualify as pocket pistols.
When I say magnum handguns, no one thinks .25ACP.
When I say service pistol, no one thinks .454 Casull.

And everyone understands that when you go from one class to another (pocket pistol to service pistol to magnum) that there's an increase in performance. No one argues that magnum handguns (as a class) are superior, in terms of terminal performance, to service pistols (as a class).

The superiority arguments come WITHIN classes. 9mm vs .38SP, .40 vs .45ACP, etc.

That's why I carefully stated that my comments applied to comparisons WITHIN A SPECIFIC PERFORMANCE CLASS rather than leave the comments unqualified.

WITHIN A PERFORMANCE CLASS, specifically the service pistol class (.38spl, .45ACP, .40S&W, 9mm, etc.), bigger has NOT been shown to be better.

The reason that is true is that any minor differences in performance within a performance class are completely swamped by shot placement issues.

Stated another way.

It is completely unprofitable to quibble over hundredths of an inch or thousandths of a square inch and the theoretical effects that those trivial numbers MIGHT make when it is CLEARLY and UNEQUIVOCABLY true that a few inches difference of shot placement WILL have a predictable and tremendous difference in effect.

 

[Vern Humphrey]

Vern,

No one argues about the effectiveness of a .25ACP compared to the.454Casull.

People understand the basic classes of handgun performance:
When I say pocket pistol, no one thinks .357Magnum even though there are a few .357 guns that might qualify as pocket pistols.
When I say magnum handguns, no one thinks .25ACP.
When I say service pistol, no one thinks .454 Casull.

And everyone understands that when you go from one class to another (pocket pistol to service pistol to magnum) that there's an increase in performance. No one argues that magnum handguns (as a class) are superior to service pistols (as a class).

The superiority arguments come WITHIN classes. 9mm vs .38SP, .40 vs .45ACP, etc.

That's why I stated that my comments applied to comparisons WITHIN A SPECIFIC PERFORMANCE CLASS rather than leave the comments unqualified.

You're kind of defining the problem out of exitance. In effect, you're proving that you can make increments smaller than the margin of error of the measuring instrument -- something no one denies.

 

[JohnKSa]

You're kind of defining the problem out of exitance.

JUST the opposite.

The whole argument is over "increments smaller than the margin of error". That's my point.

People want to state bigger is better argument in such an extreme form that no one can argue--e.g. .458Win Mag outperforms .22Short. Which is fine--but then they want to bring that back down and have it apply to 9mm vs .40S&W. You can't do that.

The only reason that the initial premise was reasonable was the extreme comparison in the original statement. Cannon vs musket. Elephant gun vs gallery round. When you get back to a real world comparison, the extreme comparison isn't helpful. No one wants to know the difference between the .500 Magnum and the .380. People want to know the difference between .45ACP and .40S&W.

But the bigger is now only a hundredth of an inch or so instead of a factor of 2. The faster is now only a fractional increase in velocity instead of a factor of 2. All of the overwhelming differences that made a person immediately accept the original premise aren't there anymore...

See, the reason the debate over the difference in effectiveness in service pistol calibers rages on is precisely because people refuse to realize that there is NO significant difference in effectiveness in service pistol calibers.

The differences are due to shot placement, the mindset of the attacker, the number of rounds that connect, etc. NOT due to a hundredth of an inch more diameter. NOT due to a bit more velocity or a little more or less energy.

 

[Vern Humphrey]

People want to state bigger is better argument in such an extreme form that no one can argue--e.g. .458Win Mag outperforms .22Short. Which is fine--but then they want to bring that back down and have it apply to 9mm vs .40S&W. You can't do that.

The reason extreme cases are valuable is that they offer increments that are measurable with the available instrument. So it is legitimate to say, "I can't proove A is better than B because I can't measure that finely. But I can prove that with greater increments A' is better than B'."

The question is, are there other factors that are more important than the incremental improvement that is too small to measure?

For example, is a .22 LR that you can shoot very well better than a .45 that you can't shoot nearly that well?

 

[Larry Ashcraft]

DNS, I see your point, and as always, value your view, but:

You see, they deputy is confused about the differences between mortally wounded and actually being dead. Legally, death is defined as being brain dead where there is a complete and irreversible cessation of brain activity.

I think the deputy was saying exactly what you are saying, instead of he is already dead he should have said he will be dead in a few seconds, but in the meantime, he still can finish or continue his attack on you.

I once shot a pronghorn through the heart and both lungs at 100 yards or so, with a .270 Win 130 gr bullet. He hunched up and then walked another ten feet or so before he stuck his horns in the ground and flipped over. He just didn't know he was dead yet.

Anyway, having seen several big game animals hit in vital areas with major calibers, which continued to run and try to get away from the threat, I still think the one shot stop is a myth (and I'm not sure you were arguing that point).

I also read an article recently (by Jim Carmichael) where a doctor had determined that one shot "drops" on big game can be attributed to the fact that the hunter "lucked out" and hit the animal in the heart just as the heart was pumping.

 

[TOADMAN]

I like the keep shooting until the threat stops idea...best...

 

[JohnKSa]

The reason extreme cases are valuable is that they offer increments that are measurable with the available instrument.

You could also say that the reason they're NECESSARY is because there is no measureable difference if you don't resort to the extreme cases. And that's exactly what I've been saying all along. Is anyone REALLY interested in a theoretical difference that is essentially unquantifiable? I can't see how anyone rational would be..

For example, is a .22 LR that you can shoot very well better than a .45 that you can't shoot nearly that well?

That's a matter of degree. It depends on how well you shoot the .22 and how badly you shoot the .45. I think everyone agrees that a hit with a .22 is better than a miss with a .45. But, again, that's a comparison that does no one any good. People are not out there trying to make the decision between carrying a 22 and carrying a 45. There might be people trying to choose between a 22 and a 25, or a 40 and a 45, but a 22 vs a 45? Not very likely at all. As before, resorting to the extreme case provides an answer that is essentially useless.

If the extreme case comparison is actually proof for the bigger is better argument (as it applies to comparing calibers within a performance class), if it really is valuable, it MUST come along with a method to show how the extreme case scales to the trivial case. And there isn't any such method. There just isn't.

 

[Double Naught Spy]

Article on statistical analysis of Marshall/Sanow one-shot-stop "data" proving it was faked:

Sorry Kurush, based on your statement above, but I think you were unaware of what a statistical analysis can and cannot do. Statistical analyses do not actually prove anything. They simply give a probability.

"One-Shot Drops Surviving the Myth" FBI bulletin explaining how the "one shot stop" myth can endanger lives:

Did you read the article, Kurush? Go back and read the section called "The Myth." The myth has nothing to do with one shot stops, but the unrealistically high amount of bad guys dropped by singular shots. While folks know they are movie stunts, as they note, many officers expect that sort of performance to happen when they are in a fight. That expectation is one germinated by the countless Hollywood portrayals of one shot drops. It is the expectation of officers of the mythical Hollywood one stop drops that is how lives can be endangered as those sorts of events are very rare in real life shootings, especially when compared to the vast number of Hollywood portrayals of one stop drops.

If you check the Endnotes section, you will see that the officers didn't even cite any of the OSS articles. That is because they were not discussing on shot stops.

--------

Larry, that is where so much confusion gets introduced and then passed on as "facts" when they are in error. What you reported the deputy said is completely different from what he should have said. The condition of death, brain death, is fairly binary. Either you are brain dead or you are not brain dead.

So it isn't the momentum of the mortally wounded guy charging you that will carry him to you, but the fact that without brain death and or a CNS shutdown, the human body is still able to function. Even with the heart not pumping blood, adrenaline in the system will allow your muscles to continue to function via anaerobic chemical activity as opposed to aerobic which is how we normally function most of the time. So it isn't that the guy charging you has momentum that carries him to you. He does have momentum, but even with a stopped heart, he may function quite well for 10-30 seconds. In that time, he can alter the momentum of his direction of travel. He can stop, turn or whatever much like a non-mortally wounded person.

So, the mortally wounded person is not dead while he can still attack you and it is not his momentum that carries him to you where he will undoubtedly try to harm you. Sorry Larry, but your source with all that experience screwed up some key concepts that are important for this discussion.

The fact that a person could be mortally wounded via their first shot and still fight on is not new at all, nor is it particular to pistol calibers or OSSs. I may be in error here, but the first or one of the first wounds suffered by Matix in the shootout with the FBI in 1986 was a mortal wound. He managed to kill and wound several agents before that wound would have eventually taken his life. It was one of his major blood vessels that had been nicked and he was bleeding out internally. As one of the surviving agents said about Platt and Matix, they were dying, but not dying fast enough.

That is probably one of the best known mortally wounded bad guy events where the bad guy did much harm. However, people are mortally wounded in all sorts of activities and still manage to perform a variety of tasks before they expire.

In your deputy's example, a person could be shot once in the heart, it being a OSS, suffer no other wounds, and the person live long enough to attack and kill others. I believe this was the point you were trying to get at by bringing up his information. And sure, it does happen. I don't recall anywhere that OSSs are necessarily instantaneous in their stopping ability.

As I said, one shot stops are not a myth. It does happen. What does appear to be a myth is how people apply the data (be it real or false doesn't matter to me) in unrealistic manners, often because they don't actually understand what OSS means, how the supposed data were compiled (rules, inclusions, exclusions), or understand the fact that every time a gun is discharged, it is a unique event, mutually exclusive from other events, particularly in regard to the outcome. So you end up with your high brow gun store commandos saying dumb things like,

I shoot Federal Hydroooshok .45 acp. It has a OSS of 96%. That pretty well means that if a bad guy comes through that door and I have to shoot him, there is only a 4% chance the fight will go beyond that and I got three more mags of Hydrooochoks if it does.

.45 acp Hydrashok may be reported to have a 96% OSS historical rating, but that has no bearing what will happen if the gun store commando shoots somebody. Historical data do not determine or influence future events.

Also, and very significant to OSS is the fact that a bad guy may stop after just one shot and not be wounded or not be seriously wounded. The OSS concept does not imply that the singular shot will necessarily be incapacitating. I think a lot of the interpretive confusion from gun store commando types is that OSS is about physically stopping the bad guys and the reality is that OSS is a mishmash of physical incapacitations and simple behavior modification. The report of a gun and/or the sensation of being shot may be enough to convince said bad guy that he needs to cease current aggression. Once the aggression has ceased, the stop is accomplished.

And this is a serious shortcoming of the OSS concept in regard to determining whether paricular ammo is more or less effective. Of the 96% Hydrashok .45 acp OSS, how many of those were produced by minor or non-incapacitating wounds? How may produced by misses? I don't know as it has been too long, if OSS data were inclusive of shots that did not strike the suspect or not, but you get the idea. Heck, there are numerous accounts of singular warning shots being enough to convince a troubleamaker to cease the troublesome activities. Even more amazing is that are are accounts where a singular warning shot was able to cause a group of troublemakers to cease troublesome activities. So, you could have a OSS that does not actually harm anybody and yet stop the activities of many people.

So to conclude, OSSs do happen. They are supposedly based on real case data compiled under some unrealistic data selection criteria. They are an interesting historical compilation of performance, but so mired in various biases that the value really stops at being an interesting historical complilation. Since each fired round is a unique event, it is unreasonable to believe that historical performance will necessarily be duplicated by any given shot.

 

[Vern Humphrey]

That's a matter of degree. It depends on how well you shoot the .22 and how badly you shoot the .45. I think everyone agrees that a hit with a .22 is better than a miss with a .45. But, again, that's a comparison that does no one any good. People are not out there trying to make the decision between carrying a 22 and carrying a 45. There might be people trying to choose between a 22 and a 25, or a 40 and a 45, but a 22 vs a 45? Not very likely at all. As before, resorting to the extreme case provides an answer that is essentially useless.

Not really -- it tells you where to look for answers, and gives you a decision point.

For example, if we can demonstrate that bigger is better in extreme cases, then in close cases, we would use that as a tie-breaker.

If the extreme case comparison is actually proof for the bigger is better argument (as it applies to comparing calibers within a performance class), if it really is valuable, it MUST come along with a method to show how the extreme case scales to the trivial case. And there isn't any such method. There just isn't.

Not necessarily. There are many things we cannot quantify, but can nevertheless use to make decisions.

However if I were going to do a study on this issues, I would first of all look to actual shootouts and ask "What do the winners use? Is there a particular weapon, caliber and cartridge that is significantly represented amongst the winners?"

If there were, that would point us in the right direction -- the next question would be "why?"

 

[Kurush]

Sorry Kurush, based on your statement above, but I think you were unaware of what a statistical analysis can and cannot do. Statistical analyses do not actually prove anything. They simply give a probability.

I am well aware of how statistics work. The statisticians in question applied a statistical test to the data and found that it deviated substantially from the expected distributions. The same technique was used to uncover a physicist who was faking experimental data not long ago. In science, no hypothesis can be proved in the mathematical sense of proving a theorem. In common usage, when the data shows that:

Dr. Carroll Peters, Professor of Engineering at the University of Tennessee calculated the probability that they could be true to be one in ten to the twentieth power (1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000)

It is said to be proved.

Did you read the article, Kurush?

Did you try to understand it

Go back and read the section called "The Myth." The myth has nothing to do with one shot stops, but the unrealistically high amount of bad guys dropped by singular shots.

Is this a joke? That's exactly what the article is about, the title itself says that the myth is "one shot drops". Are you claiming that there is a difference between the term "one shot drop" and "one shot stop"?

The fact that it did not single out Marshall & Sanow is immaterial. The point of the article is that someone who believes their gun has a very high probability of stopping with one shot will stop firing before the aggressor stops, and get killed. Whether they believe that because they watch too many movies or because they read fake statistics is irrelevant.

.45 acp Hydrashok may be reported to have a 96% OSS historical rating, but that has no bearing what will happen if the gun store commando shoots somebody. Historical data do not determine or influence future events.

Your argument defeats itself. If one shot stop "statistics" are not predictive, they are unscientific and useless.

the reality is that OSS is a mishmash of physical incapacitations and simple behavior modification.

Psychological incapacitation is not a reliable mechanism for self defense. Bullets usually cause very little pain, and a determined attacker or one who's high on drugs can and will continue attacking even with disabling and mortal wounds. Furthermore, it is grossly implausible that you could find any correlation between bullet mass or caliber (in handguns) and psychological effects.

(edited some for clarity)

 

[JohnKSa]

For example, if we can demonstrate that bigger is better in extreme cases, then in close cases, we would use that as a tie-breaker.

You could--or you could say that it's the energy that makes the difference in extreme cases and use energy as the tie-breaker. The point about the extreme case is that there's a huge difference in nearly any parameter you choose to measure. You can't just pick ONE parameter, scale the comparison back to a nearly trivial case and have any basis for saying that the single parameter you picked (essentially at random) is the one that's important when the difference is picayune.

There are many things we cannot quantify, but can nevertheless use to make decisions.

Those are called religious beliefs. Ok, that's pushing it a bit, but you get the point. Belief without evidence is fine, but only if that's how you sell it. You can't couch opinion or faith as fact to a non-believer and expect to make any headway.

Is there a particular weapon, caliber and cartridge that is significantly represented amongst the winners?"

FBI did a study awhile back on exactly this topic. Their conclusion was that the issue pistols currently in use by U.S. LE are all effective. The difference between the winners and the losers was attitude, skill and training--NOT the firearm or caliber they were carrying. TFL search is sick right now. When it gets better, I'll post a link to the article.

 

[gunfan]

We were at a Q&A session a couple weeks ago with a deputy district attorney, part of the CCW training here, to learn about the legalities of self defense.

Anyway, the deputy, Steve Fieldman, has been with the DA's office for over 20 years, and investigated a lot of crimes, so he does have some experience in these matters.

He said: "No matter what you've seen on TV or in the movies, the person shot does NOT fly backwards or even stop at the shot, even with a shotgun. If someone is charging you from 20 feet away, and you shoot him three times with your .45, he will still be coming at you. He may be dead at the first shot, but his momentum will continue carrying him toward you, and he will still have a few seconds of life left to do you great harm."

So I think the myth of the one shot stop is just that, a myth.

Amen! Shoot them until they stop threatening you!

End of discussion.

Scott

 

[AndrewM]

I think the deputy was saying exactly what you are saying, instead of he is already dead he should have said he will be dead in a few seconds, but in the meantime, he still can finish or continue his attack on you.

I once shot a pronghorn through the heart and both lungs at 100 yards or so, with a .270 Win 130 gr bullet. He hunched up and then walked another ten feet or so before he stuck his horns in the ground and flipped over. He just didn't know he was dead yet.

Anyway, having seen several big game animals hit in vital areas with major calibers, which continued to run and try to get away from the threat, I still think the one shot stop is a myth (and I'm not sure you were arguing that point).

I was on the jury for a murder trial, the victim in this case was shot with a 9mm at close range (5-6ft), he than leaped out a window and ran another 60-75ft before collapsing. He was shot through the heart (nothing like autopsy photo's after lunch), it took a good 30 seconds for him to collapse.

Andrew