Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Handguns What you REALLY need from a personal protection handgun

The old saying applies here again: Shot placement is King, penetration is Queen, anything else is gravy.

I�m unaware of any such �data�. Is there some organization or agency that collects, analyzes, and tabulates such data? And when talking law enforcement shootings, what is �empirical data?�

How long have you been here?

Marshall's and Sanow's data, whether flawed or not, was the ground breaker for these types of studies. The current torch carrier is Dr. Gary Roberts, and his colleagues at the International Wound Ballistics Association. The FBI and various other agencies compile reports, the majority of which are sensitive.

I heard a trainer one day make an unsubstantiatable (is there such a word?)claim that apart from war time fatalities, more people have been killed with a .22lr than any other caliber. I'm not sure that I believe him--in fact I'm pretty sure that I don't--however, the .22lr is a tremendous "killing" round but a poor "stopping" round. I had a Dr. friend that worked ER (maybe Kevin can join here due to his EMT background)--- he said that he saw a number of .22 related fatalities as the round had a tendancy to enter the body and "bounce around" the interior of the cavity and tear up a bunch of organs vs a larger caliber bullet tearing the heck out of one or two organs. The patients died------eventually. The need to shoot someone is dependent upon the imperative to stop them from their current action, killing them is irrelevant, or at least secondary. They must stop what they're doing immediately. Therefore the self defense round must deliver enough foot pounds of energy and penetrated to sufficient depth to affect bodily functions with some shock value. A .22 will provide this if the target is pretty much limited to the ocular lobes, but other than that it provides little "stopping" power.

On the flip side---in most defensive encounters, the "shootee" having been shot, more often "quits" than is "stopped." Therefore having a .22 trumps having a knife or nothing. The problem is that "most" isn't something to bet your life on. Someone once said that 9 out of 10 black bears will run away from you---the problem is that you don't encounter them in numerical order so you don't which bear you're looking at---same for people.

The "quitting" vs. "stopping" argument is very valid, especially when comparing the performance of a certain round against animals and humans. Humans are both hard wired and psychologically trained that when you are shot, you die. Animals are not. Humans, sans mental and/or chemical issues, typically quit what they are doing when shot. This has always been a huge training hurdle in law enforcement, and we strive to teach cops that being shot does not mean dying, and to keep fighting. While this is most certainly not a factor upon which to rely, it is one that cannot be ignored.

I'll continue to ignore it. The fight ain't over 'til it's over. Keep shooting, keep swinging, or keep biting until any guesswork is over. Having expectations on how the bad guy might or should react will only work against me.

Absolutely..thats the mindset you have to have. This is very hard to overcome, but its been found that force on force training is the absolute best way to ingrain this into folks heads. When we do training, we do not allow our guys to quit, no matter how bad they screw up, no matter how many times they have been hit. Instinctively, when hit, most folks stop, and yell "Im hit!" Its our job, as trainers, to get in their ass and make them press on.

The trouble is your adversary can 'un-quit'. I can list off lots of fights I've seen, and one where I learned my lesson, where the gentlemanly thing to do was stop swinging when the other guy gives up - and the gentleman gets attacked again the instant he turns his back. In my case it almost meant getting whacked with a swinging beer pitcher. Somehow the guy just missed - I felt the breeze on the back of my head.

Let's say you shoot the bad guy and he doubles over and turns his back on you without dropping his gun. What would you do?

Don't answer - just food for thought.

Like I said before, this is absolutely, positively, without a doubt not something that should be counted one, but it something to keep in the back of your mind. When gunplay is involved, gentlemanly is the last friggin thing I care about.....but I do see your point.

This is what i most remember from my Military training.The battle isn't over until you are dead or the enemy is dead

Maybe I missed it, but don't think anyone has mentioned the great work of Masaad Ayoob on what actually works? Might be showing my age.

Yep, I always take my advice from a New Hampshire reserve cop who endorses carrying a Ruger P-series on duty.

Mas is a great guy, very knowledgeable an one hell of an instructor, but his �data� lacks any scientific validity just like Marshall/Sanow�s. (by the way, I happen to personally like both Marshall & Snow; very good guys, but they�re not scientists).

Since you mention IWBA and the FBI, care to point me to where I can read their source data? Because if you can�t (and I�m thinking you can�t), then YOU haven�t seen it either, so this �empirical data� you speak of can�t be cross examined, peer reviewed, or validated in any way; wouldn�t you agree? And if that�s the case, the science is basically non-existent.

I haven't heard that one before, gmoats, but it's pretty apt!

Folks who disparage training are usually people who haven't been involved in a real world shooting scenario. I train with and provide training to LEOs as a sideline business. Many of the guys I train and train with, perhaps even the majority, have been in at least one officer-involved shooting. All have close personal knowledge of at least one OIS involving someone they know very well.

I commented to one class I was teaching about this interesting bit of trivia. One of the guys in the class responded thusly:

"I survived my shooting, but I realized immediately that it was as much due to luck as it was to my skill with my firearm. I realized that if I ever got into a shooting situation again, I wanted to reduce my reliance on luck as much as possible, and the best way to do that was to increase my skill with my firearms and my ability to fight effectively. That's why I train like I do."

That cop, and others like him, spend their own time and money to get better training because they've seen the elephant and they don't want to have to rely on luck to win next time around.

The mission of a cop is different than that of "civilian" just seeking to defend himself against crime. Will training improve the crime victim's chances? Sure, but stats indicate that in the vast majority of cases, even old ladies armed with a handgun, only knowing the basic functions of their weapon, can effectively neutralize criminal confrontation. That could have something to do with the fact that most crooks figure a non-cop is more likely than a cop to just pop them and be done with it, so they're a little quicker to surrender or run off.

Kevin, I never mentioned them.

Kevin, one of the best articles on OIS's is by Tom Aveni of the Police Policy Studies Council. If you go to their website:

http://www.theppsc.org

... and scroll down the main page you'll find a link to an article entitled "Officer Involved Shootings: What We Didn't Know Has Hurt Us". It's not a new study, but it's very well-written by a very scholarly guy and it explains a lot about how and why getting raw shootings data is so difficult.

I have been accumulating OIS reports from all over the country for over a decade. I can only assemble a "complete" report one time in 20; people just don't like to share the information, for reasons Aveni goes into in his paper. I have shared my findings at LE conferences but have no desire to put this information into a published format because, as you say, my findings don't meet the basic requirements of scientific investigation.

In terms of real science of wound ballistics, terminal effects, etc, there is a little bit of stuff here and there in the trauma literature, lots of good info in the now-defunct IWBA Journal, and the FBI gelatin studies database. I believe the FBI data are available for the asking, but don't have any idea who you'd need to get hold of for that.

I am not at liberty to disperse anything I receive from the FBI, as it is all marked LE Sensitive. You may contact them, and they may release it to you, I have no idea. The only open source document I have seen is the study published in 1989, after the Miami shootout.

As for the IWBA, contact Dr. Gary K. Roberts, he is more than glad to share what he and his peers have. many of their articles and studies can be found at firearmstactical.net. They seem to have ended the majority of their web presence, but Dr. Roberts is still very active in the field.

Most of the time they can, which is why I am such a strong proponent of the 2A and lawful concealed carry of firearms. Any potential crime victim is better off having a gun than not having a gun. CCW laws that require training are, in my view, wrong-headed. People who can't and won't train still have the right to defend themselves. They may not be very good at exercising that right when the SHTF, but that right is inalienable.

But luck is still a huge part of the equation in a deadly force situation, and the only thing you can do to reduce its effect is to train. FWIW, Massad Ayoob's basic class (used to be called LFI-1, it's now called MAG-20) is 90% cerebral training, although his basic shooting system (Stressfire) is a very good system for people new to the use of the handgun. Training your mind is more important than training with your firearm, but training with your firearm is by no means unimportant.