Sean Keefe
Jack of All Trades, Master of One or Two Jan 24

In Black Hawk Down, some American soldiers were having a tough time
putting down Somali Militia with their M16 and M4. Does the 5.56
actually have stopping power?

Stopping power is a myth.

This isn't me saying that, but the late Colonel Martin Fackler, the Army
field surgeon who went from patching up soldiers and Marines in Vietnam
to founding the Wound Ballistics Laboratory for the Letterman Army
Institute of Research.

Let's not hold the period when he wore a beard with no mustache against him.

“Stopping power” is an old concept, but it really exploded in use during
the 1970s, when police found themselves having to combat a rapidly
increasing rate of violent crime with turn of the century weapons. The
six shot revolver in .38 Special like the Smith and Wesson Model 10 and
the Colt Official Police was the standard of the day, as they had been
for around 70 years at that point.

A six inch Official Police (bottom) is perhaps best known as the sidearm
of the iconic police officer Barney Fife.

More violent crime meant that more police were put in positions of
having to shoot people, and they were finding that people didn't just
fall over and die when they got shot like they did in movies. They
figured, and not unreasonably, that maybe a more powerful or bigger
bullet would help. You know, something that had the power to stop someone.

Enter the charlatans…

What you may not know is there is a whole cottege industry of selling
things to law enforcement. In the 70s, this was done by guys going
around to different departments and performing demonstrations. The most
famous of these was a guy named Richard Davis, who invented the first
Kevlar body armor. He would travel the nation and shoot himself wearing
one of his vests in front of police brass, and they would be so
impressed they would buy some, even if they lived in towns with next to
no violent crime.

This was better than delivering pizza, literally the job he had before
doing this.

Well, other guys would do the same thing, except with various guns and
ammunition. They would fill up milk jugs with water and shoot them with
a standard .38 round, and it would make a hole. Then they would shoot
another with .357 hollow points, and the jug would explode. Stopping
power! It could save your life!

People still do this

Now, I was perhaps a little harsh calling all of these people
charlatans. Most of them believed what they were selling, but there was
nothing scientific about any of it. Sure, it looked impressive when milk
jugs exploded, but people aren't made of plastic. They aren't going to
explode like that.

Anyway, some of this stuff started teaching the Army, especially the Old
Guard who hated the M16 and wanted to bring back the M14. It shot a
bigger bullet. And bigger is better. Sure, that rifle and ammo weighed a
lot more, but they carried a Garand in Korea and it was good enough for
them.

Here's where we get back to Fackler.

Doctor Colonel Marty Fackler was primarily tasked with testing the
effectiveness of the (then) new Soviet 5.45mm round, and in doing so, he
invented the science of wound ballistics. He shot pigs and compared the
resulting wounds to actual gunshot wounds, and developed clear gelatine
that could hold the shape of a bullet's path through (idealized) human
flesh. By the time he set up the Wound Ballistics Laboratory, he already
knew more about gunshot wounds than anyone.

What he found was the only way to reliably stop a living human was
through massive blood loss or damage to the central nervous system. That
is, taking out someone's heart, aorta (or other important artery), spine
or brain. The thing that did this was the what he called the permanent
wound cavity--ya know, the bullet hole. What made milk jugs explode and
other impressive displays was what he called the temporary wound cavity.
This when the energy of the projectile entering squishy human meat
caused it to, well, squish. However, once that energy dissipated, all
that meat went right back into place. Not a pleasant experience, but
it's probably not going to kill you. As I said, we aren't made of thin
plastic. Most of our innards stretch, except our bones, which are
usually too strong for this to effect.

In the 1980s, he stepped into the civilian “stopping power” debate with
articles and interviews where he presented actual scientific evidence
that all of this was nonsense. Unless you are carrying around the 30mm
gun from the A-10 Thunderbolt II, you aren't going to reliably “stop”
someone just from impact.

It's hard to get a duty holster for one of these.

Even though the world's greatest authority on gunshot wounds had spoken,
this was by no means the end of the debate. Stopping power is such an
intuitive (and profitable) idea that people just don't want to let it
go, and it made a huge comeback on the 90s with things like the Marshall
and Sanow's study of morgue statistics and Strasbourg Report, in which
goats were shot with various rounds and their time to incapacitation was
recorded. The last was a hoax, but it was heavily reported in the gun
press at the time and used to refute Fackler.

No goats were harmed in the making of this bogus report

So, what's the deal with soldiers saying they had trouble putting down
enemy fighters in various combat situations with M-16 variants? I mean,
soldiers are like anyone else. They've spent their lives watching movies
where people fall over instantly after being shot, and that's what the
expect to happen. If it doesn't, then the problem must be their weapon.
But the truth is that bullets are really small, smaller than a pixel in
a modern Call of Duty game, they can do unexpected things in the human
body, and people can do unexpected things after being shot. A bullet can
hit the center of the chest, get deflected by bone and tissue just
enough to miss the heart by an inch (which is several times the diameter
of an M16 round), and the guy who was shot might not even notice. Or he
might fall down and start crying. Or, the shot may have in fact blown a
hole straight through the heart, but it made the guy really mad and he's
going to empty his magazine and reload before he loses enough blood to
shut down.

All of that said, there is something to the idea that an M-4 in
particular suffers from issues putting down targets in Iraq and
Afghanistan. However, this had nothing to do with “stopping power”. It
was about range. Engagements in both of those countries could happen at
hundreds of meters, and bullets coming out of the short barrel of the
M-4 might not have the energy to reach that far and do enough damage,
but that's a different thing and not really something that happened in
the urban warfare of Mogadishu.

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295 comments from

Sean Keefe
I would like to add that while I have never delivered pizza, I imagine
that doing it would make me want to shoot myself repeatedly, too.

Byron Olson
· Jan 25
Supposedly the gentleman in question developed the armor, in his garage,
after being repeatedly robbed at gunpoint while delivering pizzas.
Something I read a long time ago and remember the image.

Sean Keefe
· Jan 25
Yep. Davis was a crazy genius, who got more crazy and less genius as he
got older.

Jayson Lee
· Jan 25
Seems to be a common progression for crazy geniuses. Just look at Tesla
and now Musk.

Mark Barta
· Jan 26
And Howard Hughes

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Profile photo for Peter Jones
Peter Jones
· Feb 1
Musk remains as much of a crazy genius as ever. His latest investment
project ChatGPT is expected to undermine and replace Google’s entire
platform in the next few years. He also plans to make Twitter into a
full streaming service to compete with YouTube.

Tim O'Pry
· Feb 1
Worked on me - I was a cop in the late 70s/80s and bought one of his
vests as our department did not issue them at the time. Very hot during
Atlanta summers, but gave my wife peace of mind.

Sean Keefe
· Feb 1
Seeing his demonstrations makes me want one, and I'm not even a cop.

Gregory Beattie
· Jan 25
This seems to debunk another Hollywood myth. From what I've seen in
movies, people holding other people at gunpoint generally point their
gun at the victim's head at point blank range. It always looked
unrealistic to me,
as at that range the victim can easily grab and deflect the gun before
the gunman could react and pull the trigger. I now realise it is shown
that way so the camera can frame a close-up of both actors and the gun.

I wouldn't go on to invent bullet-proof vests if my real-life experience
of being held up was of guns held to my head!(more)

Frank Aaron
· Jan 31
But does Art imitate Life? Or does Life imitate Art?

Gregory Beattie
· Jan 31
I don't know. I've never been held at gunpoint enough times myself to
have a representative sample size know where muggers normally point
their guns.