Stop the aggressor

 Reader John commented on the latex filled hollow-point: "I cannot understand why it would be important to ‘improve’ an already potentially lethal tool so that it will cause even more damage?"

Fair question.

The goal of using any weapon defensively is to make the aggressor STOP before they kill you or beat you within a millimeter of your life. In the event that they are attempting to steal your wallet through threat-of-force, they are informing you that your life and well-being are in-play...so use of a defensive weapon can be justified on the basis of parity-of-threat.

To remove the emotion from the situation, suppose this was a video-game and you, the player, could select from a menu of weapons.

A: A Bulgarian Umbrella that shoots a ricin-doped, steel pellet. The target does not notice the wound, walks around for two days and then falls over dead.

B: A firearm loaded with full-metal-jacket bullets. The bullets travel at 1100fps (roughly 300m/s). Further, assume that under stress you might manage one decent hit per magazine of ammo.

C: The same as above but loaded with ammo that is far more likely to expand.

We can reject A because the goal of using a defensive weapon is NOT to kill somebody. The goal of using a defensive weapon is to stop the aggressor and sometimes the death of the aggressor is a by-product of stopping them. It is a potential outcome, not the goal. The Bulgarian Umbrella is an excellent tool for an assassin but a horrible defensive weapon.

While B might stop an aggressor, it is highly dependent on where your one lucky shot hit him.

Section through a male torso at the elevation offering the highest percentage of heart/lung cross-section. Most modern males carry a significant amount of fat on our bodies. Image from The Visible Human Project

If you look at a section through the human body you will see that there are a lot of solid hits that will miss the heart/lung region, even if you are dead-on for the height of your shot. An undeformed FMJ at 1000fps can push the muscle aside with minimal damage and the aggressor can still pursue his intent.

Bear in mind that the shape of the undeformed bullet was designed to slip through the air with a minimum of resistance. That means the medium it is traveling through is not disturbed, Newton and all that.

Autopsy analysis of where an aggressor was hit with bullets while assaulting a cop

This is actually outstanding shooting. A 25% hit-rate is often bandied about for the frequency that a policeman hits his human target and 10% is often offered as how frequently a non-cop hits his human target.

More to the point, only one of the hits to the arm is potentially incapacitating. That is the one immediately below the shoulder and likely broke his humerus (which the perp did not find funny).

The hit to the nipple and the hit to the collar-bone might have been fatal, given enough time and an absence of medical care.

The hit to the perp's right eye was the show-stopper.

Note that the perp continued to attack even though he had been hit with eight shots before being hit by the nineth round.

Pass-throughs

The argument that hollow-points are less likely to "pass-through" and endanger bystanders is flawed because the vast majority of shots fired do not hit the aggressor.

In the illustration shown above, about half of the shots would have passed through whether they were hollow-points of FMJ. They simply did not encounter enough flesh to slow them down.

The real reason to choose the best* hollow-point available is because it will stop the aggressor more quickly whether the shooter hits muscle or more vascular tissue.

The goal is always to STOP THE AGGRESSOR.

*"the best" being defined as the hollow-point that expands the most reliably, penetrates 12" or more and is at a price-point where you can afford to practice with that exact same bullet.