Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Handguns Don't Drink the 5.7mm Koolaid

Well, whitepaper, as I stated to begin with, it looked to me like you came to this forum spoiling for a fight, and against my better judgment (having chosen to NOT carry on any further indictments of the 5.7x28mm round already)I replied to your post as clearly and non-judgmentally as I could.

You appear to be set on having a fight, though, and I'm afraid I will not oblige you. I will respond to a couple of your points as they do make some sense.



<sigh>

You're right, I cannot say one way or another what the temperature of the blocks might have been.

But the video producer posts the ambient temperature as being 94 degrees, and he's shooting at an outdoor range, and you can clearly see he's shooting in the sun. He doesn't provide video evidence of the blocks' temperatures. He doesn't explain how he safeguarded the blocks' temperatures during the tests. All that that tells me is that we have no idea whether the blocks were stored and shot at 4C or not, due to the video producer's failure to provide that information.

BB calibration was "to spec", you say, and I might concur. But when was the gelatin calibrated? How long before shooting the first bullet into the gelatin? Was he monitoring the temperature? No? Yes? We can't tell. He doesn't provide that information.

As I said, this video "proof" is only a demonstration, and while entertaining, it really doesn't prove anything one way or another.





Don't be petty. I was not "too lazy" to watch all the videos, inane as they were. I watched all 25+ minutes of them. But I have to say that watching 40 seconds of slow-motion low-resolution footage of a gelatin block being shot (half a dozen times over) did not provide any "education", for me. Nor did watching a guy shooting his pistol over a chronograph and reading the numbers out loud provide me with any "education".

You didn't hand me a text book, and you didn't provide a summary, which would have been a courtesy to the people who frequent this forum.

All I'm saying is that if you come here to pick a fight, at least have the courtesy to summarize your "proof". I did it for you. How does that offend you?



I have no idea what the producer of those videos would "gladly test", nor, do I expect, do you.

I have shot more ammunition into blocks of gelatin than you can even imagine. And yes, a large part of that testing was paid for out of my own funds. I have watched hours and hours of film and video of gelatin blocks being shot. I have reviewed reams of data of gelatin blocks being shot.

The person who produced this video may have paid for it out of his own pocket, I have no idea. Nor do you (unless you're the guy who did it? Is THAT why you're so upset that I would point out the methodological flaws of these "tests"?). Regardless, I don't care who paid for it, or why. The video was clearly done by amateurs and include amateur mistakes.



This is a complicated question, and the answer is even more complicated. But I'll give you a short version.

Bullets that fragment explosively, like varmint rounds such as the V-Max, do not penetrate very deeply. Tissue damage in human-size thoraces is typically shallow and non-lethal, or at least not quickly lethal. Bullets that penetrate more deeply into tissue before fragmenting, and particularly bullets that break up into a small number of larger fragments (as opposed to bullets that break up into a large number of small fragments) have proven over the years to be more effective in terms of terminal effectiveness. In order to assess the effectiveness of fragmenting bullets, you need to demonstrate the depth at which the bullet begins to break up, the number of fragments typically produced, and the depth to which these fragments penetrate.

As an example: the old 5.56 55 gr FMJ round carried by our troops in Viet Nam and for a long time afterwards was a proven "man-stopper" that typically yawed in flesh/gelatin and broke into 2 major fragments, which as it turns out did a lot of damage. This is a totally different type of fragmentation than that demonstrated by varmint bullets. Apparently the guys who make ammo for the 5.7 FN tried to do the same thing with their S5 or S4M ammunition, i.e., to make it break up into 3 pieces.

BTW, your boy's video shows the bullets that were supposed to break into 3 pieces didn't.

The video footage provided does not give us clear enough photographic evidence of the fragmentation pattern. The testers do not provide weights of the fragments.

Again, I reiterate: the "tests" in these videos don't prove much of anything, one way or another. Let's just leave it at that, shall we?



Well, the fact is that there is a LOT of stuff you're not allowed to see, and all I can say to that is "too bad". Learn to deal with it.

I don't do ballistics testing for a living, nor do I have control over what gets tested, or by whom. My line of the terminal effects business is the messier side. What you think of that makes no difference to me.

But I've done enough gelatin testing, and I've done enough critiques of research in fields a LOT more complicated than the Jello-o shooting area to know that junk science is junk science, and the videos you put up barely qualify as junk science. It's entertainment, it's food for thought, but it's not science, and it's decidedly not "proof" of anything.

I am putting that as kindly as I can.

Now, I am DONE with this discussion. As stated previously, I have some serious research on this 5.7mm thing in the works and I will not waste any more time on this discussion.