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Rodney Ledbetter
02-01-2012, 11:19 PM
I have a test for anyone who says that there is only a small difference between 9mm and .45 ACP.

1. Aquire a soft armor vest. (i.e. bullet proof vest)

2. Have 9mm and .45 caliber pistol

3. Acquire 10 rounds of self defence ammunition in both calibers, same brand for both.

4. Put on soft armor vest.

5. Load 9mm pistol with 10 rounds.

6. Shoot yourself in the chest (with body armor on) 10 times.

7. Take notes on how it felt and take pictures of your bare chest every day for the next 20 days. Do 20 pushups on 7th day. Note how it feels.

8. On the 21st day put on your soft armor vest again.

9. Load .45 with 10 rounds.

10. Shoot yourself in the chest (with body armor on) 10 times.

11. Take notes on how it felt and take pictures of your bare chest every day for the next 20 days. Do 20 pushups on 7th day. Note how it feels.

12. Now tell me there is only a small difference between 9mm and .45. Your chest will disagree with you.

This not a joke. It is reality. As a lifelong hunter, I know that differences in calibers do matter. It's the difference between a one shot kill and a one shot hit

that results in chasing a wounded animal for miles. Get real people.

GJM
02-01-2012, 11:27 PM
I don't know anything about shooting sort armor vests, but I have shot all sorts of animals from birds and rabbits on one end of the spectrum, to elk, moose, grizzly bears, cape buffalo, elephant, lion and leopard on the other end, and it is my experience that bullet placement trumps caliber every time.

Rodney Ledbetter
02-01-2012, 11:42 PM
So if i shot you in the chest from 500 yards with a .22 long rifle it would be more deadly than shooting you in stomach from 1000 yards with a .50 BMG?

jmjames
02-01-2012, 11:50 PM
The goal of shooting things isn't to make them bruised, sore, and achey for a few days, it is to incapacitate or kill them, plain and simple.

If the point is to prove which load penetrates armor better, your test is flawed. If you survive the test intact to the point where you are doing pushups later that day, the bullet failed to do its job. Plain and simple.

If the point is to prove which load inflicts more pain, I'd say that your measure of what makes a load effective is flawed as well. Shooting data shows that .45 incapacitates/kills people only marginally better than 9mm.

Furthermore, your test has a critical mistake, is that apples to apples, you'd want to use 8 - 10 rounds of .45 (I'd argue for 8, a common 1911 loading) and 12 - 15 rounds of 9mm (a common capacity for 9mm pistols). After all, if my first 10 shots didn't kill or incapacitate whatever I am shooting at, I am going to continue firing until it drops. Therefore, even is 9mm is only 75% as painful as .45, a 15 round mag inflicts 50% more pain than an 8 round mag, roughly.

J.Ja

jstyer
02-02-2012, 12:04 AM
I'd say the .22 vs 50 bmg analogy is pretty flawed... That's essentially the equivalent of a 45 acp vs a pellet gun.

To make your analogy a little closer to the 9 vs 45 argument, how about 308 vs 300 win mag? I think chest shot with 308 at 500 yds trumps 300 win mag at a 1000 in the belly.

Rodney Ledbetter
02-02-2012, 12:10 AM
and it is my experience that bullet placement trumps caliber every time.

Odin Bravo One
02-02-2012, 12:11 AM
This not a joke. It is reality. As a lifelong hunter, I know that differences in calibers do matter. It's the difference between a one shot kill and a one shot hit

that results in chasing a wounded animal for miles. Get real people.

I too am a lifelong hunter. And I have hunted with both .45 and 9mm.

Both did the job the job they were expected to do.

And I never had to chase a wounded animal for miles. Come to think of it.........I don't recall every chasing a wounded animal. Seems that if you hammer their vital organs repeatedly, there is not much of an issue with them running off.

EVP
02-02-2012, 12:18 AM
Sounds like a idiotic test.

It also sounds like someone is trying to stir up a hornets nest. If you prefer 45acp, cool knock yourself out.

Nothing compares to the almighty death ray of a 10mm. It causes so much hydrostatic shock that the ground trembles with the reverberations of the energy that it releases. It will register on the richter scale and trigger climate change because it upsets Earths balance ever so slightly.

Rodney Ledbetter
02-02-2012, 12:18 AM
The goal of shooting things isn't to make them bruised, sore, and achey for a few days, it is to incapacitate or kill them, plain and simple.
. After all, if my first 10 shots didn't kill or incapacitate whatever I am shooting at, I am going to continue firing until it drops. Therefore, even is 9mm is only 75% as painful as .45, a 15 round mag inflicts 50% more pain than an 8 round mag, roughly.

J.Ja

What if the charging 1000 pound bear mauls you before your 5th shot?

I'm not a east coast city person. I carry a gun for more reasons than self defense from people......

Rodney Ledbetter
02-02-2012, 12:20 AM
[QUOTE=Kevin P;49816]Sounds like a idiotic test.

Ya it is. Just as idiotic as telling me there is no difference between 9mm and .45. That is the point of the post.

jmjames
02-02-2012, 12:26 AM
What if the charging 1000 pound bear mauls you before your 5th shot?

I'm not a east coast city person. I carry a gun for more reasons than self defense from people......

If your concern is a charging 1,000 bear mauling you and needing to stop it within 5 rounds, there are loads far superior for that purpose to either 9mm or .45, so its a moot point. Likewise, the firearms that are suitable for self defense in a city situation are quite possibly not the best options for an outdoors scenario.

I am scheduled to go hog hunting for the first time this weekend. I'm bringing an P30 loaded with 9mm with me, and based on reports from people who I personally know that have hunted boar with 9mm, I feel perfectly comfortable with that selection. I keep wondering if I should also bring my 1911 as well, but it never crossed my mind to bring my 1911 with me instead.

I agree with a previous poster, this thread does feel like stirring a pot for no good reason.

J.Ja

LOKNLOD
02-02-2012, 12:42 AM
Rodney, don't take this the wrong way, because I know you're just making observations based on your personal experience, but I believe you are misinterpreting that data a bit.

The addition of armor to the mix is drastically changing the dynamics of the situation you are trying to assess, to the point that you are no longer able to make fully valid inferences about the phenomena you are trying to study.

This is similar to saying that the .45 is more reliable at knocking down steel plates than the 9mm, therefore it has more "knockdown" or "stopping" power. But the physics at work when a bullet hits a rigid mass like a steel plate or armor are very different than when a bullet penetrates flesh.

In inelastic collisions like bullets are experiencing, momentum is conserved, kinetic energy is not. Momentum is velocity*mass, so the .45 has a big advantage here over 9mm. Shooting a plate will result in transferring momentum to the plate, thereby giving it some velocity, but not much, because of the increased mass. (Getting ahead of ourselves a bit, as the targets mass becomes sufficiently large, the imparted velocity is negligible, which is a part of the reason a person doesn't get knocked down by bullet impact alone.) Nonetheless, this is why if you're shooting some steel at a match that guy with the 230gr ball looks like he's slapping them with the hand of God compared to your light 115gr FMJ practice loads which make you curse whoever calibrated the steel that day.

So when you shoot bullets into armor, it is bringing them to an abrupt stop much like the steel plates. By not allowing the bullet to penetrate, its assuring that the full momentum of the bullet impact is transferred VERY rapidly. And the impulse, the force, of the impact is the change in momentum over the length of time it occurs. The sudden stop is maximizing the force of the impact by making that time (the denominator) smaller. But when comparing pistol rounds, the momentum on top of the equations becomes dominant. The 9mm may be moving a little faster making that time less by a small percentage, but that .45 has nearly twice the momentum (due to the mass) so it's applying a much larger force to the rigid body of the target. Result, steel goes down, flesh gets bruised, perhaps ribs get broken. Exaggerated and oversimplified example: Shooting a bullet into steel or armor is like holding your hand out rigidly to catch an egg thrown at you. SPLAT. Catching the egg by moving your hand away will cushion the blow. Right? Well, that's sort of how the bullet entering flesh and coming to rest over a longer period of time behaves. I did say exaggerated and oversimplified, right?

The .45 will always have more momentum to transfer, so it must be universally better, right? Well, it depends. Momentum and force aren't what cause death (unless you shoot someone a lot with HUGE, slow bullets and the coroner calls it blunt force trauma) and certainly aren't what cause immediate incapacitation. The bullets have to hit/destroy something important (preferably something related to the central nervous system) and/or provide a path for enough blood to leave the body for important parts to stop working.

That's not to say that there are not physics based advantages to bigger bullets. More momentum certainly brings the advantage of being able to break through intermediate barriers (internal or external to the body of the target) while maintaining enough of that momentum to still damage the aforementioned critical bits. To a lesser extent, a bigger diameter is still a bigger hole and slightly larger swath that might contact those important parts. The complex dynamics of what pistol bullets do in flesh is a whole science in and of itself that people and agencies have spent huge sums of time and money studying. To try and infer what happens in flesh based on the results of shooting steel or armor just doesn't do the topic justice, and can be misleading.

The point is not that there is no difference between .45 and 9mm. It's that the differences are complex, subtle, and, unless the bullets find the right innards to wreck, they might be moot.

And when things start approaching rifle velocities everything goes completely crazy.

jetfire
02-02-2012, 12:48 AM
I suppose it was only a matter of time before we had one of these.

I carry a .45, but I don't believe it has any more magical power than a 9mm. And since there's no empirical evidence that proves otherwise, I won't lose any sleep if I have to switch back to 9mm. I'd much rather worry about becoming a better shooter than whether my roundof choice is better for "rapid-fire-double-tap-stopping-power".

tremiles
02-02-2012, 01:01 AM
Editing my post because I feel dirty for participating in a caliber war thread.

Sent from my DROID2 using Tapatalk

agent-smith
02-02-2012, 01:17 AM
I'm a little slow here - Could you please video yourself performing both of the above tests (on yourself of course), and then post the results here?

BWT
02-02-2012, 01:28 AM
I'm switching from .45 ACP to 9mm.... One of the many reasons is I wouldn't have to reload the gun to finish that test.

DocGKR
02-02-2012, 01:41 AM
Please......this is the most insipid thread I've had the misfortune to read at PF...

Ed L
02-02-2012, 04:14 AM
I can't believe that what follows is a serious post.


I have a test for anyone who says that there is only a small difference between 9mm and .45 ACP.

1. Aquire a soft armor vest. (i.e. bullet proof vest)

2. Have 9mm and .45 caliber pistol

3. Acquire 10 rounds of self defence ammunition in both calibers, same brand for both.

4. Put on soft armor vest.

5. Load 9mm pistol with 10 rounds.

6. Shoot yourself in the chest (with body armor on) 10 times.

7. Take notes on how it felt and take pictures of your bare chest every day for the next 20 days. Do 20 pushups on 7th day. Note how it feels.

8. On the 21st day put on your soft armor vest again.

9. Load .45 with 10 rounds.

10. Shoot yourself in the chest (with body armor on) 10 times.

11. Take notes on how it felt and take pictures of your bare chest every day for the next 20 days. Do 20 pushups on 7th day. Note how it feels.

12. Now tell me there is only a small difference between 9mm and .45. Your chest will disagree with you.

This not a joke. It is reality. As a lifelong hunter, I know that differences in calibers do matter. It's the difference between a one shot kill and a one shot hit

that results in chasing a wounded animal for miles. Get real people.

Jay Cunningham
02-02-2012, 06:21 AM
The point of this post is to troll.

Please don't do it. Go read DocGKR's research on wound ballistics and terminal effects of handgun ammunition.

This thread has run its course - quickly.