I should point out that “bigger” isn’t better. Because KE=1/2m*v^2, faster is better. Ergo a 5.56mm full metal jacket rifle bullet is smaller than a .45 ACP pistol round, but causes a lot more damage. the FMJ round is also more likely to go through body armor, then through the victim, through the wall, through a tree outside…
Is that actually true? A FMJ round as stated in the previous post doesn’t expand. It has more kinetic energy, but seems like a hollow-point 45 ACP self-defense round is going to cause way more damage at close range.
It’s actually a bit more complex.
The .45 will have less energy overall but will impart most of it onto its target.
The 5.56mm round will have a lot more energy but is also theoretically likely to just punch through, imparting less of its total energy into the target.
I say “theoretically” because IIRC, in actuality the 5.56mm round as fired from an M16 is more unstable and will thus tumble when it hits a target, doing a lot more damage.
Also something travelling that fast still creates a shock wave in front of it, even if it doesn’t break up or tumble. And a person is mostly made out of water, which doesn’t compress. So there’s that.
But I also recall in the book Black Hawk Down, the American soldiers were describing their rounds punching through targets exactly as you described.
One thing I also wanted to add is that unlike what you see in the movies, one does not cure a bullet wound by digging the bullet out. They always say stuff like “we got to get that bullet out!” like its existence in the body is causing harm (lead poisoning maybe?) AFAIK, the bullet itself is sterilized by the heat of firing and traveling through the atmosphere and generally the pieces themselves aren’t of any particular danger once they’ve come to a stop. In many cases doctors might leave the bullet in place if removing it is too dangerous. What causes the infection is dirt and debris carried in by the bullet or having or intestines or spleen or other organ ruptured and spreading bacteria.
But no, you can’t just have the patient bite on a stick, dig out the bullet with your bayonet, close the wound with some burning gunpowder and then have the patient get back up and be like “ahhh that’s better!”
Teddy Roosevelt was shot before delivering a speech, delivered the speech, and lived the remainder of his life with the bullet in his body. Also, the bullet shot a hole through his speech outline that he had in his breast pocket. It is
dangerous to remove a bullet, and this was over 100 years ago
Speaking of shot Presidents, Garfield might have lived if they had done nothing but stop the bleeding and made him comfortable.
Instead, they went in with dirty hands and removed the bullet.
Sounds like TR made the right choice
To add to what @msmith537 said, the 5.56 round is designed to both tumble and fragment on impact, here’s a video of an M855A1 round (‘NATO Green Tip’) being fired into ballistic gel, from about 1:25 you can see the aftereffect of the round on the gel and how the round almost immediately started fragmenting leaving pieces behind in the gel while the main body continues tumbling through the gel.
This is by no means unique to the 5.56, most modern small arms ammunition does this or something similar. So while the round is fully jacketed, and doesn’t flatten or expand easily in the human body and thus meets the letter of the law of the 1899 Hague Declaration, the effect is pretty much exactly what the Declaration was trying to constrain. From the conclusion of a Red Cross article titled The 1899 Hague Declaration concerning Expanding Bullets: A treaty effective for more than 100 years faces complex contemporary issues:
According to available evidence, the 1899 Hague Declaration on
Expanding Bullets has been consistently applied and respected from a legal
point of view. Nevertheless, efforts to uphold its object and purpose in the
light of new technologies are difficult because of the complexity of the many
issues at stake. It is now recognized that bullet construction is only one factor
in the causation of excessively large wounds. Defence and development of
this aspect of international humanitarian law and related legal discourse will
be convincing and coherent only if based on an understanding of the wounding potential of the weapon system in question
There’s also a super slow-motion video of a 5.56 M885A1 impacting a ballistic gel block using high speed footage on from the same YouTube channel here.
And here’s a video of what happens when you shoot an anatomically correct ballistics dummy with a .50 caliber explosive round fired from an anti-materiel rifle. In this case the cause of death would be having your spine removed and organs rearranged and cooked inside your torso.
A ‘little’ bit of blood can look like a whole lot of blood. It’s fairly opaque, intensely colored, and we tend to have a visceral reaction to the sight of even a little of it. I injured myself in a way that caused me to lose maybe a quarter cup of blood, tops, but after all the flailing and thrashing and slipping and sliding were done the room looked like an abattoir.
Corollary: bloody fluid can look an awful lot like blood, too. I had to put a chest tube into a guy with a persistent pleural effusion post-open-heart surgery, and dark magenta fluid positively shot into the pleurevac, filling it disturbingly quickly. I clamped the tube and peeked over the drape at what I thought might be a dead man - had I put the tube into his vena cava or pulmonary artery somehow? - but his vitals were actually improved and he said his breathing was easier. I asked for a second pleurevac and just about filled that one, too. It was just an effusion with old blood in it, but I sure had a brick in my shorts. It looked for all the world like venous blood in the tubing; only the viscosity was off.
Mushrooming = “bigger bullet”. I had simplified it. Even at that, an expanding 45 ACP is still preferable to an expanding 9mm. Basically a bigger hole beats a smaller hole, whether you get there by a larger round, or by having your bullet expand.
And I’m not convinced that overpenetration is the first concern when law enforcement are choosing bullets. In fact if you look at the FBI bullet test protocol, it’s exactly the opposite. It’s all about penetration, not about expansion.
To be fair, it was developed in the 1980s after a notorious Miami shootout where some agents got killed because their expanding bullets expanded, but didn’t penetrate deeply enough to actually incapacitate the bad guys, who shot back for a while before they bled out.
As far as tumbling goes, that’s all about velocity vs weight, and generally is only applicable to rifle rounds. So yeah, smaller & lighter is better down to a point. Temporary cavities are almost completely velocity related, but the thing is, the temporary cavities aren’t shown to do particular damage- it seems to just be tissue stretching, without actually doing injury, unless in some sort of inflexible organ like the liver, or if the velocity is high enough that the tissue actually tears, which is apparently fairly rare.