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Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
10/10/09
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10/09/09
Also as someone else mentioned, they could also be safer in a home defense type of situation because they will be stopped more quickly than their full metal jacket counterparts by things like walls.
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And that's why our military is begging the government to let them start using less "lethal" rounds because they aren't doing a very good job of killing the enemy.
See, the type of round you want to use depends on _who_ you're shooting at, and more specifically what they're wearing. If Joe has a flak jacket on, hollow points are just going to flatten against the armor plates and the force will spread out over a large area just that much more effectively. Shoot him with a round designed to take out armored personel, and it'll punch right through the armor plate and carve a big hole through your enemy.
Conversely, if you're shooting at people wearing nothing but regular clothing, a hollowpoint round, or even a snubnose round, will mushroom and transfer all the force of impact into the body. Shoot them with a bullet designed for use against armor, and it'll leave a neat little hole all the way through the body, but the target likely won't notice it immediately, which gives them plenty of time to do whatever they can to help you get dead before the blood loss affects them.
What our troops are finding is that they're armed to be effective against properly equipped soldiers, but when they shoot terrorists and insurgents, bullets just slow them down, but don't render them immediately harmless like they should.
10/10/09
10/10/09
The issue they're facing right now is enemy combatants that look forward to martyrdom, but that the rounds they're armed with don't put them flat on their back when they get shot. Therefore, they are lethally wounded, but still actively dangerous. How lethal that tiny pokey-hole will eventually be doesn't matter to a guy who is intent on suicide-bombing your squad anyways. All _you_ want is something that will put him down, and put him down hard. Hollowpoints on unarmored flesh will open up inside, carve the hell out of whatever happens to be in the way, and transfer the full ballistic force of that bullet to whatever happened to be in the way. In human terms, it'll turn their organs into sausage, and take them off their feet. Before they'd be able to get upright again, they will definitely be feeling the bullet wound. Conversely, an FMJ round with a narrow point (like US troops are generally equipped with) will punch a clean hole all the way through, leaving minimal internal trauma behind, and transferring very little of the ballistic force to whatever it just hit. In human terms, it's like being stabbed with a fencing foil instead of hacked up with a broadsword. Sure, it might kill you eventually, but you won't notice the wound right away, and at most the ballistic force will just make you run a little slower.
Essentially, what it comes down to is that a single soft-point or hollow point will lay out an average Taliban insurgent, while you've got to pump the same guy full of standard military-issue ammo to have the same effect. Now, I don't know about you, but if I was in a wartime situation, I'd prefer to be able to count anyone I shot _once_ as being effectively out of the fight for long enough that I can deal with all of his unwounded buddies. What they're dealing with right now, though, is not unlike going up against Snyder's fast-zombies. You can shoot them, but if it's not an instant-kill shot, they'll just keep coming at you.
10/10/09
That way you can have the best of both worlds!
10/10/09
10/11/09
That still leaves you facing the fact that when you do manage to score a single hit on an enemy combatant, there's a 50% chance that you hit him with the wrong type of bullet. No, you want ammo that's going to be 100% effective against 100% of your enemy. You're already going to miss enough shots because of cover, because you're trying not to make a target out of yourself, and because you might not have the best aim under ideal circumstances. At most, if I was in those circumstances, I'd want at most one or two clips of straight FMJ ammo, and a bunch of softpoints (hollowpoints might be disallowed by the Hague Convention). If I go up against armored troops, I know I've got some ammo that'll be more effective against them, but the bulk of it will be keyed to the bulk of who I'd be facing in any given firefight. And if I get down to those one or two FMJ clips, I'm probably going to be trying to conserve ammo as much as possible, so I might be more inclined to risk taking a shot if it means being able to line up a clean kill, knowing that once I run out of ammo, I'm a sitting duck anyways.
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The Teflon-coating gives the bullet the nasty ability to slide right thru body armor.
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The so-called "cop-killer" was a military-grade brass-core armor-piercing round coated with Teflon and marketed as "KTW." These have not been legal for civilians to purchase since the mid-1980's, as have tungsten/steel-alloy rounds that are non-frangible.
Google/Wikipedia is your friend.
10/09/09
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Oh and last I checked hollow points are'nt illegal, coated bullets the are designed to go through kevlar are though.
Actually, Hollow points are the best choice for Home Defense, because they are more likely to disintegrate in a wall if you miss the bad guy and not keep going and hit your neighbor.
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10/09/09
I mean lets be honest congress doesnt know what theyre talking about the majority of the time.
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