In this episode, we have a little fun with ballistics, and see just how effective each round truly is. We start with a .22 caliber defensive round, and move on to a .380 caliber, and finally finish up with a 9mm defensive round.
00:00:02.000Now, the Founding Fathers understood that only an armed people could truly be a free people.
00:00:09.000So this week, I invite you to join me and Mug Club resident gun aficionado, Mr. Guns and Beer, as we tackle the subject of firearms from every angle possible.
00:00:22.000In today's episode, we have a little fun, okay, a lot of fun with ballistics.
00:00:28.000And see just how effective each round truly is.
00:00:35.000All right, so we've done five other installments.
00:00:42.000You can hit one of those videos where we dispel some of the common myths, but this does kind of help do that because a lot of people don't really know what calibers do to soft tissue, to bone.
00:00:53.000So this is the proper gelatin that would be used in the FBI ballistics.
00:00:58.000Clear ballistics gel, which is a synthetic material.
00:01:01.000The FBI uses organic, but organic's way harder to film with, so this simulates it very closely.
00:01:10.000It's very close, but none of us have plotted a kidnap a sitting governor.
00:01:14.000So, I think the synthetic works for the FBI.
00:01:16.000And the standards for this, just so you know as far as defensive use with a caliber, is you're looking for a specific penetration without over-penetration, that number is?
00:01:23.000So the FBI standard, which is kind of the industry standard, 12 to 18 inches.
00:01:28.000Basically you want to get enough penetration, but not too much penetration.
00:04:29.000I mean, it's no butterfly, but... Alright, up next we're going to be shooting the exact same bullet, but out of a rifle-length barrel, so it should behave differently.
00:05:25.000The high-speed footage should tell us, but just looking at that track, it did one of the two.
00:05:29.000And sometimes I think it's important for people to note, like, there is a point, depending on, right, the grains, like, there's a point of diminishing returns where if you fire it too fast, especially some of the, like, sort of semi-fragmenting rounds where they don't penetrate nearly as deeply.
00:05:41.000Correct, because it's all about bullet design, so...
00:06:19.000And it's actually a pretty good gun to use.
00:06:21.000I think it's a longer barrel than a lot of the micro pocket carries, so you'll kind of get the right ballistics out of it, I guess, maximizing it.
00:06:26.000Yeah, if you toss it and single it, I mean, you'll hit it anyway, but the double action... Right now we have full metal jackets, so... Yes.
00:06:33.000In 380, there is somewhat of a debate between hollow points and full metal jacket in terms of how they perform.
00:06:40.000We'll leave that to the comments section.
00:06:41.000It's one of those, look, I'll say this because he's being very diplomatic, it is one of those rounds, the 380.
00:06:46.000Keep in mind, we're talking about the same diameter, right, as a 9mm.
00:06:49.000Far less, you're talking about power, like power that you can fit into it, right?
00:06:54.000If it's a hollow point, there's a lot of data to suggest, and there are some exceptions, but as a general rule, unless you have the right gun, the right round, it can under-penetrate if it expands.
00:07:03.000So there are a lot of people who say just use ball ammo.
00:07:05.000The risk of it over-penetrating is, again, still pretty low because it's not that powerful of a round.
00:07:11.000So a lot of people will tell you to use standard ball ammo.
00:07:14.000It's one of the exceptions to the rule.
00:07:50.000So how much of that, you know we see that obviously in the gelatin, how much of a reflection is that actually as far as would that have a larger wound cavity in the body?
00:08:28.000So that's why rifle wounds are just so much more devastating than pistol wounds.
00:08:32.000But, I mean, there would be some tissue damage like that, but it wouldn't be like what we're going to see with the rifles.
00:08:37.000Now, what about, we talk about, because we're talking about like the hydrostatic shock.
00:08:41.000The wound cavity where, think about it, it goes, and we'll see it in slow motion, it goes, basically like this, it goes, these are technical terms you need not concern yourself with.
00:10:15.000In that instance, it failed to hit a guy's heart, the criminal, and he was able to keep fighting.
00:10:22.000So that's why they switched it, because of that underperformance.
00:10:24.000But here, obviously you can see, Over-penetration as well.
00:10:27.000So on that one with the full metal jacket, yep, we're looking at 29 inches of penetration on that round.
00:10:32.000So probably more than what you typically want.
00:10:34.000And to be clear too, sometimes people will get the... This doesn't mean that it will exactly penetrate, let's say, 12 or 14.
00:10:41.000It's meant to be a relevant metric to give you an idea as to what you're looking for with that penetration to guarantee that it'll, you know, crush bone if it needs to, make it through clothing, right?
00:10:49.000That's something people don't take into account.
00:10:50.000Correct, and it's also a consistent medium.
00:10:52.000That's why a lot of people use it, because you can compare round to round to round and have a consistent outcome.
00:10:58.000A barbell where you have the exact, like sure, you can get stronger using a kettlebell, but it's hard to measure, whereas you know the exact poundage.
00:11:04.000It's kind of a good way to measure progress.
00:11:06.000So, neither one of those would be ideal.
00:11:42.000Yep, this is .55 grain, so it's going to be similar to M193, which is a military loading for like 20 years in the military, 30 years.
00:11:50.000So .556, .223 is a very velocity-dependent round, so at this close-up with a 60-inch barrel, it should still We do pretty well, even though it's not fancy stuff.
00:12:00.000And with something like this, it's not nearly as relevant as with a pistol, whether it's a hollow point.
00:12:06.000It still is, but not to the same degree.
00:12:40.000So what you see here probably is more evident in the slow-mo that you guys probably saw than what you see here with the actual wound track itself but as you can see it went in about probably four inches and then started fragmenting so what's happening there is the bullets going so fast and it hits that soft tissue the bullet itself is breaking apart so It started to come apart right around three to four inches.
00:13:03.000I think, slow-mo would tell us, but I think it actually exited out the bottom of the block.
00:13:08.000So, what you see there with rifle rounds often, particularly a full metal jacket, is that they will tumble, twist, turn in the gel, and the same thing would happen in, you know, a deer or your body.
00:13:18.000Now, just to be clear though, we'll do that in the myths video.
00:13:21.000It doesn't mean that it bounces around like a ping-pong ball.
00:13:56.000In ballistics terms, we call it the neck right there on the front.
00:14:00.000And what Clear Ballistics doesn't show all that well is what the real temporary stretch cavity would be if you were actually shooting like ordinance grade gel or tissue.
00:14:12.000So you have your permanent cavity, which is what you see that's damaged, and then your stretch cavity, which this doesn't do a good job of replicating.
00:14:20.000But I think the slow-mo probably shows that a little bit better than what we see here with our naked eye.
00:14:25.000But yeah, this is the one I was talking about.
00:14:28.000This one exits the block at 14 inches.
00:14:32.000All right, now let's grab the shotgun, because that's one of the myths that we'll be dispelling, and you can click on the link below, where some people say, all you need is birdshot.
00:14:41.000You don't want over-penetration, you just want birdshot.
00:14:45.000If you don't want to win the gunfight.
00:14:46.000Yes, so we'll do a round of 12-gauge, we'll do birdshot and then buckshot into another block of gel, so you can see the penetration and why it's a silly thing that only silly people say.
00:16:11.000There's more of them in the shotgun shell itself, and they will penetrate a little bit less.
00:16:15.000So for buckshot, this is the heaviest penetrating Round that's typically used.
00:16:19.000So you can see here that we had a couple of them stop between the 15 and 19 inch mark and it looks like we had two go out past that all the way out to 26 inches on that one.
00:16:33.000So a little bit more penetration that would be ideal Me personally, if I were getting into a gunfight, I would rather have more penetration than less if I had to err on the side of one or the other.
00:16:43.000And when you're talking about the actual right sort of leg count, the muzzle energy, is that about the equivalent to, is it 8 rounds of 9mm?
00:17:09.000But yeah, I mean, you'll see a lot of security camera footage all the time of people take high center chest hits with pistols, and they keep moving.
00:17:19.000Well, we had someone just... I'm not saying it's impossible.
00:17:21.000Yes, and this is one of those things, a lot of people will tell you this, and we had someone who was an operator, former Special Forces, say, just trust me, I know what I'm talking about, birdshot.
00:17:29.000And Ginger Snap said, wait a second, I had a friend who was shot with birdshot, and he can still mostly see out of that eye.