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I've seen this discussed here and on other forums, and there seems to be a continuing myth, fed no doubt by Hollywood, that a pistol bullet will knock a man down, or worse yet, blow him backwards as if he had been attached to one end of a rope being yanked on by a truck. Of course, saner heads dispute this. Unfortunately, saner heads are not found in great abundance in Hollywood.



In any case, I found the following two quotes recently which I thought I would share here:

http://www.sightm1911.com/1911%20Myth.htm (near the bottom of the page)

You can't shoot down zeroes, blow up Tiger tanks, or sink the Bismark with a 1911 .45 ACP. Handgun bullets do not generate enough force to knock down an adult human being--if they did, they would knock us down when we fired them. [emphasis mine] This is simple physics. People do fall down most often when shot with a .45 because they are dead, seriously injured, or responding to the shock, but not because the force of the projectile is pushing their body down. The image of someone flying backwards after being hit by a pistol round is pure Hollywood, but not of the real world.

I've told this story elsewhere on this board, but my dad shot a Japanese soldier at very close range (within 10'-15') in the stomach on Iwo Jima. When I asked him what happened to the enemy soldier, my dad said that he "sat down abruptly." He wasn't knocked down, or blown backwards. What happened is that either from traumatic shock or surprise, the guy's legs collapsed underneath him, and he went down in a heap. He did not move after that, so my dad presumed that he had killed him; but circumstances being desperately grim at the time, he did not make it his business to confirm it.

In this thread on another forum which has been previously linked to here on TexasCHLforum, a poster says:

Well in my personal experiance with being hit by a .357 180 grain sjhp from five feet away I would say it stops a person most of the time because it dropped me like a rock with a shot to the gut one inch above my bellybutton. OUCH! Damage was as follows. Took half my stomach,half of my small and large intestines from fragments,20% of my liver and my right kidney. It stopped millimeters from coming out my back and was about 2 inches from my spine!

Given the amount of damage suffered by the individual above, and give that it dropped him "like a rock", the best you can hope for with a pistol caliber is instant incapacitation, but not a knockdown. If death follows, so be it, but it is not guaranteed.

Myth Busters did a "project" on this very thing....it is very interesting if you can find it. I seem to remember that a 12 guage was about the only thing that generated enough energy to actually move their subject (a pig, both with and without a vest on).

Gotta love those guys....

Jason

You are correct jbird, the pig was hanging on a hook that was balanced so that you could just push it slightly with the hand and it would fall. They shot it with many different calibers, 45acp, 44 mag and including a 30-06 I believe, yet the only one that made it fall was a 12 ga slug.

I saw another test they did on shooting locks. If I remember correctly the 12 ga slug won that contest also. I guess this means a 432 gr bullet beats a 200 gr bullet regardless of the velocity.

Houston1944 wrote:You are correct jbird, the pig was hanging on a hook that was balanced so that you could just push it slightly with the hand and it would fall. They shot it with many different calibers, 45acp, 44 mag and including a 30-06 I believe, yet the only one that made it fall was a 12 ga slug.

I saw another test they did on shooting locks. If I remember correctly the 12 ga slug won that contest also. I guess this means a 432 gr bullet beats a 200 gr bullet regardless of the velocity.

E = mv^2. No, that's not Einstein's formula (but close); it's the formula for joules of energy. In short, you can double the energy by either doubling mass or by increasing velocity by the square root of 2 (~1.414). A shotgun slug is double the weight of your average 45ACP bullet. At the same speed it would have double the energy; in fact, a 432gr bullet beats a 230gr bullet even if slower, as long as the 432gr bullet is moving at least 70% of the velocity of the 230gr.

Here's the kicker; a shotgun slug averages about 1600FPS and some approach 2000. That's two to 2.5 times the velocity. Add it all up and the muzzle energy of a shotgun slug is up to 10 times that of a .45 handgun. There quite simply is no comparison in terms of blowing something away physically.

BTW, the BoxOTruth guys did this one as well, with similar results; only the 12-gauge slug was capable of doing enough damage that the lock failed. Handgun and rifle bullets froze em up, but only a shotgun slug broke the lock apart.

Liko81 wrote:E = mv^2.

[nerd]I know I'm picky, but you forgot the .5. It's E=.5mV^2.[/nerd]

Houston1944 wrote:....

I saw another test they did on shooting locks. If I remember correctly the 12 ga slug won that contest also. I guess this means a 432 gr bullet beats a 200 gr bullet regardless of the velocity.

The box o truth (http://www.theboxotruth.com/) website did a study on shooting Master Locks with rifles and pistols. It was pretty amazing how little damage was done.

Speaking from second hand experience, my brother said getting shot in the chest with a shotgun from 15 yards away is like being hit in the chest with a sledge hammer.

The Annoyed Man wrote:I've told this story elsewhere on this board, but my dad shot a Japanese soldier at very close range (within 10'-15') in the stomach on Iwo Jima. When I asked him what happened to the enemy soldier, my dad said that he "sat down abruptly." He wasn't knocked down, or blown backwards. What happened is that either from traumatic shock or surprise, the guy's legs collapsed underneath him, and he went down in a heap.

I believe that some of this can be explained by what hypnotists call "the power of suggestion." If people believe that getting shot will "knock them down" then they will get "knocked down." I am not suggesting that they will get thrown backwards through a glass window, but they will sit down, give up and perhaps expire.

That is why I believe in people who teach the "combat mindset." If you "hypnotize" yourself into a mental state that you will continue to fight until you have prevailed, you have a much greater change of surviving a fight. Another way to look at is when a boat capsizes, a person can last many hours in the water and swim to shore. Upon reaching the shore [or other safety] that person may collaspe into unconsciousness.

Just my 2¢

TCD

"Speaking from second hand experience, my brother said getting shot in the chest with a shotgun from 15 yards away is like being hit in the chest with a sledge hammer."

Congratulations to your brother. I would say he's lucky to be saying anything after being shot in the chest at 15 yds. with a 12 ga.

Be sure to rub his head for good luck. The guy obviously has plenty to go around.

the doctor call him a miracle and have a look of amazement in their eyes every time they see him. He's got a scar from armpit to armpit.

We have a fellow we do business with regularly, that was shot point blank through the heart. I cannot recall the caliber, but It was more than one bullet through the heart. It was about ten years ago.
fwiw, it didn't change his lousy attitude at all.

KaiserB wrote:

Houston1944 wrote:....

I saw another test they did on shooting locks. If I remember correctly the 12 ga slug won that contest also. I guess this means a 432 gr bullet beats a 200 gr bullet regardless of the velocity.

The box o truth (http://www.theboxotruth.com/) website did a study on shooting Master Locks with rifles and pistols. It was pretty amazing how little damage was done.

The largest thing they shot it with was a .308

"Back in the day", when Master lock company was promoting their laminated locks via a TV commercial where they shot one with a rifle and it held up...I used my .338 Win. Mag with 300 gr. round nose loads to open them with boring regularity. It would blow them to pieces EVERY time!

I would expect a .223 to drill nice little holes in them (like in the test). Shoot them with something a bit more powerful (and expanding bullets) and things change dramatically.

When my brother shot me in the leg with a .22 my reaction had little to do with the impact beyond the fact of it. A little tug on the leg and a burning sensation, but you can bet I jumped a bit.

There are plenty of video and movie examples of real shootings to show the typical reactions to being shot.

lrb111 wrote:We have a fellow we do business with regularly, that was shot point blank through the heart. I cannot recall the caliber, but It was more than one bullet through the heart. It was about ten years ago.
fwiw, it didn't change his lousy attitude at all.

When I worked in the ER, I once helped to treat a guy (an armed robber, btw, who picked the wrong liquor store that night and had an unpleasant encounter with an ornery sales clerk) who had been shot right through the right ventricle with a 9mm. He was also hit in the upper right arm, which broke his humerus mid-shaft. He was awake, alert, and fairly oriented. Now, without surgical intervention, he would have eventually died of a pericardial tamponade, but he held on long enough to make it to an ER and have emergency surgery, and he survived his wounds.

BTW, my dad was also WIA, having been hit by a Japanese rifle round approximately in the solar plexus. The bullet hit one of his buttons, shattering the bullet jacket. The lead core stayed in his chest wall, dissecting between two ribs, and exited his back midway up, about 4-5 inches to the left of his spine. To the day he died, the bullet track was visible on x-ray because of the trail of fine particles brass button and copper jacket. As recently as a month before he died, I saw him pick a little piece of metal out of his skin which had traveled to the surface from his chest wall.

My dad described the sensation of being shot as like being "kicked by a mule" (his words). He was kneeling when he was hit, and he said he toppled over to his right rear. He said he was incapacitated for perhaps a couple of minutes because the wind had been completely and thoroughly knocked out of him by the bullet impact. He said that, as he began to recover from the impact, the wound began to burn terribly, and then after about a half hour or so, it went numb. (In fact, as he lay there waiting for a medic, he stuck both thumbs in the entrance and exit holes to stem the bleeding because that is what he had been trained to do.) In any case, after that initial few minutes, he was no longer completely incapacitated, and in fact, he shot that Japanese soldier with his .45 some 24 hours after he had been hit himself. It was a couple of hours after shooting that enemy soldier that he and the remaining 6 of the 10 total survivors (out of a rifle company) finally made it back to the relative "safety" of American lines. (Read up on "Cushman's Pocket.")

Another example of remaining relatively effective after being wounded:
The corpsman who helped my dad after he was hit, was hit himself by either a rifle or machine gun round low in the shoulder while working on him, breaking his (the corpsman's) arm. He picked himself up and went back to work on my dad, whereupon he was hit in the legs by machine gun fire. He picked himself back up and finished patching up my dad. Then he lay down next to my dad and said, "my turn... I'll tell you what to do." While my dad was trying to dress the corpsman's wounds, the poor guy took another round to the head and was killed instantly.

The point of all this is that, as WildBill said, a "combat" mindset will get you through an amazing amount of trauma, so long as your wounds are not instantly fatal, and even a direct hit to the heart may not be necessarily instantly fatal. Where I would disagree is that it may be possible that temporary incapacitation has nothing to do with the combat mindset, while the ability to recover from temporary incapacitation and regain a modicum of combat effectiveness has everything to do with it. A combat mindset is exactly that - a mindset - and it is a matter of good training, and a little personal decision making. But some insults to the body's core are just so overpowering as to temporarily derail that mindset, no matter how bad you think you are, or how good your training. It is something that a warrior tries to prepare for, but all the preparation in the world simply isn't going to enough sometimes. So you push through and hang on until you can resume fighting.

Since a rifle or machine gun round can potentially have far more devastating effects on the human body than a pistol round, it is unrealistic to expect that our "puny" 1911s, etc., are going to knock anybody down. If that is the case, is my love affair with 1911s and my insistence on carrying one mere vanity? I don't think so, but I'm starting to give some thought to carrying my USP .40 more often with its 12+1 capacity, or perhaps buying something else.

Hmmm.... What to buy? What to buy?....

The Annoyed Man wrote:

lrb111 wrote:We have a fellow we do business with regularly, that was shot point blank through the heart. I cannot recall the caliber, but It was more than one bullet through the heart. It was about ten years ago.
fwiw, it didn't change his lousy attitude at all.

When I worked in the ER, I once helped to treat a guy (an armed robber, btw, who picked the wrong liquor store that night and had an unpleasant encounter with an ornery sales clerk) who had been shot right through the right ventricle with a 9mm. He was also hit in the upper right arm, which broke his humerus mid-shaft. He was awake, alert, and fairly oriented. Now, without surgical intervention, he would have eventually died of a pericardial tamponade, but he held on long enough to make it to an ER and have emergency surgery, and he survived his wounds.

BTW, my dad was also WIA, having been hit by a Japanese rifle round approximately in the solar plexus. The bullet hit one of his buttons, shattering the bullet jacket. The lead core stayed in his chest wall, dissecting between two ribs, and exited his back midway up, about 4-5 inches to the left of his spine. To the day he died, the bullet track was visible on x-ray because of the trail of fine particles brass button and copper jacket. As recently as a month before he died, I saw him pick a little piece of metal out of his skin which had traveled to the surface from his chest wall.

My dad described the sensation of being shot as like being "kicked by a mule" (his words). He was kneeling when he was hit, and he said he toppled over to his right rear. He said he was incapacitated for perhaps a couple of minutes because the wind had been completely and thoroughly knocked out of him by the bullet impact. He said that, as he began to recover from the impact, the wound began to burn terribly, and then after about a half hour or so, it went numb. (In fact, as he lay there waiting for a medic, he stuck both thumbs in the entrance and exit holes to stem the bleeding because that is what he had been trained to do.) In any case, after that initial few minutes, he was no longer completely incapacitated, and in fact, he shot that Japanese soldier with his .45 some 24 hours after he had been hit himself. It was a couple of hours after shooting that enemy soldier that he and the remaining 6 of the 10 total survivors (out of a rifle company) finally made it back to the relative "safety" of American lines. (Read up on "Cushman's Pocket.")

Another example of remaining relatively effective after being wounded:
The corpsman who helped my dad after he was hit, was hit himself by either a rifle or machine gun round low in the shoulder while working on him, breaking his (the corpsman's) arm. He picked himself up and went back to work on my dad, whereupon he was hit in the legs by machine gun fire. He picked himself back up and finished patching up my dad. Then he lay down next to my dad and said, "my turn... I'll tell you what to do." While my dad was trying to dress the corpsman's wounds, the poor guy took another round to the head and was killed instantly.

The point of all this is that, as WildBill said, a "combat" mindset will get you through an amazing amount of trauma, so long as your wounds are not instantly fatal, and even a direct hit to the heart may not be necessarily instantly fatal. Where I would disagree is that it may be possible that temporary incapacitation has nothing to do with the combat mindset, while the ability to recover from temporary incapacitation and regain a modicum of combat effectiveness has everything to do with it. A combat mindset is exactly that - a mindset - and it is a matter of good training, and a little personal decision making. But some insults to the body's core are just so overpowering as to temporarily derail that mindset, no matter how bad you think you are, or how good your training. It is something that a warrior tries to prepare for, but all the preparation in the world simply isn't going to enough sometimes. So you push through and hang on until you can resume fighting.

Since a rifle or machine gun round can potentially have far more devastating effects on the human body than a pistol round, it is unrealistic to expect that our "puny" 1911s, etc., are going to knock anybody down. If that is the case, is my love affair with 1911s and my insistence on carrying one mere vanity? I don't think so, but I'm starting to give some thought to carrying my USP .40 more often with its 12+1 capacity, or perhaps buying something else.

Hmmm.... What to buy? What to buy?....

A "pocket" shotgun?.....