The 40cal on its way out?

[Cypher]

.40 is a good cartridge and does some things very well. But physics is a harsh mistress, as is materials science. In otherwise equivalent pistols, .40 S&W generally wears the guns out faster than 9 mm. Many large users of both calibers report up to four times the service life of the 9 mm variants compared to the .40 pistols. LE service pistols that started out as 9 mm designs, like the G22, G23, or Beretta 96, tend to not fare well when chambered in .40 S&W. If you believe agencies can order quality .40 S&W defensive loads at whatever velocity they desire, see if you can find some 180 gr HST with an ave MV of 850 fps from a 4" barrel. FWIW, I just got in some new practice ammo today; I can assure you that 9 mm is indeed less expensive than .40...

This answer is enough to convince me

[jd950]

I usually stay out of these discussions, and someone with better recall or knowledge can tell me to get back in my lane, but I believe that person was outed as a fraud, and the piece was a work of fiction.

I was "present" for and participated in that thread and in a few minutes of research figured out who the person was and where he worked and determined his claimed experience made no sense. It turned out that his experience was some time spent (not sure how much anymore ) as some sort of non LEO assistant in the morgue in a small to medium county with low crime rate and whose homicide rate could not possibly provide the basis for the information he asserted. I think he may have actually attend autopsies, to be fair althugh at some point he said he did not wsee "fresh" bodies but only skeletons. That raises its own set of issues for his conclusions. Shortly after I and other people started asking for details to back up his claims and assertions and tried to pin down the actual basis for his assertions, he disappeared and was never seen by that forum name again.

I guess I should add that a lot of the stuff was just ridiculous..."never saw a .40 or .45 fail" Anyone who says they have first hand knowledge of that many shootings and can state based on experience that a .40 or .45 is a death ray and the 9mm is simply ineffective has to be full of it. Every duty-type handgun cartridge "fails" at various points and no matter what your favorite caliber is, the 9mm is not a BB gun. Anyway, the thread will never die.

[Malamute]

Thank you.

Im glad my memory hasnt failed me.

[Thy.Will.Be.Done]

To be frank my argument isn't really that 9mm is a poor choice, simply that .40 S&W may be a better choice in certain applications. I think the main thing is that people tend to use the FBI going to 9mm again means it is better than .40 or other options for self defense. The FBI said no such thing, more along the lines of for 'our' uses based on our testing methods we have chosen 9mm.

Excerpt From the Following Article : http://www.gunsholstersandgear.com/2...-self-defense/


"The FBI testing protocol quantifies a bullet’s terminal performance in a consistent medium. The tests are designed to be repeatable by anyone with the resources to purchase, mix and chill the gelatin. Results from the testing can then be used to compare one bullet to another in terms of its performance in the testing.

However:

The FBI tests do not predict bullet effectiveness.

More than a few of you will stop and reread the previous statement. This is because the FBI tests are frequently used as “evidence” that one round is better than another. Yet, this is simply not true.

The FBI tests only measure a bullet’s performance in a controlled setting and medium. You may be able to correlate performance “on the street” with performance in gelatin, but there is no direct relationship there. In other words, a bullet’s score on the FBI test does not equate to a certain level of performance in real life.

“I don’t think any test can be a predictor of performance other than ‘the bullets that seem to work well tend to meet these test protocols’,” said firearms expert Grant Cunningham. “Beyond that, it’s really generalization. For example, expanding bullets tend to be more effective than non-expanding bullets all other things being equal.”

According to Cunningham, people have misconstrued the FBI testing to support personal preferences in ammunition selection.

“This is why we get dogmatic assertions of bullet effectiveness, such as ‘If it doesn’t penetrate at least 12 inches, it’s not suitable for self defense’,” said Cunningham. “We also still hear predictions of ‘effectiveness’…based on those…measurements, which the tests were never designed to determine. The issue, then, isn’t the tests themselves…the problem is getting people to understand what the tests are and what they do (or don’t do.)”

Based on largely anecdotal data, the handgun ammunition that performs well in the FBI testing tends to perform well in violent encounters. Nevertheless, this is a correlation only and you cannot reasonably extract a predictive formula from it.

There have been a number of significant studies on real world performance of ammunition. Perhaps one of the most famous – and most controversial – was the long term look at handgun stopping power conducted by Evan Marshal and Edwin Sanow. More recently, Greg Ellifritz took a stab at compiling and analyzing data on firearm performance in the real world.

Though the details are different in all of the studies I have seen, the results tend to suggest that:

there is a minimum level of cartridge power to see reliable performance from a handgun,
expanding bullets tend to perform better than non-expanding bullets,
long guns perform much better than handguns, and
no previous study of actual shootings provides reliable data to make specific predictions on the performance of any specific cartridge.
None of the studies I’ve read are able to provide clear evidence that the FBI testing protocol is an accurate predictor of the elusive thing called “stopping power.” Unfortunately, the FBI testing protocol seems to be the best tool we have for studying potential in controlled conditions."

Thank you.

Im glad my memory hasnt failed me.

Thank you both for confirming this for me, I hesitated to mention it here because it was anonymous for this very reason... only mentioned because it made some sense to me.

.40 is a good cartridge and does some things very well. But physics is a harsh mistress, as is materials science. In otherwise equivalent pistols, .40 S&W generally wears the guns out faster than 9 mm. Many large users of both calibers report up to four times the service life of the 9 mm variants compared to the .40 pistols. LE service pistols that started out as 9 mm designs, like the G22, G23, or Beretta 96, tend to not fare well when chambered in .40 S&W. If you believe agencies can order quality .40 S&W defensive loads at whatever velocity they desire, see if you can find some 180 gr HST with an ave MV of 850 fps from a 4" barrel. FWIW, I just got in some new practice ammo today; I can assure you that 9 mm is indeed less expensive than .40...

This is very clearly a weapon system issue, many .40 caliber pistols were just an afterthought along the lines of (we can just stick a .40 barrel in this 9mm and call it a .40). I would not chose any of those pistols to launch .40 personally... but I am not bound to police policies as many here are.

[TGS]

blah blah blah infectious retard vomit blah blah blah

Oh, ok. You should probably let the entire terminal ballistics community over the last 30 years know that they don't know what they're doing, and provide some evidence of such.

You've got a mighty big rock to push up a hill, there.

So, let me get this straight: you're doubting the combined "anecdotal" findings of the most professional, objectively researched and evidence based terminal ballistics research organizations in history, such as FBI BRF, IWBA, JSWB-IPT, TSURG-WG, etc and are replacing it Marshal & Sanow?

Got it. There's really no reason for further conversation.

FWIW, the reason the FBI testing protocol does not provide clear evidence as being an accurate predictor of "stopping power" is because stopping power is a bullshit catch-phrase, and the FBI testing protocols purposely do not try to address the concept because there is no evidence that it exists as a mechanism, and there's no way to measure it. The FBI testing protocols abandon the concept of "stopping power" entirely, relying on scientifically validated mechanisms of incapacitation, i.e. hit something important.

This is very clearly a weapon system issue, many .40 caliber pistols were just an afterthought along the lines of (we can just stick a .40 barrel in this 9mm and call it a .40). I would not chose any of those pistols to launch .40 personally... but I am not bound to police policies as many here are.

No, it's physics. A pistol designed for .40 will last doubly long when chambered in 9mm.

[DocGKR]

Thy.Will.Be.Done:

You are quoting a lot of inaccurate information, as several knowledgeable posts above have described. Clearly the "Deadmeat2" post you referenced has been debunked. Likewise, last I checked, Grant Cunningham is not an authority regarding wound ballistic testing, as can easily be deduced by his referencing Marshall and Sanow.

Regarding the correlation of properly conducted wound ballistic laboratory testing with actual shooting incidents, please note my commentary in post #22 of this thread: https://pistol-forum.com/showthread....539#post917539

[Lester Polfus]

Grant Cunningham's books mostly have great information in them, but you can save yourself some time and skip the chapters on defensive ammo.

[Ed L]

There have been a number of significant studies on real world performance of ammunition. Perhaps one of the most famous – and most controversial – was the long term look at handgun stopping power conducted by Evan Marshal and Edwin Sanow.

Their so-called studies were debunked over 20 years ago. Without taking a lot of space, there were two major problems:

1. Their so-called one-shot stop numbers deliberately did not include situations where someone was shot one or more times and did not stop.

2. Many of the sources that they attributed their shootings later stated that they did not provide

More recently, Greg Ellifritz took a stab at compiling and analyzing data on firearm performance in the real world.

Gregg Ellifritz is an amazing resource on defensive issues. He is a great teacher with a strong background in Law enforcement and training, and has written some of the best things that I have read on a wide variety of topics, this is one thing that I really disagree with him on.

To gather data he "scoured the newspapers, magazines, and Internet for any reliable accounts of what happened to the human body when it was shot."

This is a huge problem because you often don't get accurate information about the gun or caliber used, ammo used, number of shots fired or hit, where they hit, circumstances of the shooting, etc. Thus, you absolutely cannot include these accounts in any statistical study.

By his own description, he tried to record every shooting he could find. By definition this includes situations where an armed person shot an unarmed person, or shot someone who was not interested in fighting him in the first place, or not very serious about posing a threat. All of those fall into the heading of "every shooting he could find."

Further, even if the data were accurate, the premise of this study is flawed in the way it compares dissimilar shootings.

Shooting someone who isn't a serious attacker, who may not be armed, and is afraid of you isn't the same as shooting an of objective driven violent criminal attacker.

If you look at this author's logic, if two drunks at a bar get into a pushing match and one pulls out a .25 auto and shoots the other once and the man who was shot backs off, it counts as a one shot stop.

But if a police officer draws his 9mm loaded with Federal HST JHPs and as fires multiple quick shots at an attacker—in the manner in which he was likely trained--it counts as a one-shot failure, or a situation where multiple shots were required to stop someone.

I submit, would you rather rely on a .25 auto for self defense or the 9mm loaded with Federal HSTs?

I think it is admirable what the person who wrote this study tried to do, but I am afraid the methodology wasn't quite there. I would not try to extrapolate any of his results on what would work for me if confronted by a violent criminal.

While I disagree with the study, the author has a reputation as an excellent trainer from people I know who have trained with him, and as a stud of a Cop, and has written many other things that I consider to be thoughtful and useful.

[HCM]

Their so-called studies were debunked over 20 years ago. Without taking a lot of space, there were two major problems:

1. Their so-called one-shot stop numbers deliberately did not include situations where someone was shot one or more times and did not stop.

2. Many of the sources that they attributed their shootings later stated that they did not provide



Gregg Ellifritz is an amazing resource on defensive issues. He is a great teacher with a strong background in Law enforcement and training, and has written some of the best things that I have read on a wide variety of topics, this is one thing that I really disagree with him on.

To gather data he "scoured the newspapers, magazines, and Internet for any reliable accounts of what happened to the human body when it was shot."

This is a huge problem because you often don't get accurate information about the gun or caliber used, ammo used, number of shots fired or hit, where they hit, circumstances of the shooting, etc. Thus, you absolutely cannot include these accounts in any statistical study.

By his own description, he tried to record every shooting he could find. By definition this includes situations where an armed person shot an unarmed person, or shot someone who was not interested in fighting him in the first place, or not very serious about posing a threat. All of those fall into the heading of "every shooting he could find."

Further, even if the data were accurate, the premise of this study is flawed in the way it compares dissimilar shootings.

Shooting someone who isn't a serious attacker, who may not be armed, and is afraid of you isn't the same as shooting an of objective driven violent criminal attacker.

If you look at this author's logic, if two drunks at a bar get into a pushing match and one pulls out a .25 auto and shoots the other once and the man who was shot backs off, it counts as a one shot stop.

But if a police officer draws his 9mm loaded with Federal HST JHPs and as fires multiple quick shots at an attacker—in the manner in which he was likely trained--it counts as a one-shot failure, or a situation where multiple shots were required to stop someone.

I submit, would you rather rely on a .25 auto for self defense or the 9mm loaded with Federal HSTs?

I think it is admirable what the person who wrote this study tried to do, but I am afraid the methodology wasn't quite there. I would not try to extrapolate any of his results on what would work for me if confronted by a violent criminal.

While I disagree with the study, the author has a reputation as an excellent trainer from people I know who have trained with him, and as a stud of a Cop, and has written many other things that I consider to be thoughtful and useful.

Yup. The problem with both of those studies is the plural of anecdote is not data. You have partial or bad information via anecdote and nothing repeatable to correlate against.

As I recall San Diego PD and CA DOJ did some very interesting correlation studies and found the FBI gel / 4 layer denim test most closely correlated to the results the same rounds produced in actual CA LE shootings. They access to official reports, autopsies etc as they were working in their official capacity. DocGKR can speak on this in more detail.

[HCM]

Grant Cunningham's books mostly have great information in them, but you can save yourself some time and skip the chapters on defensive ammo.

As I recall he is a skilled and knowledgeable gunsmith, particularly with regard to revolvers but no background I am aware of in terminal ballistics.

He has retired from gun-smithing to pursue tactical instruction based on training with a variety of instructors from the rightfully renowned Mas Ayoob to the clownshoes Rob Pincus.

His bio is here: https://www.grantcunningham.com/about-grant-cunningham/