Tales From The Morgue~interesting read about ballistics ALSO: Greg Ellifaz data

[JoshA]

Good point. That's something I really didn't consider.

I am a well driller and I will never forget one time I drilled this attorney that strangely resembled Abraham Lincoln due to the mustache-less beard look. Well anyway it didn't make hardly any water so he proceeded to pull what I recall a .25 or .32 beretta or the like from his pocket and attempted to shoot it into the well. Click, click and some fumbling with it etc. Well he never did get it to fire a round.

I doubt he was very serious about personal defense, but he would have likely been able to drop the mag and get to work had he a spare mag on his person. Maybe his ammo was as out of date as his beard, but that pistol was more of a detriment than a benefit IMO.

Don't worry if you wear that beard style by the way, it came back in style, but a defensive pistol going click is never in vogue. I like the second mag concept for this reason too. Thanks.

[sslater]

It took me a couple of weeks to plow thru that Tales From The Morgue article, then someone threw in the Greg Ellifaz article.  Whew!  The reason I stuck with it is I did a lot of digging on internal ballistics about ten years ago.  Why? Because I had gotten sick of all the misinformation being written by the familiar-name gun writers and published in the popular gun magazines of the day.  As a mechanical engineer with a pretty strong background in the sciences, terms like "hydrostatic shock", "hydrodynamic shock", "energy dump in the target" just didn't ring true. 

To keep a very long search short, the real story has been available in the literature since the mid-'90s:
1.) I found a number of articles by Dr. Martin Fackler, a retired U.S. Army Medical Corps Colonel.  He was a battlefield trauma surgeon and head of the Wound Ballistics Laboratory at the Letterman Army Medical Center.  It wasn't hard to find a good many articles authored by Dr. Fackler.  He debunked a lot of the popular writings on handguns inflicting hydraulic shock, and "energy dump".  Dr. Fackler eventually realized he needed the expertise of a physicist.
2.) Enter Duncan MacPherson and his seminal work, "Bullet Penetration: Modeling the Dynamics and the Incapacitation Resulting from Wound Trauma".  When I found the reference to this paper, it was out of print, and all of the copies distributed to the local universities had magically "disappeared".  After a couple of years of searching, a librarian I happened to know found a copy at a community college in Iowa.  It was worth the effort.  Amazon lists a Kindle version for about $40, and the real book in (second printing - 2005) hardcover (used) for $200!  I think the first edition was printed before 1995 by The International Wound Ballistics Association.

Bottom line:  The Morgue guys got it pretty much right with the exception of "energy dump" (saying it is best for a bullet to stay in the subject and expend all its energy inside; a bullet that goes thru and exits wastes wounding potential.)  MacPherson explains that what you really want is a bullet that goes all the way thru AND leaves a REAL BIG hole.
As for the hydro(whatever) shock - Fackler, MacPherson and the Morgue guys were in agreement that rifle velocities are needed for that phenomenon to occur.  Even 2,000 ft/sec velocity is on the low side, and there are only a few handguns that will do it.  Like the FN Five SeveN which that Major used in the Fort Hood shootings several years ago...
 

[JoshA]

Thanks for sharing your info Sslater.

It's always helpful when very experience folks agree AND you can NOT follow it to $$$