Re: Best 5.56/.223 Home Defense Ammo?
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: ForceResponse</div><div class="ubbcode-body">+1 for Doc Roberts. He's fantastic.
You can see the can of worms you opened up, eh, Norm?
Always come back to what YOU will be doing with the bullets. What is YOUR house made of? Not likely that you'll encounter auto glass with a home defense weapon. Not likely that you can articulate to a jury your need for shooting through barriers. SO focus on fields of fire, a good safety plan that you rehearse with your family, and THEN decide what the likely scenarios will require you to use. Sounds like you're already thinking in this way (e.g. my shotgun will not pattern well down my hallway, etc).
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I know, I'm in the habit of opening up cans of worms on this forum!
Like they say, there's no such thing as a stupid question -- just a lot of stupid people out there like me asking questions.
The one problem I have with Dr. Roberts, Fackler, and other ballistic gurus is that they don't show pictures of wounds on their forums and I'm not seeing statistics of different rounds performances. Evan Marshall did this to some extent with handgun rounds, but he is either glorified as a guru or villified as a con artist, depending on who you ask. It seems the more you learn on this subject, the less you know. Drawings and photos of ballistic gelatin tests are nice, but pictures and x-rays of actual wounds, along with medical/autopsy reports, are worth a thousand words.
Earlier, I posted some pretty gruesome flesh wound pics from the Phillipines of the "meat axe" effect of a M193 round compared to autopsy photos of a bad guy who took multiple "ice pick" hits from some TAP ammo and still had to be subdued to be cuffed before he later expired.
Hard to argue with the impressive effects of the M193, yet Drs. Roberts & Fackler seem to zero in on a single anecdotal failure of the M193 to make massive wounds. There had to be some legitimate reason why the Soviets dumped the 7.62x39 in favor of the 5.45x39. You can find books of wound ballistics for $$$, many printed decades ago, but since the field of ballistics is constantly evolving, even new info is obsolete by the time it gets published, at least as far as the effects of the latest available loads to hit the market. Most of these books are geared to police forensics rather than determining what the latest and greatest round is doing on the streets.
There must be an infinite number of variables as to why a single round would succeed or fail to stop a bad guy in his tracks. There's always going to be an anecdote about one round doing this, another doing that in some circumstance or another. I guess the best you can do is look at the overall success rate of a certain round in multiple shootings, analyze the body of evidence and choose accordingly.
