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

Of course everyone knows a 380 isn’t any good for self protection. Many times a perp has been shot with a .380 and they will always say “that didn’t hurt”

damn good info, and well presented. Thanks

I have to apologize, the picture of the bullet I posted is not a 380 HST. I have no idea what it is. It is a 9mm and the weight is 133gr. as shown but can’t remember the manufacturer. I’m thinking a 124gr GD with extra weight added from what ever I recovered it from (never owned 147gr GD’s). I was going through more of my bullets and found the real one. Sorry for the mistake.
Here’s a picture of a 380 HST. 99gr. as shown.

If you want to give a .380 a *true* torture test, have a brain fart that causes you to think that the "2" on the 10th beam of the scale means 2/10ths instead of 2 grains.

7 grains of AA#5 under a 100 grain hardcast bullet will make a LCP Max *BARK* (I was looking for 5.2 grains,...which would have been a very warm load in itself. Instead I dumped 7 grains in)

I guesstimate about 41,000 PSI and 1350 fps. Those Buffalo Bore .380+Ps ain't got *schitt* on it.

10 rounds of it didn't blow nothing up. But the little LCP Max rattles a bit more than it did before.

Hence, my purchase of a Glock 43 this morning.

Update

I shot some more .380 ammo. However, it occurred to me that I have not run the same test using any other calibers. So, I figured I would run the same test with “gold standard” 9mm ammo. I shot the same array with a 9mm Speer 124 grain standard pressure Gold Dot. This is a very standard police load fired out of 4-4.5 inch duty barrels. I fired this round out of my 3.1 inch barreled Sig P365. Figure another 50 FPS out of a longer barrel and figure 50 FPS extra velocity over standard pressure out of +P rounds.



Back to the .380 tests.

.380 Hornady Custom 90 grain XTP. This is a darling of the Internet crowd along with the Critical Defense ammo. I had to slowly feed this into the chamber because I get a lot of bullet setback with this ammo.



Another new darling is the 85 grain Federal Punch.



A long time Internet favorite is the Speer 90 grain Gold Dot. I love Gold Dots but not in .380.



crttrgttr sent me this ammo so I tried it. 56 grain Novx.



I recently tried a .380 Lehigh 90 grain Xtreme Penetrator. See earlier in this thread. Since Lehigh was acquired by Wilson Combat, I have not seen this as loaded ammo. Underwood loads the XP, so I bought some standard pressure, which runs about 50 fps faster than the Lehigh version.



Draw your own conclusions. I will share mine at some point.

Very interesting and informative thread, thanks for sharing.

Here are the recovered bullets from the tests I did yesterday.





It should come as no surprise that I prefer the standard pressure hard cast and the Lehigh Xtreme Penetrator bullets in my .380 guns. Aside from the lack of expansion, they were able to hang with the 9mm Gold Dot from a penetration standpoint. (I now will have to try the 9mm Gold Dots from longer barreled guns to see how much more penetration they will deliver.) I was thinking about transitioning to the Lehigh 68 grain Xtreme Defense in my Sig. However, when I was chronographing after I ran the barrier test a couple of weeks ago, I got 1 malfunction in each of 2-5 shot strings. The empty case would not completely clear the ejection port both times. I don't recall exactly what happened the first time, but the second time the next live round was already partially inside the chamber. It appears to be cycling the slide so fast that the case is getting hung up between the rear of the barrel hood and the slide. I may give them a try in the Glock 42 because the recoil spring appears to be stiffer.

Aside from the malfunctions with the XD round, I have had no other malfunctions with the ammo tested in this thread. I did have 1 Sig V-Crown 90 grain hollow point (ironic considering that the gun is a Sig) that did not lock the slide back after the last shot when chronographing. The average muzzle velocity was an anemic 846 FPS. I did not bother to try that ammo in this series.

Stay safe.

I'm sorry for being Late to this party!!!

Cheyenne, those are excellent, informative videos. Thank you very much! My g42 likes both the 90 xtp and 90 gr sierra sportsmaster. Hornady factory critical defense has done well in my pistol but I prefer to reload. Yet after seeing those 100 gr hard cast and 90 xp go to work in your tests, I'm needing to up my game.

Thanks again for everyone's comments. If anyone has any of their own testing to share, please feel free to add them to this thread. As of this writing I am not contemplating any more .380 testing unless something new comes along. I do intend to shoot some standard pressure 124 grain 9mm Gold Dots out of my Sig P365 XL and out of a longer barreled 9mm to see how they do in relation to the one fired out of the P365. But, that may not be added on this thread unless the results somehow relate to it.

I don't own a .380, but wow, this was a fun read!

Thanks for all the time and hard work that went into this thread, Cheyenne! You Da Man!

Excellent info indeed! My only issue (personal) is that I do not reload for the .380.. I love those Lehigh bullets though, and reload those into my 9mm stuff..

Thank you for all your work!

Thanks a bunch for the info you posted and the videos!

I settled on Lehigh for my 9mms and the 380s also. I wish they still made their 32 caliber bullets.

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.

Thank you Cheyenne for your work. I’m thinking the wood 2 pieces of steel are skewing the results for hollow point defense ammo. Maybe a couple shirts or a blue jean leg would be more realistic for that. Of
Course unless you’re just looking for penetration results. Anyway, thanks again for your efforts!

Ron

Thanks! Yes, the test was skewed toward penetration over expansion. Here is my thought process. I have said parts of this in some other threads over the years, so I may as well put it all in one that I started.

As I understand the FBI protocols used for testing LE duty ammunition, 70% importance is given to penetration and consistency of penetration, 20% to expansion, and 10% to weight retention. Source: https://www.brassfetcher.com/FBI%20Ammunition%20Protocol/FBI%20Ammunition%20Protocol.html
The test involves five separate shots at 6 different sets of media, namely, bare gel, cloth covered gel, and cloth covered gel placed behind each of plywood, wallboard, sheet metal (heavier 20 gauge, not the stuff I used) and windshield glass. The results are weighted based on criteria deemed important by the FBI and are cranked into a formula used to assign a number score to the ammo. In looking at the criteria in the above link (Note that the criteria are stated to be for 9mm Luger, which may be read to imply that there are different weightings for different calibers, but I do not know this.), penetration under 12 inches for any shot is assigned a point value of 1 per shot under 12 inches, while penetration over 18 inches is awarded 5 points per shot. Penetration between 12 and 18 inches is awarded points in the 8-10 range, with 14-15.99 inches getting 10 and 16 to 18 inches getting 9 points. There is no disqualification for penetration over 18 inches-it is awarded exactly half credit.

The manufacturers, social media influencers and hobbyists frequently conduct bare gel and cloth covered gel tests with .380 and proclaim that their tested ammo “meets FBI specifications.” Well, that is not true. They may perform well in 1/3 of the tests, but the reviewers are not performing the other 4. Ballistic gelatin “match[es] the low-velocity flow characteristics of living muscle tissue and have very similar density to mammalian muscle tissue.” See above article. It does not represent things like bone, pocket clutter or barriers.

Why are the testers ignoring the other 4 tests? Because .380 ammo that barely makes 12 inches in plain gel or cloth covered gel will suck when put through the barrier tests, losing a lot of points per shot and also on the score for number of shots per test under 12 inches. So, they focus on pretty mushrooms, which the FBI thinks is substantially less important than penetration. Now, a lot of reviewers imply that barrier penetration is not important because non-police people carrying .380s are only going to be getting in “best case scenario” shootings at 3 yards against someone facing them squarely out in the open. I also see people on forums say that their strategy with their .380 is to dump a couple of rounds and run away. Well, those ideas contain huge assumptions upon which I am not willing to rely. How does one know that there won’t be a side shot, or one through any kind of barriers? How does one know that getting away from a bad guy will not involve running over him? So, I shoot any ammo that does not receive the benefit of massive taxpayer funded research against a variety of stuff to see what it will do.

If someone would expend the effort to run the full FBI protocol tests with .380 hard cast flat points or mono-metal solids, I suspect that those rounds would perform fairly well for a pipsqueak caliber and substantially better than any .380 hollow point out there. I also don’t think they would overpenetrate on the gel based on some other gonzo testing I have posted here in the past. There would be excellent weight retention, which would help on that 10% metric. Expansion would be minimal, but that is only 20%.

Anyway, those are my thoughts. I welcome debate and input from anyone who can add context on the basis of knowledge, training and experience. I know we have tons of it on this forum spread across a number of fields of study, occupations and avocations. Also, if anyone has more detailed knowledge about the FBI testing protocols that may differ from what I found on the Internet, please share that information.

Stay safe.

Thanks Cheyenne! I’m sure those tests were fun, but tedious too.

Ron

Gotta wonder what the .380 ACP performance would be like from a 4-1/4” barrel, such as on this pistol developed for the Mexican market:

The difference would probably be about 50-100 FPS.

http://www.ballisticsbytheinch.com/

OK, OK, just one more. After having some bobbles with the Lehigh branded 68 grain XD rounds, that were starting out in the low to high 1000s, I handloaded some XDs that were in the mid-1100s and, so far, give good functioning. I bought some loaded, allegedly standard pressure, Underwood 68 grain XD ammo. With only a few downrange, they function well and eject well and give good results. Notice the back of jug 2.



It dented jug 4.

I think I can live with these or the XPs. I will report if I have any issues.

After cogitating on the video posted just above this, I decided to see what kind of penetration I would get when shooting only water jugs with the same round. I did it twice, once a couple of months ago and once recently. Here is the most recent one.



I got into jug 4 with a dimple on jug 5 with the earlier shot. But, there was too much wind noise and a narration error, and I didn’t publish it. In contrast, note that a Speer 9mm standard pressure 124 grain 9mm Gold Dot fired out of a Sig P365 XL stopped in jug 3. The Gold Dot expanded nicely, which, obviously, the XD round will not do.

I had a couple of water jugs left and decided to add another piece of 22 gauge steel in front of the wood and see what happened.



I am guessing it would have gotten into the third jug.

My little Sig is loaded with this round. I need to shoot some more of it in my Glock 42 to test for functioning, but it's fine so far. Note that I can only chamber rounds once in the Sig before putting them in the practice pile because a slight bit of setback starts with the first chambering. That's not great, but I can live with it.