Ballistics by the Inch
It looks like these guys did some pretty impressive back yard science to determine the effects of barrel length on the speed of handgun rounds. I am impressed with the level of commitment that these guys brought to the process.
(H/T:The Real Gun Guys)
1. Attackers will run in fear of the sound of a racking shotgun.
Not necessarily. This makes a lot assumptions like you are going to have time to change the state of your shotgun when you need it. If you are racking a shotgun at the start of your encounter then you were starting with an unloaded gun (or ejecting unspent ammunition.) If you want to use to sound to reliably intimidate people you ether need to issue verbals commands (“I am armed and I will shoot you…”) or begin shooting them.
2. Shotguns don’t need to be aimed.
Depending upon the distance and the load the shot will strike in a small cluster a few inches across. Shortening the barrel or increasing the distance will cause the pattern to spread out more, but will also reduce the penetration of each pellet. Realistically you need to get as many pellets into the vitals as possible so wider spreads of shot are less likely to produce stops in human targets.
3. Shotguns will knock a bad guy into the air.
Nope. Physics tells us that if the shotgun had enough power to lift the target it would also have enough recoil to lift the shooter. Shooting people who are off balance might get knocked over, but nobody is going to go flying though windows.
4. Shotguns are more deadly than rifles.
A trigger press of .00 buckshot is like shooting a lot of little handguns. Assuming all the pellets are on target you generally produce a number of low velocity wound tracts. This means that any tissue that is actually touched by a pellet dies, but the surrounding tissue is undamaged. Rifles fire one bullet at higher velocity creating a larger permanent cavity. The subjective “deadliness” has more to do with the circumstances of the shot (distance and shot placement) rather than a hard fast rule. Both shotguns and rifles are more than capable of killing people.
5. Shotguns require less training to operate effectively.
Because of the higher weight, recoil, limited ammo capacity, and manual controls shotguns require more training to operate. People that are new to shotguns frequently “short stroke” inducing stoppages. Less critically things like reloading and ammunition selection (select slug drills) do require a fair bit of practice to master.
I would not argue that shotguns are not effective self-defense weapons, but they do not live up to the hype and in most circumstances are not as good as having a semi-automatic rifle. Despite the informal training supplied by Hollywood and video games, they do no live up to their billing.
The term “stop” is loosely defined as the threat stops all hostile action. A stop might just as easily be a look or body posture as multiple bullets tearing through vitals. There is a tendency in firearm circles to confuse a ’stop’ with a ‘kill’, but this is incorrect. Handgun bullets do not tend to kill people stone-dead on impact, though they might deter future hostilities.
There is a lot of discussion about the ’stopping power’ of some given caliber, cartridge and bullet configuration. For the most part these discussions are irrelevant, as all major caliber handguns seem to produce the same range of effects. Handgun bullets produce low velocity wounding, so a few more millimeters of wound channel or another inch of penetration is not really all that significant. The ballistics might differ, but the physiological effects are all pretty much the same.
We desire to effect “stops” against all assailants, but are responses have to be appropriate for the circumstances. The assailant that runs away because of a face full of pepper spray is stopped, but he is not killed (or even harmed.) For self-defense purposes we would like to be able to effect stops with the lowest level of force possible, but we must recognize that anything less than incapacitation is a deterrent, and requires the assailant to want to quit. All stops occur via one of three mechanisms: psychological, physiological, and neurological. Or as Greg Hamilton, once said “People stop because they run out of blood, brains, or balls.”
A psychological stop is where the assailant quits. Pain, fear, or uncertainty cause the assailant to choose to break off the victimization. All applications of less than lethal force (and a good number of lethal applications as well) can be said to be psychological stops.
A physiological stop is where there is enough damage to the assailant that he is unable to continue. Large amounts of blood loss that leads to unconsciousness, or breaking essential pieces of his skeletal structure that are necessary to keep him engaged in the fight are examples of physiological stops. It is important to realize that damaging non-vital organs might cause death given enough time, but they are not fight-stopping injuries, and are not physically incapacitating.
A neurological stop is simply damaging the brain so that it can no longer direct the bodies functions. This is the most reliable stopping mechanism, but it is the hardest to effect. The brain is well protected and most the tools available in self-defense situations have a hard time penetrating the skull.
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