The single most harmful myth about home-defense ammunition is this: the fact that selecting a less lethal load will cause fewer hits to be more dangerous. In actual rooms using actual wall materials, a shot that is not even hit by the target can still go through several barriers with the needed energy to hurt the people that a defender is protecting.
Responsible shooters drill on what occurs when accuracy reduces when under stress. That entails learning the behavior of various projectiles when they are within tissue and when they leave the drywall as well as on their exit.
1. Supposedly low recoil or light on the other hand, will not penetrate walls
Penetration is propelled by velocity, construction, and shape rather than a designation such as light or reduced recoil. When a systematic test was conducted in interior-wall panels and simulated exterior wall, almost all the loads tested still went outside the “house” on a clean miss. The lesson was simple enough: each of the rounds that missed 12″ of the 10% ballistic gel went through both walls. A round, which does not strike the target, is not safer, simply because it seems to be in control.
2. Birdshot will be the responsible option since it will not over penetrate
Birdshot is usually considered as a moral shortcut: the less it penetrates, the less dangerous it is. The tradeoff in the engineering sense is that even tiny shots can be deformed within a short period of time and they cannot access important structures, particularly with longer distances traveled as well as in actual anatomy due to the addition of bone and denser tissue. Using the same wall-and-gel test assembly, the birdshot, which has a #9 mark, was more likely to come to rest in gel instead of going through the various layers, although the author nonetheless called it a last-resort measure since sufficient penetration is needed to disable a lethal target. A weight that does not penetrate critical body parts may extend the risk within the house.
3. FMJ is good on defense since it is reliable
The smooth profile of FMJ and non-expanding design are able to feed well and shoot consistently, yet the same qualities allow full utilization of deep and straight-line penetration. The reason why a lot of defensive curricula do not include range ammo with defensive ammo is that. An effective non-controversial baseline is that FMJ is typically linked with deep penetration owing to non-expanding design, and thus, the other way is more likely to pass through tissue and onto further traveling through building materials.
4. A hollow point is said to avoid overpenetration, meaning that the backstop is irrelevant
Hollow points of the modern era have been designed to cause controlled upset and to transfer energy more efficiently in soft tissue, but do not cause the development of a force field behind the target. Even when the bullet does not expand, cuts something in between or does not hit at all, it is still possible that it acts as a penetrating projectile. Even where a defensive round has worked as intended, a defender is still responsible with each projectile that has been fired. The backstop is a planning need not a frivolity.
5. A larger caliber means a quicker stop and this will reduce the number of shots taken
This myth manifests itself as “.45 wipes it out” or 9mm is too small, but gunshot wound trajectories are frequently hard to differentiate based on caliber in a medical facility, as discussed of FBI ballistic investigations. The practical implication is that the ammunition selection is not able to substitute the essentials that terminate fights by achieving vital anatomy and applying it again and over as required. The same source focuses on that instant incapacitation is not assured, and precision hits that take place promptly are the most predictable course over depending on caliber fame.
6. Shotguns do not overshot indoor
The difference in loads can be concealed by the reputation of a shotgun. In barrier-and-gel, buck and slugs were 12-gauge 00 exhibiting clear penetration through gel, through interior and exterior wall structures. In the meantime, a single buckshot size was outliers: the #4 buck often lodged pellets in the gel or the first inside wall, which made it more similar to a balanced result of that particular test design. It is not that a shotgun is inherently safer and/or riskier, but rather that the payload design is far more important than stereotypes of platforms.
7. Rifles are never good in a house since they are always worse through everything
The identical test, which had condemned handgun FMJ and heavy shotgun charges, established that certain rifle charges will stop sooner than anticipated after traveling through gel and hitting wallboard, based on construction, and dependent on projectile destabilization. Some of the 5.56/.223 soft point designs have stalled in the first wall after gel and others rifle loads have penetrated both walls. The engineering lesson is that the risk of the rifle depends on the loading and not on the name of the caliber.
8. Ammunition tests are lethal, thus, the solution to it lies in picking a top score
The advantages of standardized testing are that it tests repeatability and not the certainty of a result. The FBI standard is highly regarded as a standard of handgun duty/defensive ammunition, but the standard is measuring terminal-performance reliability across barriers, rather than stating that a round is the most lethal. According to the ammo-testing procedure provided by the FBI, the scoring is highly biased to the consistency of penetration and a small range of penetration in a variety of situations. It is, then, a means of picking reliable performance, not a replacement of skill, tactics and safe angles.
The harmful myth is that ammunition choice can be used to responsibly engineer rounds away. The less dramatic truth indicated by materials testing and ballistic standards is that misses are the actual liability and a large number of typical loads will continue to penetrate typical residential buildings.
The factual conclusion is clear-cut. A responsible home-defense planning takes ammo selection as a layer training, reasonable expectations of realistic accuracy, and a solid grasp of what is behind the target of intended attack.
