By Don Kates

Washington State – -(Ammoland.com)- Some years ago I saw a movie (I forget the title?) in which “Dutch” Schultz is in a restaurant men's room and knows that killers lurk outside.

He prepares himself, opens the door and steps outside to shoot it out. I doubt that Dutch actually did this but the one accurate thing is that had he done anything so stupid it would have gotten him killed.

TACTICS: Defending A Room

Retreat as far from the door as leaves you a clear view of it. Let him come to you. Fall flat on the floor w/ your extended handgun aimed to face the door. Aim to the center of your opponents’ mass and shoot until he goes down.

By assuming this position you have both minimized the target you present and maybe avoided your attackers’ gaze momentarily.

You know that he must come through the door peer around it) so that is where you are aiming.

Why not shoot for his head? A more difficult target than the center of his chest and attackers are often moving their heads. A shot to the face inflicts a grievous wound but unless you penetrate the brain incapacitation is not immediate.

[what follows is something I wrote for a gun magazine of which I was one of the editors. They never printed it because it punctured too many of their illusions about the defensive value of guns:]

I.

Stopping power is the term often used to describe the capacity of a firearm to incapacitate an attacker when he is shot. For at least 50 years gun writers have been absorbed with the issue of which handgun has stopping power or superior stopping power. My conclusion from researching the subject and consulting physicians and other experts is that no ordinary firearm has dependable stopping power.

Before proceeding to address this, it is important also to clarify that I am talking about real physical stopping power not mere psychological stopping power. Physical stopping power means that being hit makes the assailant physically incapable of continuing his attack. Mere psychological stopping power is when the attacker says to himself, “oh God, I’ve been shot” and lies down to die or be taken to a hospital.

Psychological stops are probably more likely if the hit was with a .45 ACP than with a .22 short, but can happen with either or any caliber in between.

Massad Ayoob has autopsy photos of an offender who tried to outrun two Illinois state officers who were armed with 15-shot 9 mms. The photos show the offender having been hit 37 times between his head and his crotch. But he only stopped running when he bled out.

Numerous comparable incidents may be cited. Of course advocates of the .45 ACP will dismiss them all as just proving the 9 mms.’ ineffectiveness. Well, I am aware of an incident in which an officer survived being shot in the forehead with a .45 because the slug bounced off it.

Or, consider the following case from my career as a lawyer. The offender was a skinny man of ordinary height who was neither drunk nor on drugs. But he was very, very angrily engaged in a neighborhood dispute. When my client and other officers attempted to search him he drew a Llama .380 which he picked up again after one officer knocked it from his hand. Unbeknownst to anyone, when the Llama fell it struck a rock which actuated its Colt-type magazine release, ejecting the slide and rendering the weapon inoperative because of its magazine safety. My client shot him eight times in the torso with a .45 ACP (1911A1). My client then took cover because the offender was still standing, pointing the Llama and vainly pulling its trigger. Eventually he lay down and died, having bled out.

“Well,” you say, “your client should have been using hollow points.” He was!

Massad cites the following incident: NYPD, having reason to believe that a certain store was going to be held up, planted a shotgun-armed officer in a concealed position in the store. When a robber entered the store and pointed a handgun at the proprietor, the officer appeared from hiding and ordered him to drop the gun. Instead he turned thereby pointing his gun at the officer from a sideways position. The officer fired and the 12 gauge slug entered the robber's body through the arm pit, transited his chest (missing the heart) and exited from his other armpit breaking his arm. The robber got back up and ran two blocks, stopping only when the pursuing officer tackled him from behind. Incidentally, the robber survived.

An account of conduct for which the Congressional Medal of Honor was awarded provides the ultimate refutation of the idea of physical stopping power. A WWII soldier stepped on a mine which blew his feet off. He nevertheless advanced on his stumps, killing Germans until he eventually bled out.

WWII also provides an ultimate proof of the concept of psychological stopping power. On autopsy, from one to three percent of deceased soldiers were determined not to have been wounded at all. They had apparently died just from the effects of psychological stress.

“Knock-down” power is a term also sometimes used to describe a firearm’s capacity to incapacitate an attacker. But, we know that no firearm has literal “knock down” power. Given Newton’s Law about “equal and opposite reaction”, if a firearm had power enough to knock someone down, discharging it would generate a recoil which would knock down the person firing it.

My conclusion that no handgun is powerful enough to physically stop an assailant comes from Col. Martin Fackler, M.D., a battle surgeon and world class expert who until his retirement headed the Armed Forces’ Wound Ballistic Laboratory. He cites an instance in which a victim shot at short range with a shotgun had his heart shredded yet managed to run 60 feet before collapsing.

Now technically there is a place on the body where a bullet strike should immediately physically stop an assailant. A bullet that penetrates through the eye and into the brain will shut everything down immediately. Note that that is ANY bullet. A .22 will do it just as reliably as a .45. The problem is that no one is trained for that kind of shooting because it just isn’t practical. The brain is a very small and difficult target and people engaged in violent confrontations are liable to be moving their heads around.

If you strike the head area and do not penetrate the brain, a terrible wound is likely, but not an immediately incapacitating wound.

So defensive gun training emphasizes shooting for “the center of mass.” i.e. the torso. Well, you may ask, a shot in the torso can strike the heart and won’t that immediately incapacitate the attacker?

No, it will not! A person hit in the heart has as much as 30 seconds to live which is enough time to get off multiple aimed shots – and there are many incidents in which this has been done.

And, of course, many times shots to the torso miss the heart even though penetrating the lungs or other vital areas. That means that the shot inflicts a possibly mortal wound. Yet that may do you no good if he retains the capacity to inflict a mortal wound on you.

Col. Fackler cites the experience of hunters that often animals shot through the heart nevertheless remain able to run for hundreds of feet. Attesting to his own experience he writes:

“I live on a 90 acre farm. I lease 75 acres to a farmer who has about 30 breeding beef cows and one bull. Two years ago, coyotes killed two of his newborn calves. So I put my 6mm PPC bench rest rifle on a sandbag just inside the glass door of my glassed-in back porch. Happened to spot a coyote walking across the pasture, I opened the door and she stopped long enough for me to get off a shot. She ran for about 30 yards and then collapsed. It was a 35 lb female, shot in the heart at 230 yds. “Some years ago I hit a deer just forward of its heart with a .30-06 165 gr. This is 4-5 times the energy of a potent handgun round. It severed all the blood vessels from heart to brain, and left about a 2” exit hole. The deer still ran about 30-40 yds before collapsing. “I was told some years ago that FBI had a training program of some manner, one focus of which was ‘just because you're shot doesn't mean you're dead.’ It was an effort to counteract by training the natural response to being hit, which is to collapse regardless of whether the wound is physically incapacitating or not.”

ADDENDUM

In late 2009 wrote I an essay supporting an heretical (to many gun owners) theme: “My conclusion from researching the subject and consulting physicians and other experts is that no ordinary firearm has dependable stopping power.”

[NOTE: This does not mean that handguns are useless for self-defense. Criminals are looking for the vulnerable and the helpless. In the great majority of cases when a victim pulls a gun, criminals flee. They have no interest in a gunfight. It puts them at two terrific disadvantages: 1) gunfire brings police attention; 2) if criminals are wounded they either forego medical attention or go to a hospital and then to jail.]

My negative conclusion about stopping power and many of my facts came from the research of retired Col. Martin Fackler, MD, an experienced combat surgeon who after Vietnam went on to found and head the Armed Forces Wound Ballistics Laboratory. He has now written me correcting some of my statements. Here is his letter:

First, your 12th paragraph (ANY bullet in the head will incapacitate, etc): If you write “most center-fire rifle bullets that enter the central area of cranium, at a range under 100 yards, will immediately incapacitate”; you come a lot closer to the truth. If you wish, I can possibly find the reference, in the medical literature, to collected head shots — as I recall it was from a source in Europe, in the past two decades I think –in which more than a few shots, from handgun bullets, that penetrated the cranium did not cause immediate incapacitation. Recounting instances of multiple-shot-outcomes misses the point: which is what structures were disrupted by the shots? Go to an anatomy text and find a view of the human body from the front — in which all the organs, bones, blood vessels, etc. are shown. Then note how much of the body's frontal area a bullet could hit and pass through without hitting any significant blood vessels (the heart is a modified blood vessel), the brain, or the spinal cord (or bone of the spine within an inch of the cord). Certainly it is more than 75%. All those shots through loops of bowel, lungs. The liver, kidneys, spleen, various muscles, etc. can't be counted on to cause the determined assailant to stop his aggression in the next few minutes. Even shots hitting big blood vessels, with the possible exception of putting a large hole (at least half the diameter of the vessel) through the aorta in the chest are unlikely to stop aggression in less than a minute. I would add to the FBI doctrine: “if he still has a gun when he hits the ground you might want to continue firing; and certainly if he points it at you while on the ground – fire! Better than Newton, simply ask how many deer get knocked down by rifle bullet hits? In my meager experience of shooting six of the small German Reh deer through the big blood vessels just north of the heart (German hunters sell the meat — and the heart is meat) with a .243 Winchester –all just ran off giving no indication of being hit –to be found dead within 100 yards. In no case was a deer's body displaced noticeably by the bullet. Suggest any doubters prove it to themselves by filling a large sack with 160 lb of dirt, hanging it from a tree limb, noting how easy it is to move with a shove from your hand, steadying it, and shooting it. They will observe the lack of significant movement. Pete Kasler shows photos of shots into a 170 lb free swinging bag shot with a 10mm handgun bullet at a distance of a few feet: the max rearward deflection was “about 3/4 inch.” (Kasler PA, Business Partners, Paladin Press, 1991, pp 12-13). The Am Rifleman demonstrated this lack of movement, as I recall, in 1906. They cut out two frontal outlines of a human body from plywood; spaced them about 8 inches apart, and put in some side walls; filled it with sand, and glued it to a small platform which had roller skates on its undersurface. Hits from a 30-06 moved it about two inches.

II.

Here are some stories that I collected from the former Chief of the CA Narcotic Bureau.

In one shootout, a .38 special round passed through the offender’s neck w/o harming the offender; he was also shot in the chest and through the mouth knocking 5-6 teeth out. When the chief arrived some minutes later the offender was standing up conversing with the cops.

One narcotics officer managed to shoot himself in shin w/ a .45. The bullet broke his shin but did not immediately disable him and caused no permanent damage.

In another incident an offender drew a gun and fired at an officeer in the front seat, hitting him in the back but not stopping him. Another officer managed to shoot the offender through the eye w/ a .45. This did not stop the offender who had to be subdued. He lived to go back to prison.

Two incidents w/ my friend: In 1970 two offenders who belatedly realized he was a cop shot him four times, twice w/ a .45 and twice w/ a .38. None of the shots stopped him and he noticed no difference between the .45 and .38 wounds.

In 1974 he and several officers shot it out w/ three offenders. None of the .45 wounds the officers inflicted stopped the offenders. One of the offenders did not even realize he had been hit until he saw blood – at which point he collapsed. (Psychological stopping power.)

About Don Kates

Don Kates is a retired American professor of constitutional and criminal law, and a criminologist and research fellow with The Independent Institute in Oakland, California. www.independent.org/aboutus/person_detail.asp?id=739