09-27-2011, 03:37 AM
Your question is basically: Do we have a scientific baseline for wound ballistics from the collective real-world results over the last century of warfare? The answer is...Nope. There are no units in the military that collect enemy bodies, and process them through a detailed forensic analysis on a regular basis, to include tracing the wound tracks, retrieving the projectiles, and making conclusions that will be of use to ballisticians. Something about battlefield priorities creates an environment where there are still tens of thousands of soldiers probably unaccounted for, who likely were buried in their trenches for expediency-just the reality of the nature of war.
I have friends that go and dig for war remains and materials from the Second World War, and the field is ripe for the reaper. The only semi-useful studies are fragmented, and mostly exist from shootings in the US, where there are actual forensic pathologies involved. I have yet to see someone gather the various independent studies and try to correlate them in a manner that will be of value to the armed citizen.
In the meantime, I will continue to train to put as many rounds into a threat as fast and as violently as possible, in as many worst-case scenarios as I can craft after reviewing the real-world experiences of those who have survived them, in addition to my own. While there are certain groups that frequently use small arms to effectively dispatch bad guys, and have been doing so for a few decades, we'll never see their ballistics results, and I don't think we need to because they would emphasize training over the tools anyway.
I have friends that go and dig for war remains and materials from the Second World War, and the field is ripe for the reaper. The only semi-useful studies are fragmented, and mostly exist from shootings in the US, where there are actual forensic pathologies involved. I have yet to see someone gather the various independent studies and try to correlate them in a manner that will be of value to the armed citizen.
In the meantime, I will continue to train to put as many rounds into a threat as fast and as violently as possible, in as many worst-case scenarios as I can craft after reviewing the real-world experiences of those who have survived them, in addition to my own. While there are certain groups that frequently use small arms to effectively dispatch bad guys, and have been doing so for a few decades, we'll never see their ballistics results, and I don't think we need to because they would emphasize training over the tools anyway.