For the last 100+ years, a great deal of the effort expended in ammo technology has gone toward trying to make pistol bullets act more like rifle bullets. Every few years, a new cartridge or bullet design arrives on the scene, claiming to have gotten us just a little closer to the fabled “pistol with rifle performance.”
Before we try to evaluate these claims, it really helps to have a basic understanding of terminal ballistics. And that starts with understanding why rifles behave like rifles, and pistols behave like pistols.
Hey everybody, I’m Chris Baker from LuckyGunner.com and today I’m going to talk about why some bullets are more effective than others – specifically, why rifles completely out-perform pistols.
Really, this is going to serve as kind of an introduction to terminal ballistics. That’s the study of what bullets do once they hit the target. If the target is an animal or human, that’s terminal wound ballistics. I’m definitely not an expert on that topic, but I’ve learned a lot from people who are. You don’t have to get very deep into it before terminal ballistics can start to feel overly technical. I’m going to try to skip the more academic stuff and keep us grounded in the real world question rifles versus pistols.
Keep in mind that bullets and bodies behave in unpredictable ways and there are no guarantees about what will happen. Also, there is not actually any hard technical distinction between rifle and pistol cartridges. So bear with me here – I’m going to make broad generalizations to keep this simple, but there are plenty of exceptions and gray areas that would just take too long to cover.
We all know rifle rounds are more effective than pistol rounds. But what does “effective” actually mean? For today, we’re going to narrow our context to defending against a violent human attacker. In that case, an effective bullet would be one that makes that attacker stop trying to hurt people as quickly as possible.
