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Heh, crazy. In the Netherlands there's now a discussion flaring up again about what looks like an assassination by the Dutch army of a group of Moluccan hijacke

Heh, crazy. In the Netherlands there's now a discussion flaring up again about what looks like an assassination by the Dutch army of a group of Moluccan hijackers looking to bring independence for their people (part of Dutch colony Indonesia shifting towards independence). One salient fact that arose recently is the use of hollow point bullets. Why is this controversial? Because for incapacitation, not assassination, regular bullets would apparently have been more effective. (and of course, an order for such an assassination would've been extremely controversial, in fact illegal) Pretty crazy to think such hollow points are standard issue in some places.

hga 12y ago
"Because for incapacitation, not assassination, regular bullets would apparently have been more effective." Absolutely and totally false. At the most fundamental level, you want the bullets to dump their energy in the target body. "Regular", as in Full Metal Jacket (FMJ) bullets are smooth and slippery, and more readily pass through a body (and are more likely to cause greater harm to anyone behind). Hollow point bullets, if you're lucky, expand (which uses up some energy), and that larger bullet does more damage in its passage (also using up more of its energy). Here's the key question you're implicitly asking: do you want to stop or kill the target? Per the above, unless you get a lucky hit on the central nervous system (CNS), people who get shot stop because they don't want to get shot again (perhaps 1/2 of the criminals shot in the US), the rest when they've lost enough blood, which bigger wound channels, destroying more tissue, do a better job of. If you just want to kill someone, pump a lot of holes in them all the way through, for which FMJ is best. It'll be much harder for anyone to patch them up before they die of blood loss. I put it as a simple law: lethality scales with number of hits, stopping power with the diameter of the bullet. Caveat: if you don't luck out with a CNS hit or convincing the target he doesn't want to get shot again, there's a rather thin line between causing him to lose enough blood to stop fighting, and losing enough to die. But he still has a better chance to survive the former, and you and the other good guys have a better chance of surviving because you took him out of the fight faster.
- bequanna 12y ago
  >Caveat: if you don't luck out with a CNS hit or convincing the target he doesn't want to get shot again, there's a rather thin line between causing him to lose enough blood to stop fighting, and losing enough to die. But he still has a better chance to survive the former, and you and the other good guys have a better chance of surviving because you took him out of the fight faster. To add to that, I've often heard that one of the reasons the M16 (AR15) uses 5.56mm as opposed to a larger round size is to encourage incapacitating/wounding shots as opposed to kill shots. The idea being that a wounded soldier is both out of combat and utilizes additional enemy resources for care vs. a KIA soldier who is simply out of combat.
  - hga 12y ago
    It's not clear what all the motivations were in adopting 5.56 mm and the AR-15/M16, besides their being totally political. The unit of the Army responsible for this, which had done a good job up through WWII, was utterly corrupt by the '50s and sabotaged the copies of other designs, allowing the M14 to win, which was an inferior battle rifle, but not all that bad. (Hmmm, and if they did the M60 GPMG, they managed to field the absolutely worse modern GPMG in history; of course, by then we'd long sacrificed our normal means of developing machine guns on the altar of gun control.) But it was rather heavy for Vietnam, and assault rifles were of course getting a lot of attention after the Nazis invented them and the USSR adopted one, which was also more reliable (the M1 and M14 designs leave way too much of the action out in the open). And the "space age" AR-10/AR-15 got a lot attention (the Armalight subsidiary of Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corporation was set up explicitly to use aircraft type materials in weapons, e.g. aluminum and plastic, which are just fine if done right, which was the case with these two guns). The Air Force bought a bunch to defend their planes (rather lighter duty than infantry in the jungle), and McNamara, justifiably in terms of the Army's corruption, but displaying his usual total stupidity, e.g. in actually testing the weapon and cartridge, forced it on the Army. Getting back to your point, as best I know, it was not thought the AR-15/M16 was bad at killing, in fact, one early very informal field trial ascribed miraculous wounding power to it. Which didn't turn out to be the case, but this was most certainly a minor consideration in its adoption, somewhere down there with it being reliable. If you're familiar with McNamara's other decisions when he was the Secretary of the DoD, well, you can imagine he and his wizz kids might have thought such a thing, but their thoughts would likely be completely independent of any check on their reality. Heck, it wasn't until the 1980s that Martin Fackler figured out how 5.56 mm rounds actually behave, not that the Army gives a damn about that (the Marines are not surprisingly another story).
tzs 12y ago
Incapacitation is hard. The common belief that when you get shot you quickly go down and either pass out or are in too much pain or shock from the injury to do anything is pretty much a myth from movies. There's some great information on this in the book "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers" by Mary Roach [1]. Even getting shot through the heart often leaves the person several seconds where they are conscious and able to act, giving them enough time to shoot back or shoot hostages. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Stiff-Curious-Lives-Human-Cadavers/dp/0393324826 http://www.amazon.com/Stiff-Curious-Lives-Human-Cadavers/dp/...

hga 12y ago

"Because for incapacitation, not assassination, regular bullets would apparently have been more effective." Absolutely and totally false. At the most fundamental level, you want the bullets to dump their energy in the target body. "Regular", as in Full Metal Jacket (FMJ) bullets are smooth and slippery, and more readily pass through a body (and are more likely to cause greater harm to anyone behind). Hollow point bullets, if you're lucky, expand (which uses up some energy), and that larger bullet does more damage in its passage (also using up more of its energy). Here's the key question you're implicitly asking: do you want to stop or kill the target? Per the above, unless you get a lucky hit on the central nervous system (CNS), people who get shot stop because they don't want to get shot again (perhaps 1/2 of the criminals shot in the US), the rest when they've lost enough blood, which bigger wound channels, destroying more tissue, do a better job of. If you just want to kill someone, pump a lot of holes in them all the way through, for which FMJ is best. It'll be much harder for anyone to patch them up before they die of blood loss. I put it as a simple law: lethality scales with number of hits, stopping power with the diameter of the bullet. Caveat: if you don't luck out with a CNS hit or convincing the target he doesn't want to get shot again, there's a rather thin line between causing him to lose enough blood to stop fighting, and losing enough to die. But he still has a better chance to survive the former, and you and the other good guys have a better chance of surviving because you took him out of the fight faster.

bequanna 12y ago
>Caveat: if you don't luck out with a CNS hit or convincing the target he doesn't want to get shot again, there's a rather thin line between causing him to lose enough blood to stop fighting, and losing enough to die. But he still has a better chance to survive the former, and you and the other good guys have a better chance of surviving because you took him out of the fight faster. To add to that, I've often heard that one of the reasons the M16 (AR15) uses 5.56mm as opposed to a larger round size is to encourage incapacitating/wounding shots as opposed to kill shots. The idea being that a wounded soldier is both out of combat and utilizes additional enemy resources for care vs. a KIA soldier who is simply out of combat.
- hga 12y ago
  It's not clear what all the motivations were in adopting 5.56 mm and the AR-15/M16, besides their being totally political. The unit of the Army responsible for this, which had done a good job up through WWII, was utterly corrupt by the '50s and sabotaged the copies of other designs, allowing the M14 to win, which was an inferior battle rifle, but not all that bad. (Hmmm, and if they did the M60 GPMG, they managed to field the absolutely worse modern GPMG in history; of course, by then we'd long sacrificed our normal means of developing machine guns on the altar of gun control.) But it was rather heavy for Vietnam, and assault rifles were of course getting a lot of attention after the Nazis invented them and the USSR adopted one, which was also more reliable (the M1 and M14 designs leave way too much of the action out in the open). And the "space age" AR-10/AR-15 got a lot attention (the Armalight subsidiary of Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corporation was set up explicitly to use aircraft type materials in weapons, e.g. aluminum and plastic, which are just fine if done right, which was the case with these two guns). The Air Force bought a bunch to defend their planes (rather lighter duty than infantry in the jungle), and McNamara, justifiably in terms of the Army's corruption, but displaying his usual total stupidity, e.g. in actually testing the weapon and cartridge, forced it on the Army. Getting back to your point, as best I know, it was not thought the AR-15/M16 was bad at killing, in fact, one early very informal field trial ascribed miraculous wounding power to it. Which didn't turn out to be the case, but this was most certainly a minor consideration in its adoption, somewhere down there with it being reliable. If you're familiar with McNamara's other decisions when he was the Secretary of the DoD, well, you can imagine he and his wizz kids might have thought such a thing, but their thoughts would likely be completely independent of any check on their reality. Heck, it wasn't until the 1980s that Martin Fackler figured out how 5.56 mm rounds actually behave, not that the Army gives a damn about that (the Marines are not surprisingly another story).

tzs 12y ago

Incapacitation is hard. The common belief that when you get shot you quickly go down and either pass out or are in too much pain or shock from the injury to do anything is pretty much a myth from movies. There's some great information on this in the book "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers" by Mary Roach [1]. Even getting shot through the heart often leaves the person several seconds where they are conscious and able to act, giving them enough time to shoot back or shoot hostages. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Stiff-Curious-Lives-Human-Cadavers/dp/0393324826 http://www.amazon.com/Stiff-Curious-Lives-Human-Cadavers/dp/...