Can bullets as small as 5.56mm really be effective in bringing down a person? It seems like a bullet that tiny couldn’t possibly do any significant damage unless it hit someone in the head.
Well, the DC snipers were using a 5.56 semiautomatic rifle, and I believe most of their victims were killed.
The 5.56, or .223, must be a very effective round for the US military and other militaries around the world to use it.
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Can bullets as small as 5.56mm really be effective in bringing down a person? It seems like a bullet that tiny couldn’t possibly do any significant damage unless it hit someone in the head.<<<
It seems to work for the M-16, AR-15 and so on. Two possibilities here. The bullet passes right through you. May not take you down immediately, but likely to take the fight out of you. At least within a few minutes. At close range there is a better chance of putting 2 rounds in someone from a 3 shot burst of the .233 M-16 than say the .308 M-14. The M-14 was developed for single and full auto fire but was pretty much uncontrollable on full auto.
Also, long, lightweight bullets like the .223 are more susceptible to tumble once it hits the ‘target’. Causing more damage.
It’s a trade off. A solider can carry more light weight .223 rounds than the .308.
The .308 is still used as a sniper/long range round. And very good at it. For a firefight, I would take the .223 M-16, AR-15. The .223 caliber is a varmint round. Designed to pick off small targets at long distance. So it’s hardly a slouch when it comes to accuracy. The .308 is also very accurate, and less susceptible to cross winds.
With helicopters, mortars and incredibly accurate artillery and air power, opposing forces don’t have the need to pick away at each other from 500-1000 yards.
In short, IMHO, the ability to put a high volume of fire down quickly and accurately makes me think that the smaller caliber weapon is more effective.
Oh, and the .223 is not exactly a pop gun. I have shot right through 3/16" steel sihouette targets at 100 yards.
Melted through is probably closer to what happened.
Susanann: nice article. Confirms my love affair with the tried and true .45.
A wounded soldier takes more people out of combat than a dead one.
Sorry, don’t know were I heard it, but I suspect it’s true.
This is true; but the point is that a dead soldier can be picked up later, but a living wounded soldier takes two corpsmen or medics to remove him from the battlefield. This means that three potential enemies are not fighting you.
I hope you linked to the url for its entirety.
I only exerted a very very small portion of that article/study by the FBI Academy.
The moderators of this website will not let me post more than a small fraction of any outside website.
Go to the link for the entire article.
http://www.firearmstactical.com/hwfe.htm
To me, I think the article/study emphasizes placement more than anything else.
A few points on gunshot wounds from someone in law enforcement. Trust me, I’ve seen a number of them.
There are basically three factors that come into play when a person is shot: actual damage done by impact of the bullet, hydrostatic shock, and psychological effects.
The actual damage done by the bullet is VERY unpredictable. .22 calibre bullets and other such small rounds very often tend to hit and tumble, causing massive internal damage. Larger calibre bullets, like .40 calibre and such, generally do not tumble as much, and the resulting injury depends on shot placement, and the positions and movement of the target and shooter. However, very large calibre bullets may cause death by basically making hamburger of vital organs.
Hydrostatic shock, which is basically shock waves sent through the fluids of the body, can also be fatal, but not immediately. This type of death is often a result of being shot with a high powered rifle, and therefore they can be even more deadly than a handgun, since they cause the double injury of the orignal wound and the hydrostatic shock.
Psychological effects also play a large part in gunshot wounds. The tendancy to fall down when shot rarely has anything to do with bullet impact, and is believed to be a learned phenomenon, probably from t.v. Even a blast from a shot gun will rarely knock a man off his feet, unless it hits the pelvic girdle or a knee. the image of a man being shot and blown backwards is a product of “Dirty Harry” and other such shows. Adreneline and drugs often do allow people with fatal wounds to continue to fight. We recently had a subject that pointed a gun at one of our officers. He was shot directly in the heart, ripping it to pieces, and continued to run for about 300 yards. Other people, including officers, with non-fatal wounds have died, probably because they associate being shot with being killed.
Hope this contributes in some way.
It is my understanding that “hydrostatic shock” is now considered a myth.
Nevermind the discussion, Kudos to Susanann!
You really did your homework there
The bullet is small, weight from about 55-62 grains (1/8-1/7 of an ounce) but has a muzzle velocity of around 2,900 feet per second or nearly two thousand miles per hour. Not a lot of jet fighters can go that fast. That puts a lot of kinetic energy into a little bit of metal. Debates aside all that energy has to go somewhere then the bullet hits a target.
Military bullets are not designed to expand or fragment but in the case of the 5.56mm it may as well. The shape of most rifle bullets is aerodynamically unstable. The only reason it doesn’t fly backwards is because of the gyroscopic force of the spin keep the pointy end forward. If an object disrupts the bullet’s flight those forces make it go in unpredictable directions. The bullet tends to tumble when it hits a target then usually breaks in halt at the cannelure, an indented band around the middle that secures the bullet into the crimped casing. The copper jackets usually separate from the lead cores (and a small steel penetrator core in the case of the most current NATO ammunition) and fragment further causing massive damage in multiple difections.
Forgot to add the rate of spin which is significant. Current US rifles, M16s and M4 carbines have a spin rate of 1:7" or one complete rotation every seven inches. That’s an unusually fast spin by any standards and many consider it too high for optimum stability with military bullets. Commercial barrels such as Colt and Bushmaster civilain models use a rate of 1:9" and even that high rate is only needed for unusually heavy and long target bullets. The original M-16 had a spin rate about half the current rifles, 1:12" or 1:14" IIRC. Anyway, the rifling twist means the bullet leaves the muzzle over mach 2.6 spinning at nearly 300,000 rpm.
When it comes to “stopping power”, handgun and rifle rounds are in completely different categories. Handgun rounds are big and slow, rifle rounds are several times faster.
So a .308 rifle round is FAR more powerful than a .45 handgun round, despite the smaller bore size.
With small caliber rifle rounds, they’re often designed to tumble or fragment to increase their effectiveness. The .223 rounds shape makes it naturally tumble when it hits a medium as dense as human flesh, and it often fragments into several dozen pieces upon contact with the body, depending on the velocity and manufacture. Swedish .223, for example, is known for it’s explosive fragmentation, which is ironic, given that I believe they put out several proposals in international treaties to ban various types of ‘inhumane’ rounds recently.
The Russian 5.45x39 caliber, similar to the .223, has an asymetrical air cavity in the tip of the bullet. During it’s flight in the air, the cavity has no effect on the ballistics because the exterior casing of the bullet is rigid - but as soon as the round hits a viscous medium such as flesh, the rear end of the round comes slamming forward and to one side in the round, imparting a very fast and very severe yaw into it’s terminal ballistics. It was known as the “poison bullet” in the Soviet-Afghani conflict because of it’s tendency to inflict grievous wounds. Due to the design, someone can get shot from the front in the thigh, for example, and have the bullet exit out their chest because of the unpredictable path of the round.
Regarding hydrostatic shock, a few months ago I read a rather lengthy article by a respected ballistician - the name escapes me at the moment - who conducted various experiments and studied data to example the idea of hydrostatic shock. He very reasonably concluded that while the shock of a bullet entering the system did cause compression waves to run through the body, organs, muscles, and tissue weren’t damaged by being displaced for very short periods of time. He basically said that bullets kill the same way that swords do when used as a stabbing weapon: you either hit something critical like the spine or the heart, or you cause something to bleed to death. The temporary compression of tissue described by ‘hydrostatic shock’ doesn’t do any real damage to the body.
Oh, and a quick question regarding Smithsb’s post: Are you confusing the 7.62x39 with the 7.62x54R perhaps? Or is the 7.62x39 designated as a rimmed round, perhaps in standards I’m not aware of?