If a cartridge / bullet combination fails to penetrate deeply enough from any angle needed to hit the vitails then it failed. If the bullet reaches the heart and the advasary continues on, instead of instant incapacitation that is simply the difference from one to another and no fault of the cartridge load combination, because it did the damage. This applies to rifle, shotgun and handgun.
Basically you're setting up a false paradigm. The goal should always be to kill the animal quickly and humanely regardless of penetration. The two basic schools of thought here are penetration vs. expansion. If your goal is penetration and everything else be damned, then you're probably going to have some failures to kill quickly in your quest for 100% success on penetration. Likewise, if your goal is only expansion, then you are probably going to have some kill-failures in your attainment of the expansion goal due to not attaining enough penetration for that expansion. What this probably illustrates is that goals of penetration and expansion are not 100% reliable arbiters of killing game.
And again, killing game and stopping a person from fighting are two different things even though you seem to not differentiate between them. All you're doing is once again stating your preference for penetration over everything else and anybody who has read here very long knows that.
