Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Handguns Your opinion - Most "State of the Art" pistol for military

Glock 17 or 34

This is anecdotal and we don't have access to the autopsy reports. We also don't know where they were shot. Still, I don't like those odds, only about 1/3 died (thank God in this instance)

Would you ever shoot a deer with it?

I believe that NATO test was through body armor, in which case the mere fact they 5.7 made it through makes it a winner by default. As for non body armor tests, the 5.7 has very shallow penetration through soft tissue, very little ability to break bone, which all add up to an insufficient cartride for self defense.

In a world of soldiers facing soldiers with body armor, it's perhaps a better choice, but that's the only world where it's better. In that instance, it makes more sense to develop kevlar punching rounds for the 9mm and stick with what we have.

Thanks, I was going off the memory of having read the book in excess of 25 years ago. At least I had the gist of the story close.
My question was rhetorical--poorly phrased, as it obviously didn't make my point, but rhetorical.[/quote]
hmmmm, sounds pretty close to today's scenario where the 5.7 is supposed to be the "cop killer" used by Mexican drug cartels. It holds a prime place in Tom Clancy's new book.

Still, as in your next entry about the NATO testing and the Ft. Hood incident---there's a significant difference in using a weapon offensively vs. defensively. The chemistry of the target changes too much---no doubt in duct seal, wet newsprint, gelatin blocks or sheeple wondering what the loud noise in the lobby is, the 5.7 may look great---probably works great when you're against an unsuspecting target or one motivated to escape and evasion by fear. Still, when the tables are turned and we are the hunted/victim/target instead of the aggressor, the 500 mile per hour brick trumps the 1500 mile per hour needle---so far, at least historically.

Rifle wise---I'd certainly rather have an AR platform 5.56 than a Marlin 45/70 Guide Gun UNLESS I was inside my house defending against a large, determined meth tweeker--then, quite frankly I'd opt for the 45/70.

I've never heard of anyone that was in a fight wishing that they had a smaller caliber weapon---more ammo maybe. Of course, I could be wrong. :-) Still hard for me to embrace the 5.7---of course my opinion is irrelevant to the issue.

Your opinion is as good as anyone else here. Hell, we�re just a bunch of gun nuts sitting around a campfire shootin the chit.

I just tend to think the solution to the body armor threat is cartridge development. Our soldiers who are armed with handgun should have a traditional 9mm FMJ and some sort of soft body armor penetrator loaded into a spare magazine for when the body armor threat rears it's head.

Kevin, I think you may be unintentionally trivializing the Ft. Hood shootings by referring to the published reports of the event as anecdotal. The factual side of the reports may be summed up as one shooter, armed with a 5.7mm pistol killed 13 and wounded 32 other persons. I doubt the autopsy reports will refute the fact that Hasan killed 13 people, or that the cause of death was anything other than by gunshot wound. Since Hasan has yet to face trial all specific details of the shooting will be sealed until the matter is resolved in the military courts.

While I wouldn't shoot a deer with a 9mm, I would shoot a man with a 5.7, if that answers your question.

The NATO tests were conducted on a variety of ballistic medium including tissue and bone. Commercially available 5.7 ammo is loaded to less than military specification; that said it still averages 11 inches of penetration in ballistic gel, and creates a wound channel significantly larger than that of comparable 9mm ammunition.

Since your original question concerned a state of the art pistol for the military I think it only reasonable to reply in terms of soldiers facing soldiers, and not in terms of civilians facing street punks, etc. as others responding have done.

If you want to change the question, I'd probably change my answers.

Best regards

Scott

On the 5.7 FN, a few more points. It's a very sought after pistol by the mexican drug sorts. Some examples have gone for as much as $5000.
Our special forces guys like it alot. It seems that they find they have more dead bad guys with it than they get with the 9mm.
The commerical ammo is underloaded. Loading data by Ramshot and Accurate arms show a 100-200 fps increase with similar bullets.
And performance on 2.5 gallon water jugs is impressive. Blow them apart quite well. E

Please produce some verifiable data that any of our SpecOPS guys are using the 5.7 in any platform.

I also dont recall being attacked by any water jugs, 2.5 gallon or otherwise.

Its a niche round designed for a niche use. Nothing more, and often less.

Agree with the 5.7x28mm...


That just goes to show that shot placement is paramount.

I will be shooting some coyotes here in the near future with SS197SR and/or one of EA's 5.7x28mm loads (http://www.eliteammunition.net/home.html). Based on the experiences others have had shooting coyotes with 5.7x28mm, I'm sure it will be quite effective.




Actual verifiable accounts from people that have been in shootings with the P90 completely disagree with you. For example:

http://www.hendonpub.com/resources/articlearchive/details.aspx?ID=309

I concede that the P90 is not all things to all people. However, for what I do, as a SWAT officer in a major city, it�s a great weapon.

<snip>

The 5.7mm ball produces a wound cavity about the size and shape of the best 9mm 115 grain JHP +P+, except the peak occurs at a deeper penetration. In the one shooting we had with the P90, the bullet performed well. In fact, the bullet performed exactly as it was designed. The autopsy provided detailed information about the wound cavity and travel of the bullets.

<snip>

If you operate in an environment like the one I operate in, you can�t go wrong with a P90 slung at the low-ready.

-- Sandy Wall of HPD (see below)



http://warriorsos.blogspot.com/2010/10/how-to-win-gunfight-by-sandy-wall.html

Sandy Wall retired from Houston Police Department after 28-years. He served for 22 years on SWAT, and was a three-term president with the Texas Tactical Police Officer Association (TTPOA). He is currently the Training Director for Safariland Training Group. Sandy is the founder of the Less Lethal Solutions, Inc. and the inventor of "The Wall Banger."



http://www.tactical-life.com/online/tactical-weapons/radical-tactical-firepower/

S.W.A.T. team commander Capt. Mohamed Lostan of the Passaic County Sheriff�s Dept. in NJ is a particularly enthusiastic supporter of the handgun and cartridge. �While our department issues .40-cal. pistols, our S.W.A.T. team is allowed to carry any handgun they want to use as long as they purchase it themselves and qualify with it, In fact, I was the first one on the team to carry the Five-seveN, although now several others do as well,� he continued. Lostan definitely knows his way around firearms. In addition to his 23 years with the sheriff�s department and current position he also served in the U.S. Army in the 3rd Division Recon Unit and the 82nd Airborne Division.

�I was so impressed by the 5.7�28mm cartridge used in the P90 that I asked permission for S.W.A.T. team members to be able to carry Five-seveN pistols if we purchased them on our own.�




The Five-seveN pistol has no problem firing lots of rounds very quickly and accurately; the Fort Hood shooting demonstrated that very clearly. Many of the witnesses mistook the gunshots for fully automatic fire (hence the early reports of 3 suspected shooters).




On the contrary, there is a wealth of information available from the Fort Hood shooting. The Wikipedia article is a good start:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Hood_shooting




Per news reports, most of the wounded were shot in limbs and other non-vital areas of their bodies. A fatality rate of about 30% is average (or above-average) for handgun bullets. There is no reason to think the exact same results would not have been produced with a 9mm, .40 S&W, or .45 ACP pistol. See, for example:

http://articles.cnn.com/2011-02-06/...ltiple-shell-casings-student?_s=PM:CRIME

Two men were arrested Sunday in connection with a shooting that left an Ohio university student dead and 11 other people wounded, police said.

<snip>

The shooting happened at a house where members of the Omega Psi Phi fraternity were holding a party, Hughes said.

<snip>

Authorities found multiple shell casings from two semiautomatic handguns, one a .40-caliber and the other a .45-caliber, Hughes said.




On the subject of hunting, here are a few animals (posted elsewhere by various people) taken with the caliber:











The 160-pound hog in the first two pictures was dropped with one round of SS197SR (not sure about the hog in the third picture).

The 182-pound deer in the last picture was dropped from 70 meters with one round of SS197SR through the lungs/heart.




Actually, there are numerous 5.7x28mm loads available from Elite Ammunition that penetrate 12+ inches of calibrated 10% ballistic gelatin. Even FN's anemic SS197SR penetrates about 11 inches in ballistic gelatin.




This is completely false. The female police officer that responded to the Fort Hood shooting, for example, was hit once in the femur (the strongest bone in the human body) with a 5.7x28mm bullet, and it shattered her femur into "hundreds of bone fragments." The killer then walked up to her, kicked her M9 pistol out of reach, and walked away. She was lying on the ground badly wounded when a second police officer, Sgt. Mark Todd, stopped the killer. She was already fading out of consciousness when medics reached her. Sgt. Munley subsequently underwent a knee replacement operation and she won't be able to do patrol work anymore. All of this information is corroborated by a number of witnesses including Munley herself, on both her blog and in her trial testimony. See:

http://sgtmunley.blogspot.com/

I was given a second chance at life. I was also fortunate to not lose my leg. The awesome surgeons were able to do an arterial graph and repair my femoral artery. But for a couple of days, there were unsure about the outcome and if I was going to be able to keep my leg at all.

I stay in a lot of pain because the bottom of my femor is blown into hundreds of bone fragments that are pushed into my muscle tissue and until the surgery, they will not be removed.


http://www.starnewsonline.com/article/20091202/articles/912029944

Sgt. Kim Munley, who helped stop the shooter Nov. 5 at Fort Hood, Texas, will have to get an artificial knee, which means she will not be able to return to street patrol duty.


http://www.kasa.com/dpps/military/army/Fort-Hood-hero-faces-more-surgery-_3228588

Munley underwent total knee replacement surgery in January and still walks with a cane. She said the most difficult part of her recovery has been learning to rely on others.


The killer at Fort Hood was eventually hit 5 times with 9x19mm, by the way, and he survived to stand trial.




Being armed does not make an individual impervious or magically resistant to bullets; the wounds (and their effects) are not different. As for the soldiers at Fort Hood, they were highly motivated during that attack, one way or the other; all of them were very intent on surviving and helping others survive. Many of the victims described feeling the effects of adrenalin during the shooting.

Two of the victims even charged the shooter with chairs (according to the trial testimony, both were killed with shots to the chest before they could reach him). The female police officer mentioned earlier was also intent on stopping the shooter but by all reports, was incapacitated (and nearly died) by her leg wounds.




You have to realize we're not discussing bricks or needles. We're discussing a tiny pistol bullet (5.7mm) as opposed to other tiny pistol bullets (9mm, etc); they are all very tiny and they are all highly dependent on proper shot placement. With proper shot placement, they all work; with poor shot placement, they all fail. There is a wealth of information available from actual shootings with 5.7x28mm, and every indication is that the caliber is every bit as effective as the common pistol calibers -- even with FN's watered down loads (SS195, SS197).




You just finished posting unverifiable internet stories from supposed shootings with 5.7x28mm. Produce some verifiable data that proves your internet stories are factual (don't cite a post on some other forum, either, because that won't prove anything).

I am not at liberty to disclose things told to me in professional confidence, therefore I suppose we are at an impasse. I guess we will have to agree, to disagree.

BT927....welcome to the campfire----your first entry is a great one----very convincing. Looking forward to more in the future. Fill us in on your background, you appear to speak from experience.

Greg,

HAPPY BIRTHDAY! to you and all other Marines here at the fire.

Cheers,

Pete

Thanks Pete, and Urrahh to any Teufel Hunden at the fire.
Semper Fi,
Greg

Let me get this straight. You were told something in "professional confidence", but decided that the content of that confidence could be breached in an open forum. When asked to substantiate the allegations made public in your posting you decline to do so on the basis of a sense of loyalty to an already betrayed "professional confidence".

Hmmm.

Seems to me that this is more about veracity than disagreement.

Thanks for the welcome. I do have quite a bit of experience with these weapons and I hope to document some testing and other information in the near future with photos and/or videos, for everyone curious (including myself). I should be shooting some coyotes here in the near future with either the Five-seveN or PS90 (or both), with FN's loads and/or with Elite Ammunition's 5.7x28mm loads. I'm sure either will do well; in the process I hope to get videos to share. I also hope to do some various pork shoulder tests with the aforementioned EA loads behind barriers such as car doors/windshields, solid core doors, clothed and unclothed targets (denim), etc. Videos will definitely be included for those tests.

Anyway, I found some of the comments in this thread misleading so I couldn't resist. One thing I neglected to mention is the gelatin testing that Brassfetcher independently conducted with EA's 5.7x28mm ammo. Here are the high speed videos from their testing (9mm included for comparison purposes, but note that the videos aren't quite to scale):


9x19mm 147-grain Remington Golden Saber (1,000 ft/s):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKC832xZ6RA


EA 5.7x28mm 28-grain S4M (2,600 ft/s):

http://www.eliteammunition.net/f/5.7x28mm_Elite_Ammunition_S4M.wmv


EA 5.7x28mm 50-grain Pro II (1,800 ft/s):

http://www.eliteammunition.net/f/5.7x28mm_Elite_Ammunition_ProtecTOR_II.wmv

BT927 - Excellent post on the 5.7, thanks for the info.

I have shot the P90 when doing some training with a large city SWAT team. They used it as an entry weapon, and they very much liked it. They were't impressed so much with the single round effectiveness as the ability to put mulitiple rounds ACCURATELY on target, in a split second. This was verified when I dumped anywhere from 3 shot to 10 shot groups of full auto fire into remarkably tiny groups from 25 yards. It is easily the most controllable SMG I've ever fired. The trigger takes a lot of getting used to, but after that, it's just plain the easiest SMG to shoot. So I've been convinced of the P90, but I'm starting to give some new consideration to the FN57 now.

Where is "here"---where abouts do you live???

MO.

check your PM

FN 9mm or the S&W MP 9mm.

Is there any advantage to the 5.7 over a 5.56 in a carbine??? In a pistol it'll penetrate but one 22 caliber hit probably won't stop anyone attacking you