Handguns hold a weird place in the American life: they are seen in films as charms, discussed in the media and are presented as a last resort weapon by a common person. Myths are proliferated in that disconnection between pop culture and physics, and some of them give unrealistic expectations of how easily a danger is eliminated, how the equipment can compensate for talent, and what will occur when the trigger is pressed.
The worst myths have one thing in common; they reduce a multifaceted, high-stress situation to one supposedly simple trick. The reality is more stubborn. The handguns depend on principles, and that is loading bullets into vital body parts, ammunition penetration is sufficient, and the system proves under pressure.
1. The bigger its caliber the greater the stopping power
Caliber arguments appear like certainty but the physiology is unlikely to cooperate. The own ballistic studies of the FBI have been quoted to an abrupt conclusion: surgeons and pathologists are usually unable to distinguish the way of the wound caused by the common service handgun bullets. The implication here is the practical one of caliber size not being a short cut to rapid incapacitation.
The actual determinants of results are the speed with which the bullets hit and damage critical structures and the ability of the shooter to provide such hits as soon as possible. The weight of the cartridge used in a hard kick can also cause the follow-up shots to be slowed down and lower the accuracy of the shooter. When used in actual defense, the most best caliber is the one that can be manipulated to the extent that the rounds are maintained in the vital zone when repeated hits occur under deteriorating fine motor skills.
2. Hogs carry concussive power
Hollywood markets that a shot of a pistol causes bodies to fly. Physics does not. And in case a bullet is fast enough to knock down an adult, recoil would knock down the shooter, too; the law of conservation of momentum works both ways.
When individuals fall after being shot at once, it is most often due to the fact that the central nervous system is interfered with-or they choose to stop, run away or even to obey. The latter category, which is commonly referred to as a psychological stop, occurs regularly enough to make people believe that it is assured. It is not. The surest route of the fast physical disablement of the handgun goes through the brain or the upper spinal cord and those targets are difficult to strike when they are in motion.
3. The magic of modern hollow point is sure to put a stop
Defensive hollow points of the modern type are made to enlarge and penetrate more reliably than those of the older type, though not always. The bullets, even the well-designed ones, may clog, fail to expand, or over-penetrate, particularly after penetrating through cloth. That is the reason why the years-old standard of the FBI insists on 12 inches and 18 penetration in ballistic gelatin: superficial injuries might not include the organs that count.
Gelatin is also associated with caveats. Gel gives comparable results that are repeatable, yet it does not reproduce the anatomy, organs or the stratification of the variability in real anatomy. It is best to think of test results as a filter: they should not be used to avoid loads that under-penetrate every time or show a weirdly behaving load, but the reliability in the particular handgun being carried should be checked.
4. Bang your head on them and that is all
Internet talk and action movies consider head shot as a cheat code. The head is a small moving target, not uniformly vulnerable, and the anatomy of a head has not been designed to be shot by a person in real defensive shooting. The brain and the upper spinal cord is the target of the shuts down, which is guarded by the bone and moves with every move.
Even the accurate shooters may not hit accurately when the threat puts pressure on them and more so at high velocity. This is the reason most defensive doctrine causes shooters to target the widest possible vital zone, which is usually the upper chest, and in which imperfect hits have a greater probability of striking organs and blood vessels that are significant.
5. Go to the heart, not the center chest
It makes sense to target the heart until the element of stress comes into the picture. The heart is not a big target and it is not in the place that most of the population imagines it to be. When adrenaline kicks in performance is generally less, the sights become more wobbly and the triggering is more inaccurate.
There is no compromise involved in center-chest aiming; it is a strategy of reliability. A miss may occur when a shot lands a few inches away of a shot that is meant to hit the heart. A bullet that targets the middle of the high chest has a higher chance to hit an area where large vessels, lungs, and upper thoracic organs reside and therefore there is a higher chance that something can be hit that has a consequence.
6. When a gunfight comes on it is always about tight groups
The culture of range encourages small groups, whereas the defensive shooting encourages quick, repeatable shots into critical anatomy. Hanging onto one tattered fragment may drag cadence and establish a false norm which falls apart at the stress of time.
There is also a mechanical consideration commonly overlooked, which is that shooting more than one round into the same small area of previously damaged tissue is not necessarily better than diffusing the shots across the vital area. Defensive training is more inclined to focus on being able to shoot within the time frame necessary to hold onto the target but vast enough to keep the shot within a zone no more than the size of the upper chest – large enough to tolerate a stress-induced error, small enough to have some anatomical significance.
7. When it matters, it will work when it feeds at the range
Reliability is not a feel, but rather a system property. Defensive shooting failures can have their origins in the ammunition which is not so much the same, the intolerance of this type of handgun to a particular load, problems with the magazines, or cost-cutting measures. The workaround is mundane: run the test load ammunition in the real gun, the real magazines on it, on real strings of fire, not on a slow box or two.
Blast testing may assist in eliminating possibilities, yet it may not be accurate in the cycling of a specific pistol. Even the most carefully selected load must still pass through the lowly trial of springs, feed ramps, extractor tension, and shooter induced stress errors.
The most appealing aspect of most handgun myths is that they seem simple, one caliber, one bullet, one ideal shot. Physics and biology of handgun wounds are not up to that sort of certainty.
The least cinematic basement is also the safest: favor precision, sufficient penetration, dependable operation and capacity to shoot several controlled shots at vital targets until the enemy ceases.
