And not to sure why this post got doubled... something going on here or is it on my end?

Humans are not concrete blocks.

Motivate people are hard to stop. You can find lots of stories about how great caliber X is, and if you talk to people who have actually used caliber X to shoot people trying to kill them you'll find that at least some were not so impressed.

Nothing commonly used in combat is reliable at stopping people until you get to .50 HMG rounds and cannon shells.

For example, I had a shotgun instructor who saw an escaped prisoner get shot with a 12 gauge slug in the lower back and had to chase him for a mile after it traversed his leg and lodged behind his knee. And the guy stopped running only because his leg cramped up. (The guy fully recovered). And 12 gauge slugs are lot bigger and faster then the .458 SOCOM and are considered damn good at stopping people compared to pistols or SMGs.

The suggestion I heard from one instructor who shot a hell of lot of people was to plan to shoot anyone as many times as it took. "Shoot them to the ground", and "Anyone worth shooting is worth shooting twice." He's shot people with (at least) 9mm, .45, 5.56, shotguns, 7.62 and .50 BMG. The only "one-shot-stop" he saw was from an NVA company commander he shot in the chest with a .50 cal machine gun. Everyone else he shot multiple times before they were convinced to desist whatever behavior made him shoot them.

Yeah, I can't remember where I heard it, possibly from a police training instructor, but "If you get someone opening fire on you, shoot to kill. Do not try any fancy tricks like shooting to disable. Put him on the ground, empty your clip into him if you have to. If he shoots at you once he will try to do so again. End it right then and there, do not give him a second chance. He forfeited his right to life the moment he opened fire."


-karma

Yeah, adrenaline is an amazing hormone along with huge amounts of endorphins. The bodies natural angel dust, but anyways. Now there is no arguing when there is someone really motivated to keep going your going to have to put some more rounds into them, or sometimes half a mag if what some of the older marines said they had to do when fighting against very stubborn japanese soldiers. But heavy grain rounds have something that makes them attractive for use in military arms, even if they are determined to kill you having a large heavy round tumbling through the chest or stomach cavity is going to slow them down noticeably. I have two friends serving in Iraq, well there last post was in Iraq and they insist on carrying old M1911 Service pistols instead of the M9 Service Pistol, due to the well earned reputation for being a man stopper. My grand father army friends all swore by his trusty Model 1911 sidearm and the .45ACP. I cant help but think that even if you have to put multiple rounds into the bad guy, the extra weight that larger rounds carry are going to have a noticeable and appreciated effect on the SOB your shooting. Should mean that you don't need to put a particularly long burst into the guy? The body does not function all that well when chunks of flesh are being cored out, even under the influence of painkillers natural or otherwise.

You're talking about a difference of .356" to .452" It's really not that big a difference, between a 9mm and a .45. Shoot -- and carry -- whichever one you can afford to train with, so that you'll hit. It's the one that'll win the fight for you.

Battlefield applications aside, they've made a polymer-tipped hollowpoint version of this round which is sickeningly effective against soft targets and might well have better ballistics than the standard copper jacketed one. That said, I still can't find penetration tables for this round. If its penetration was impressive at all they'd be right on the mfg. website.

Hollowpoints don't tend to penetrate well at all. You can do stuff with hardened penetrators in the core, but it isn't going to work as well to punch holes in stuff as a dedicated AP round. There are always tradeoffs. I'm told that the 5.56mm M995 is hell on armor, but has some accuracy issues.

The old edition of emergency war surgery had a wound profile from a SP .30 cal hunting round and noted that these kinds of wounds are usually seen by pathologists instead of surgeons because the trauma is so enormous.

Hell, I was talking about penetration for the standard .458 round. Provided, I haven't looked all that hard, but, like I said, if the results were impressive in the least, they'd be hard to miss.

That fact combined with the fact that the same guys who made the .458 later also made the Spectre .338 to serve the exact same stated purpose as the .458 leads me to believe that the round is pretty crap.

Sometimes I think they need to somehow teach this in school, or something. It would eliminate a lot of the controversy/politics that occur when Joe Public can't understand why Officer Cropkey dumped his magazine into Susie Suspect.

What I'd actually like to see is a tactical FPS where they try to do wounding super realistically. The software would plot the path of the rounds through bodies in reference to bones, and it would calculate if any major structural bones were destroyed or not which in the first place would disable certain functions like being able to stand up or sprint. It would also calculate systemic shock and trauma, meaning that each time you were hit there'd be a random chance of incapacitation which was higher or lower depending on the round, but afterwards if the character wasn't incapacitated they'd still be in the fight for up to, say, 10 minutes.

Unfortunately, it would have to be in the style of one of the old Rainbow Six games where you could jump to different platoon members and control him/her, because if you were going to be totally realistic and you were only controlling one character it would be too easy to get a career-ending, if not fatal, injury.

But think of the potential. You could have this huge roster of operatives, and they could get purple hearts and stuff like that, even if a given operative was then out of the game due to a crippled leg or something.