I am seeing a lot of discussion and comments about handgun calibers (I don’t think you can talk about guns on the internet without debating caliber) at Marko’s and SayUncle.

As I previously quoted John Holschen:

No common defensive handgun cartridge will quickly and reliably stop a human being who is committed to causing serious bodily harm, unless the bullet from that cartridge is applied to the correct anatomy.

Handgun bullets move too slowly to do anything other than create wound channels the diameter of the (expanded) projectile. Adding another hundred feet per second of velocity or another 3mm of diameter doesn’t really make enough difference to matter. Until you get your handgun rounds moving at more than 2500-3000 fps they aren’t going to do anything different than destroy the tissue that they touch.

Consider that bullet travels through many different types of medium in a human body: bones, fluids, air space, elastic and inelastic tissues. The order in which the bullet encounters these different mediums is going to have a lot of influence on what the bullet does. While we can create some impressive looking numbers by doing some math with the velocity, diameter, and mass of the projectile we have completely ignored the variables of what it is we are shooting at. People are not made of uniform ballistic gelatin, and are highly resistant to damage in the short term.