Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Handguns .380 ACP Bubba-style Torture Test

OK. I said that I was not going to post my follow-up shot with a 9mm Sig P365 XL unless it had some relevance to the .380 tests. Well, I think it did. Here are two shots from today.

Sig P365 XL loaded with 9mm Speer 124 grain standard pressure Gold Dot. Sorry about the wind noise. It's Wyoming, what can I say.


I also did one more. This one is for SargeMO. Sig P229DAK loaded with a .40 S&W 180 grain Gold Dot.


Notice the jug separation between the 4 jugs.

I later found some slivers of metal in jug 3 or 4 (can’t remember) of the 9mm jugs. On closer inspection, I think they are probably pieces of the sheet metal because they appear to be cutouts. Here are pictures of the front and back of the sheet metal and what I recovered from the two shots. Like Paul Harrell says, you be the judge.





When you consider what a 9mm and a .40 S&W from a compact barrel will do even after hitting a stout barrier, it appears that concerns about .380 “overpenetration” with hard cast and solid copper projectiles are a bit overrated. I shot the 9mm and 40 S&W rounds today because the Buffalo Bore hard cast and Lehigh XD did about the same as the Gold Dot from the mini-nine P365 in terms of penetration while the Lehigh XP and Underwood XP exceeded the penetration from the P365. They did not best the penetration of the Sig P365 XL or the 229, and even those guns do not have barrel lengths as long as full-sized duty guns.

Finally, although this is not a 9mm thread, an extra .6 inch of barrel on the P365 XL appears to have made a big difference in penetration. That should not come as a big surprise, though. Oh, and the .40 S&W results were impressive!

Hope I haven’t bored you. Also, thanks to the people who posted positive thoughts after my last post.

Stay safe.