I agree that the 9mm is not the very best round as a man-stopper, but I just read an article saying it's absolutely no good as a man-stopper; this based on US Army experience in combat. I'm sorry, but apples vs oranges. The US military is required to use non-expanding ball ammo while the rest of us can use modern ammo that expands to transfer significantly more energy to the target than ball ammo. Certianly, the 9mm isn't the 45 ACP, .357 Mag or .44 Mag, but modern ammo available for the 9mm is certianly orders of magnitude better than the ball ammo the Army must use.
m444ss,
First, can you please post a link to your article that you are referring to? If you can't find it, please list the title and author. I absolutely love to read the actual articles being referred to so I can address the exact same things!
Bodies are stopped by trauma and blood loss. If you are lucky, you get trauma to the brain or spine and it is immediate to the BG and he does not suffer and you do not have to continue to fire. However, any other shot does two things: creates a permanent wound cavity (PWC) as well as a temporary stretch cavity (TSC). The permanent wound cavity is the actual tearing created by the bullet, it's jacket, bullet fragments, pellets, or other foreign matter as it passes through the body. Some tearing is created as the cavity is formed, but this is usually minor compared to the cutting and tearing by the debris.
The second part of the wound created when the bullet enters is the temporary stretch cavity. This is larger than the PWC and is the area that is that is damaged by the tissue being stretched by the sheer energy of the round entering the body and dumping energy (rather than the actual metal) into the tissue. This stretching and tearing is very quick and violent and causes tearing and bleeding damage to muscle and organs but then immediately settles back into place and may or may not close. With ball ammo, the TSC is barely larger than the PWC, which means the round does the minimum trauma to the human body and therefore has the least amount of chance to stop the BG. However, when using a round like Hornady Critical Defense, a round with guaranteed expansion, the round expands in the first five inches of entering the body, thereby dumping its ballistic energy quickly. This has to very important results: It creates a much larger TSC and keeps the round from penetrating the body too deeply and exiting the rear of the body and harming innocent civilians. In this case, the TSC can be 2-4 times larger than the PWC, causing organs in the area of the TSC to rupture or fail, which means that you did not have to hit that organ with the actual bullet to cause the organ to shut down - the energy dumped in the body by a highly efficient bullet caused an organ or organs to fail which in turn caused BG to stop his attack.
Now, here's the rub: For our self-defense purposes, it may be possible to "hurt" these organs and cause him to collapse and modern medicine to save and revive him, so actually, the modern rounds are SAFER because fewer rounds can be used to stop a BG and it is possible that he will live because less actual lead and fewer PWC had to be created to stop his illegal actions. The military on the other hand, has a different agenda. A dead soldier is only one combatant removed from the fight; a wounded soldier has to be treated and carried to the rear for further care, which actually removes three combatants, even if temporarily. So it behooves the military to wound soldiers instead of killing them. This means smaller calibers and ball ammo instead of more efficient hollow point or other well-designed rounds. So as m444ss said, this may even be more of an apples and oranges comparison than we realize.