Originally Posted by glockophile
This thread is ridiculous. So many things can and do go wrong in any type of gun fight. There are so many enormous risks. All gun fights are about choosing the best among several very bad options. There are NO good outcomes in a gunfight. Even the best possible case, where the display of a gun causes the situation to de-escalate, is still a bad outcome, because lethal force entered the scenario, even if it wasn't used. All handgun rounds are under-powered and inadequate and none of them penetrate adequately. You want a round that will dump as much eneergy as possible, cause as much tissue damage as possible, and penetrate as deeply as possible, and that means either a rifle round or a shotgun blast. Any pistol round is going to come up short compared to a rifle or a shotgun. A bullet may have to go through multiple layers of clothing, skin and bone, plus inches of fat and muscle, to get through to anything where it might cause incapacitation. Or it might have to go through a car door, a piece of furniture, etc, plus bone, fat and muscle to hopefully get to a major nerve center, heart or blood vessel. NO handgun round (other than hunting rounds) can do that reliably.
Yes, sure, perhaps a bullet could go through a target and cause harm on the other side... but if some innocent person is so close to someone who is causing deadly harm, the situation is horrible, someone is almost certain to be getting hurt anyway. That should be a very rare situation, unless you're a SWAT sniper, in which case you might use special frangible ammo, etc for something like that. If you're wasting time planning for these extremely rare and dangerous situations, then you must train continuously and be absolutely sharp for all the other much more likely situations. Even these "likely" situations are things that few of us will ever encounter in our lives, thank God.
Use the most powerful round you can handle, always, unless you really are on a SWAT team and you anticipate dealing with hostages, shootouts in drug labs, shootouts on an airplane, etc. All pistols are inadequate weapons. It's what you have because you can't carry a rifle or a shotgun, both of which always have more penetration that pistols.
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