I've always enjoyed Dave's musings. I didn't agree with him, or anyone else, back in the day over the 147grn hoopla. Hollow point design was pretty crude back then, and if a jhp projectile wasn't getting up to at least 1200ish fps expansion was a faith based experience. I'm still not in the 147 grain fanboi, preferring 124 +P as a good middle ground load in the 9mm. I may not have always agreed with Dave, but I've always found his position well considered.
We may lose and we may win, but we will never be here again.......
IIRC, he based that on a run of 20 LAPD SWAT shootings that went 19 for 20. Of course, the definition of "stop" is rather fungible with, well, everyone. The plethora of shooting incident videos illustrates that.Originally Posted by okie john
Spaulding's article seems to be more of a cautionary tale about QC/QA and Lot testing than anything else. Early 147s had a rep for icepick wounds with even better(worse?) penetration than ball rounds. My department had some truly truly spectacularly alarming through and through(and through) early results, especially with the feared "Black Italians".
One shooting on a traffic stop went through the driver's side glass, the seatback, the shoulder blade, angled down through the torso, the thigh, the passenger's rubber floor mat, the floorboard, knocked a divot out of the pavement and spanged off into the neighborhood hunting baby carriages.
Ah the 80's and 90's. Gun magazines ruled and I read them all. I remember this all playing out but don't recall the exact details. Mr. Ayoob was very involved with all of this back then and wrote about it extensively. It seems like he was pro 147 early on but then switched after seeing some bad results. For some reason it sticks in my head that I read the early 147's were based on some spec op military loading for suppressed MP5's and that is where the problem lay. Of course I have no idea if that was true, just that it was wrote about in the magazines. The departments by me always had great luck with the Federal BPLE 115 +P+ load. Of course they jumped on the .40 train later anyway for no good reason.
Same.
Okie John
“The reliability of the 30-06 on most of the world’s non-dangerous game is so well established as to be beyond intelligent dispute.” Finn Aagaard
"Don't fuck with it" seems to prevent the vast majority of reported issues." BehindBlueI's
A while back I read the notion that the 45ACP might enjoy some of the reputation because it was almost universally fired out of the very shootable 1911, frequently by people that might be more serious about practice. Like LAPD SWAT.
That has been floated around and seems plausible enough on its face. Much like the ".357 Magnum is a .38 Special with a flashbang" people were trying to curve fit pseudo-historical data(defined as the plural of anecdote) in the effort to understand what was happening.A while back I read the notion that the 45ACP might enjoy some of the reputation because it was almost universally fired out of the very shootable 1911, frequently by people that might be more serious about practice. Like LAPD SWAT.
substitute "wasted" for "spent" and that would summarize my experiences down that rathole, I look back now and see I was only being fashionable with all those projects...
They All Fall To Hardball when shot dead solid perfectly in the middle of the chest...
I will never forget Skeeter Skelton's reply when someone insisted he comment on the Army's decision to adopt the 9mm. He said, "If someone is going to shoot me will FMJ ammunition, I'd rather be shot with a 9mm than a .45 ACP." While it doesn't address modern HP ammo, at the time I thought that was a damn clever answer.
147 gr 9mm averages about 952 fps and 293 ft-lbs out of a 1-7/8" barrel in my 637-2 conversion.
It's enough to suit me.
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