There is controversy over the fact the Metropolitan Police are using ‘dum dum’ bullets (which is a term used by people who know nothing about firearms to describe any bullet designed to expand upon impact).
The reason a police force or anyone with a legitimate need to use a weapon in self-defence (i.e. far more people than just the police) would use a handgun firing expanding bullets is to (1) prevent the bullet exiting the target’s body and thereby use all the kinetic energy to inflict a wound rather that… (2) leaving the bullet with enough energy that it goes clean through the intended target and wastes energy making a hole in a wall behind them or, much worse, making a hole in an innocent bystander.
It is a scandal that the Metropolitan Police killed an innocent Brazilian man and then lied about the sequence of events that led up to that happening. It is not a scandal that they used expanding bullets to do it. Would the ignorant twits in the media and various clueless Islamic ‘spokesmen’ trying to make this into a story have preferred that the cops not only killed an innocent man but also killed or injured someone else in the train by using non-expanding military style full metal jacket ammunition? It would be a scandal if they were not using expanding bullets.
The whole point of shooting someone is to cause them serious harm so that they cannot harm you or anyone else. In what way is it somehow morally preferable to use a weapon which does not cause as much harm per round-in-the-target, thereby requiring you to just shoot more bullets into them to kill or incapacitate them?
The only dum(b) dum(b)s here are the various Muslim idiots quoted in the Guardian article and their friends in the media who think this should be an issue.
Well, quite.
And even for military use, can anyone explain the thinking behind their banishment?
Is this simply to pierce armour better, or do we really adhere to conventions that state that it’s OK to insert metal shards into someone’s body provided they aren’t designed to cause them harm?
An interesting point, however they shot him 7 times anyway. The policy seems to be to shoot until the bullets are used up alledgedly to stop them quickly before the bomb is set off. If this tactic was succesfully in stopping suicide bombers they could just add a pulse monitor or a dead mans switch so the bomb goes off anyway. It is far, far more likley that a “shoot to kill” policy would kill innocents than a bomber, in fact I’d be amazed if they ever shot one of them, plus if they did get a bomber a stray bullet could set off the bomb.
This is what an armed police force gets you.
The Police’s attitude to terroism is albsolutley disgusting, they seem to think that sloppy work (e.g. the mistakes made following Mr Menezes) can be excused and use of force and authoritarian laws can make up the difference. There is no way in the world they need to use the ammount of force they used that day, nor either do they require 90 or even 28days to hold a person without charge.
And even for military use, can anyone explain the thinking behind their banishment?
I suspect the diplomats doing the negotiating neglected to consult their military advisors.
The whole purpose of making this an issue is to further plant seeds of doubt about the use of firearms GENERALLY in the minds of the British public, who are already used to negative connotations related to firearms even as used by the police, let alone for private self-defence.
The fact that this incident happened as a part of Britain’s response to terrorism (the War On Terrror) further enhances the orgasms of the media-Left when they find such morsels. It doesn’t seem to bother them that they have no clue what they’re talking about.
Were not dumdum bullets banned after WW1 because they no longer worked properly in fully or semi automatic weapons, or something similar to that? Also I don’t recall dumdums or hollow point bullets ever being banned outside of warfare.
For what an UNARMED police force gets you, consult the crime statistics in Britain for the last decade or so.
Or look at the two or three decades before that to see a quite different picture.
EG
Oh, come on, Julian! You surely don’t think for one moment that the dum-dums today are the same ones that were banned almost a hundred years ago!!
Anyway, Israeli security, which has a depressing amount of experience with suicide psychos, has advised the British government that “shoot to stop” is not necessarily effective. Someone shot in the chest can still detonate his bomb. So now, it’s “shoot to kill”, and in a crowded situation like a tube, for god’s sake, you cannot have bullets exiting the perp and spraying all over the carriage. Get real!
And I am still not convinced that the shooting of the Brazilian was a mistake. We will see.
Dum dums, iirc were outlawed at the same time that explosive bullets were banned and for pretty much the same reason, non-military types didn’t like pictures of ‘icky’ wounds. Fully jacketed rounds make nice neat holes for the most part, much more photogenic. I think the magic phrase was ‘unnecessary suffering’ which implies that necessary suffering is okay (who makes *that* call?).
If the choice though, is between a hollow point leaving a large wound and stopping the target, and shooting the miscreant with a jacketed bullet and possibly having to shoot numerous times to actually stop him with the additional possibility of over-penetration endangering bystanders, well, it seems to me that the issue didn’t get thought through sufficiently by those qualified to do so.
Hi. First time visitor here.
I’m no expert on guns and bullets, but I have worked with some human rights groups, and therefore have read up on the subject. I don’t think that you’ve gotten to the (hollow) point here.
One of the big ideas behind weapons of war are that they should incapacitate combatants rather than kill, if at all possible. The idea being that it takes two men to carry one wounded man out of battle, rather than taking one man to dispose of the body much later, after the battle is over. It ties up more resources, and it ensures that more people make it through the war, so that they can rebuild afterwards. This is the reason that non-expanding bullets are used in the military, and why the laws of war discourage their use. It’s just sound reasoning that makes things, bad as they may be, better for everyone involved.
The police is a problem-solving force. They are not military forces. They are peacekeepers. Guns are for their protection, and for the protection of innocent bystanders, and by expansion the rest of society. Their role is to walk into very dangerous and unstable situations, in which people are in some form of crisis. Using expanding bullets is an expression of not realising that people reach for violence for any number of reasons. A moment’s weakness, temporary disruptions of the stability of their lives, drugs, alcohol, some form of mental trauma, etc. There is violence in all of us, but for most people it only comes out in extreme circumstances. Some of these circumstances can happen to absolutely anyone.
If you use expanding bullets to “defuse” the situation, you are basically saying that there is no hope that someone who uses violence at one point in their lives might not have some hope of ever returning to the civilised world. You should just kill them and get them over with. Expanding bullets are meant to kill. The police aren’t.
The mechanics of firearms are such that most people are rarely conscious or in any condition to do further violence after even a single shot. Multiple shots are rarely neccessary. Expanding bullets only in some very very few cases, where a suicide bomber needs to be killed very fast and without warning, and they don’t make much of a difference even then. You shoot someone seven times, they’re dead. Doesn’t matter what kind of bullets you use. But I fail to see that these few cases make enough of an argument for why police should wear or even have expandable bullets. Basically, there’s more of a risk that someone innocent dies from unneccessary wound cavitation and shock rather than just making it through.
Police don’t just handle suicide bombings. In fact, they mostly handle other things. That’s why their weaponry should reflect this fact. Letting them have expandable bullets is silly, and nullifies the Big Idea behind the police force.
This (need for low penetration + high stopping power at close quarters) is also of course why police worldwide so frequently use shotguns of various kinds (which can also fire various specialised non-lethal for riot control).
Wouldn’t recommend shotguns against suicide bombers though for obvious reasons (unless using solid slugs to the head).
Verity,
Dumdum bullets were crosscut through the jacket at the point in order to expose the lead core inside and fired from a low velocity black powder charge it wasn’t going to make much difference to the speed of the projectile. Come the advent of fully jacketed cordite-charged bullets you just didn’t need to do that any more – being hit by a high velocity round from a Lee Enfield .303 is going to knock you out of combat regardless of where it strikes.
As I said, I don’t see why there is this fuss about the use of hollowpoint bullets – there is no law banning them from police or non-military use and they do the job admirably, although 7 HP shots to the head might be considered to be slightly overdoing it. Perhaps when the press objects to the use of dumdums they are referring to the police commanders, instead of the bullets?
The point most people seem to have lost is that when police are forced to shoot suspects (and lets try to remember they’re suspects, not guilty unless proven such…), suicide bombers not withstanding, it is generally not with the primary purpose of killing. That may well be a regrettable effect, but in general the importance is to neutralise a threat, and -for the most part- shooting someone will neutralise the threat they pose even if they are not killed.
Hollow-point bullets are MUCH more likely to kill you than full-metal jackets. A suspect stands a decent chance of surviving if given medical care urgently after being shot with a 9mm FMJ, but would likely die on the way to the hospital as a result of internal bleeding if shot by a HP.
The issue of over-penetration is moot. Regardless of what ammunition is used, you’ve got to be able to hit the frigging target – which these monkeys were not sufficiently capable of.
Dum dums? I wouldn’t trust NuLab’s paramilitary wing with a sharp stick.
Martin, Whatever revealed truths you gained from your experience in human rights groups and your reading, here are the facts on the ground. These facts come from the Israeli security services which do, unlike your good self and your human rights workers, have tens of thousands of man hours of experience with weaponry and terrorism.
Suicide psychos are very often not completely incapacitated by a shot to the chest. They can often manage to detonate their bomb before slipping into unconsciousness, thus murdering everyone in the vicinity, including the police who have put their lives on the line to save the public.
The Israeli security services have passed this information to Britain. We have now adopted a “shoot to kill” rather than a “shoot to stop” policy to make certain that some little shithole with a bomb doesn’t manage to accomplish his insane mission even after being shot “to stop”.
As I said above, on a crowded tube train, or tube station, or railway station or building with hordes of people in it, you really do not want bullets that have exited the perp hitting innocent people and ruining the frescoes on the wall behind him. Therefore, expanding bullets are now used – on the advice of the Israeli authorities.
I am trying to figure out this part of your post:
Expanding bullets only in some very very few cases, where a suicide bomber needs to be killed very fast and without warning,
Err, all suicide bombers have to be killed very fast and without warning. Otherwise, they detonate themselves, you see.
The perp may experience some discomfort when expanding bullets hit his brain, but I for one don’t give a flying rat fart.
If I was carrying a handgun I would want to be using Hydra Shok ammunition or something similar not glaser or something that doesn’t really penetrate too far.
If you are pointing a weapon at someone and firing it to protect your or someones else’s life then you want your target to be put out of action as quickly as possible. Shooting to wound is accidental.
Personally, I’m off to hide from the flying rat farts!
Hi Verity.
Yes, I understand that, but I thought you were talking about British police forces, not Israeli? I live in Norway, but I do read the Guardian fairly often and I’m almost entirely certain that the rate of suicide bombings in Israel is higher than that in Britain per capita by a factor of about 1,7 kazillion.
Suicide bombings are exceptions not the norm. Those are the facts on the ground. Every experience shows that preparing only for the exceptional makes you ill-equipped for the ordinary. A tool that specialises too much (a gun with expanding bullets designed to kill suicide bombers as quick as possible) is a worse tool than a general, adaptable one (a gun which can be used in other dangerous circumstances a police officer might end up with, and with generally better effects for all parties).
Fact is, guns often get pointed at the wrong people (another “fact on the ground”). A friend of mine just two weeks ago had a gun pointed on him in LA because of a case of mistaken identity. When the guns are out, there is every reason to put in failsafes, because all bets are instantly off. If my friend had reacted wrongly, as one might in such a situation, expandable bullets vs. non-expandable is the difference between life and death for him. That cost is not worth it.
I see exp.ammo as another way of using extreme and unusual circumstances to increase the fear level is the slippery slope to authoritarianism.
And although this is a bad argument, I am tempted to point out that Israeli Security Forces aren’t really having a lot of luck reducing the number of suicide bombings. To be honest (and to play the role of loony leftie here), I think that expanding bullets are part of a larger set of problems having to do with how society views certain segments of the population, all of which goes into a negative feedback loop, producing the problem it tries to cope with. In essence expandable ammo => more suicide bombings. This line of thinking is a stretch, and not central to my argument, but I think it is worth the walk.
I am also tempted to point out that the success rate of the shoot-to-kill policy in Britain so far is 0. The failure rate is 1 (unless I have once again been reading the Guardian too infrequently).
Oh, and I meant to say “suicide bomber or someone with a detonator.” It does not affect my argument.
The 1899 Hague Declaration outlawed expanding bullets in warfare.
The US, BTW, did not sign (but uses jacketed bullets).
Using jacketed bullets solves the problem of expansion, and insures better feed in weapons.
The police and civilians can use any damn thing they want, and bad luck to the malfeasant.
The UK police killing under discussion had a lot more wrong with it than the ammunition; Perry is quite right.
Martin GL: I must disagree with almost all of that.
I am.
I have probably read the same things and they make no sense at all.
And how do you make a firearm ‘incapacitate’ an enemy without also making it more lethal? The answer is you cannot.
That is indeed true, but just wounding an enemy (with say a shell fragment, which is by far the largest source of battlefield injuries) is just fine because the soldiers using the weapon are many kilometres away. If however you are an infantryman and your enemy has just stepped out of a doorway 20 metres away, you do not want to wound him, you want him dead or instantly incapacitated right now and unless your enemy wears substantial body armour, the best way to do that is with an expanding bullet.
However for military use, penetration (i.e. wanting more of it) is often as important as stopping power, on the theory it is better to hit someone with a slightly less lethal round than fail to penetrate cover with a more lethal one. That is why full metal jacket (FMJ) bullets are not always a bad idea in a military context but are a dreadful idea in a civilian context as penetration (i.e. wanting less of it) is also very important.
Sorry but that is not an issue for a soldier in the field.
No, it is based on a daft notion that making infantry weapons less lethal and thereby putting the soldier using the weapon at greater risk, is somehow moral.
It is deeply flawed reasoning for the reasons stated above. Please explain how shooting a man with a 9mm expanding bullet in the hope he will go down on the first hit is less moral than emptying half a clip of FMJ 9mm into them to put them down? Or for that matter, shooting a man with a non-expanding 7.62mm rifle bullet or .50 cal slug (which have many times the stopping power of the expanding 9mm bullet) or toasting him with a flamethrower or shredding him with fragments from a hand grenade or killing him an overpressure from a thermobaric bomb?
The ban on expanding ammunition is arrant nonsense.
All true and which in fact make my case even stronger.
Utterly wrong on almost every level. You do not shoot a person to ‘defuse’ a situation, you shoot someone to end an unacceptable threat that they pose. Once it is deemed that shooting is the only solution, IT DOES NOT MATTER WHY THEY POSE THE THREAT, ONLY THAT THEY DO.
The police have no business whatsoever shooting a person if they are not in such extremis that it is appropriate to kill them. If you can wrestle them to the ground or club them or mace them or tazer them, all well and good, but if things are at the stage where the only reasonable option you have is to shoot them, you do so until they are incapacitated and their welfare means exactly nothing. And I do mean nothing.
It is not just the life of the person being shot by a cop at risk here, it is the cop’s life and any third parties present. When you shoot someone, you are admitting that extreme violence on your part is the only way to prevent something worse being done by someone else. If you put a single round into them and they go down, you minimise the risk to yourself and others. Each extra round you have to fire is a potential miss that has to end up somewhere you would rather it did not go or it may be an over-penetration that likewise will dump its energy somewhere other than the target. Moreover if you have to put half a clip into them, most likely they are not just standing there allowing themselves to be shot. They are most likely shooting back.
Can you not see how once the decision to shoot is taken the ONLY thing that matters is ending the confrontation with the target down and everyone else still in one piece? If the person you have shot survives, that is (sometimes) a bonus, but when you have to use violence to defend yourself, the welfare of the person you are shooting can and must be a matter of literally trivial concern right up until the moment they are incapacitated and no longer pose a threat. That is the simple brutal reality of violence and anything else is delusion.
You truly have no idea what you are talking about. I take it you have never heard of the infamous 1986 Miami Shootout that resulted in the FBI going for bigger calibre weapons after some agents were killed by some bank robbers who had already taken several hits? There are tens of thousands (probably many more) of such incidents documented. Sorry to seem harsh but please spend some time online in places like this and you will quickly realise that your technical remarks are not just wrong, they are preposterous.
Yes, I understand that, but I thought you were talking about British police forces, not Israeli? Yes, indeedy. As I said, the Israeli security authorities have advised the British police. It’s a formal kind of thing, not something they were mentioning down the pub.
but I do read the Guardian fairly often
Well, there’s a surprise!
A friend of mine just two weeks ago had a gun pointed on him in LA because of a case of mistaken identity.
Uh-huh. And? Was it the terrorist police, or was he walking through the completely wrong neighbourhood?
I am tempted to point out that Israeli Security Forces aren’t really having a lot of luck reducing the number of suicide bombings.
There are endless supplies of young, self-dramatising religious fruitcakes in certain areas of the world.
I think that expanding bullets are part of a larger set of problems having to do with how society views certain segments of the population, all of which goes into a negative feedback loop, producing the problem it tries to cope with
I was wondering how long it would take you to get around to “it’s really all our fault”. Didn’t take long. It never does.
I know I stand alone on this, but I am reserving judgement on the 1 failure you mention.
Martin G.L.,
It is imperative that you never attempt to use a firearm in an emergency situation. You simply do not understand the principles involved.
There are two hard and fast rules for making moral decisions about shooting. (1) Never point a weapon at anyone unless you are at that exact moment willing to kill them and (2) assume that when you fire the weapon the targeted human being will die.
Why are these rules important? A firearm is an inherently lethal device. They are designed to kill and people who survive being shot do so merely out of luck. Establishing a moral and legal standard based on the idea that it is okay to shoot at anyone in any circumstances when they do not present such a level of threat that they must immediately die will lead to a mindset wherein people will aim and fire weapons casually which will in turn lead to many needless deaths.
“If you use expanding bullets to “defuse” the situation, you are basically saying that there is no hope that someone who uses violence at one point in their lives might not have some hope of ever returning to the civilised world.”
No, it is when you pull the trigger on any firearm using any type of ammunition that you have decided that no hope remains for the targeted human being.
Choosing ammunition is not a symbolic act. It is a practical one based on the physical mechanisms of killing.
All standards and practices must be based on the idea that a person fired on will die. Therefor, such decisions as choice of ammunition must be made on the basis of whether they enhance the safety of all the people involved who are not shot at such as bystanders or the person firing the weapon. Under this standard, soft or expanding ammunition is the most moral choice since it minimizes the danger to those not shot at.
Of course if you trust the police to kill and maim only people who really ought to be killed and maimed, then arming them with expanding bullets is the way to go. My point, which I imagine might have sparked this thread was perhaps ill-conveyed–as ever.
I do not trust the police with the power of life and death, and I do not think they should be running around with the intention of killing people. They should be reactive, defensive, and use the minimal force appropriate to the situation.
Is there is any evidence that any suicide bombers, anywhere, have actually been pre-empted while wearing an armed bomb by holding them down and blowing their heads off? Or is it just another violent power-fantasy of the security forces that’s being indulged by the government and creating a lethal risk to passers-by?
Cheers for the link Perry. Nice.
Verity, you reserve judgement on the dead Brazilian. I agree. That is all the more reason why we need to have an enquiry, in full and in public, about the circumstances leading up to his shooting in July. By not doing so, a cloud of suspicion hangs over a man who may be totally innocent, just as it does over some police officers whose careers are now probably in ruins.
I cannot believe the arrogance of Ian Blair and his senior colleagues on this issue. If ever there is a change of government, there must be a wholesale change to the structure of policing in this country, starting with elections for senior constables, as in the United States.
With respect, I don’t think you’ve clearly read the excellent and highly informed comments by Shannon and Perry.
If the police are going to have guns, it’s better for them to have ones firing expanding ammo because that is safer for the people they are NOT shooting at. Even if you don’t want armed police, it is better to have an armed police with weapons that pose a risk to a few people as possible. Having them fire twenty times because their weapons are less than optimally effective is not in the interests of bystanders and if they are going to blaze away anyhow, that is doubly true.
Ditto Verity and Jonathan. I just don’t buy it that the police, in an intelligence-led operation, hung around outside the Brazilian’s residence, then spent some time tailing him, then got bored and shot him. I’d bet £ 500 with any interested party of opposing views that there’s a whole iceberg we’re not hearing about here.
If the Metropolitan Police did really use something as crude as hollow point bullets in the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell Tube station, then they deserve some extra criticism.
As has been obliquely referred to above by gravid there have been various powder metallurgy and composite material based types of Frangible Ammunition available to the Police and Military for over 30 years.
As a passenger in a crowded public transport system, would you prefer the Police to be firing frangible ammunition or high penetration armour piercing rounds which could penetrate the target or ricochet, and hit someone else ?
Argosy,
I do understand the point. Perhaps “passers-by” mislead you: I was ironically referring to people going about ordinary daily activities who become police targets.
If the police are going to have guns, it’s better for them to have ones firing expanding ammo because that is safer for the people they are NOT shooting at. Even if you don’t want armed police, it is better to have an armed police with weapons that pose a risk to a few people as possible.
No; it is better for guns carried habitually to use light loads. That way you reduce the risks both to the people the police aren’t shooting at and those they aren’t shooting at. In the case of the latter, they have a chance of surviving. If you have established you are dealing with someone is armed, by all means call in marksmen with appropriate weapons for the circumstances (which might indeed be frangible or AP rounds depending on the circumstances).
While we are on the subject, can anyone more familiar with the police armamentarium explain to me the tactical logic of all those cops with submachineguns outside Parliament and Scotland Yard and other places where really important people are? What threat would allow them to open fire with such weapons in the tourist-clogged street, assuming that, standing in the open as they do, they would get a chance? Or is this yet another piece of power display, with highly trained (one hopes) officers standing around uselessly to make other people feel really important when they could be conceivably be dealing with the gangtas we hear so much about?
The ban on explosive and expanding bullets in war made sense when adopted. As others have pointed out both types tend to make handling munitions more risky for the user and jam weapons – automatics especially.
Explosive bullets were used in airplanes and some ground weapons, just not in individual firearms. All nations evaluated them. The Germans persisted with the small cannons in fighters even when pure machine guns were shown to work better.
And the people writing the war conventions are not those who deal with the consequences. So some agreements are simply about feeling morally good. Which does not imply that I disagree with them.
Arms conventions can lead to “mission creep” – after the worst weapons are banned, there is an immediate call to then ban the worst of the still legal weapons, ad infinitum.
This question is really about how much force police can use in their duties. The law hold they can use only force enough to control suspects and avoid harm to others and to themselves. The Devil lies in the details (as the saying goes).
The police lack a magic device to instantly scale their weapons exactly to the task at hand. And they often do not even know what the task may require – capture and arrest is an imperfect art.
The Brazilian shooting seems to be a failure of people not weapons. If the shots were justified then the design of the multiple bullets shot into the head won’t change the outcome. But some designs will endanger bystanders more than others.
It seems here that the police had no valid reason for the shooting. Thus the problem is with them and not with the bullet.
Finally. Anyone interested and doubtful about how expanding bullets perform can watch the move “Day of the Jackel” in which the assasin tests one. And it is a good movie to boot.
Sorry
That way you reduce the risks both to the people the police aren’t shooting at and those they aren’t shooting at.
should have read,
That way you reduce the risks both to the people the police aren’t shooting at and those they are shooting at.
Frangible ammunition (Glaser, MagSafe, the various new sintered metal slugs) are less suitable than modern hollowpoints due to their inability to adequately penetrate. They’re generally used only in special circumstances, ie in an airplane or clearing rooms where overpenetration or ricochets are extremely unwelcome.
Given the two choices, as a bystander I’d want them to use the frangible. But I’d rather them use a good premium hollowpoint , which is neither “high penetration” nor “armor piercing”.
Unless, of course, the bad guy is wearing armor. Then I hope they have that AP ammo on hand.
Also, and more importantly, I’d want them not to miss! Bluntly, that’s a bigger worry to me than the type of ammo they’re using – current police gun-handling skills leave a lot to be desired.
Not true. There is a reason aircraft after WW2 went for cannon armament and if you follow the link you can get some good information why that is the case. The German and later war British decision to rely on cannon armed fighters was the correct one.
Guy: it makes little sence to use light loads as the copper is just going to shoot more bullets. Once a gunfight starts, you do not stop shooting until one or other is down. As for the HK’s used by the Met, I think you will find they are are intended to be used as semi-auto carbines rather than sub-machineguns (I would not be surprised if their full auto cabaility has been nobbled in fact). The HK is quite an accurate bit of kit and giving a copper one of those is much more likely to result in a bullet in the target than giving them a handgun… and they also look more intimidating, which is possibly part of the thinking when trying to deter an attack (which may not be quite so effective against a suicide bomber of course).
Thanks for the 1899 Hague Declaration reference.
The reason Expanding Bullets were banned, as has been mentioned, seems to be to prevent unnecessary suffering. The principle seems to be that employing a bullet that expands easily on impact for the purpose of unnecessarily aggravating a wound is best avoided.
It doesn’t seem to have been framed as a choice between stopping the target with an expanding bullet or having to shoot someone numerous times, so much as stopping someone or stopping them and trying to gratuitously screwing them up should they survived as well. I suppose the principle. I don’t really see how I can object to an attempt to stop armies at war maiming people for no purpose other than the infliction of gratuitous injury. It’s the same principle which would stop us from advocating smearing weapons in something that induced gangrene (if this could be done).
The interesting point are: (1) is the benefit from an Expanding Bullets necessary? and (2) could an equally good choice of bullet be used that did less injury should the person shot fortuitously survive? I’d really be interested to hear more about this from people who know about guns than me.
Sorry for the appalling grammar and botched writing above.
I just want to stress that I really disagree with Perry. The ban wasn’t based on the “daft notion that making infantry weapons less lethal… is somehow moral”. For that matter it’s not true that they’re banned so that “more people make it through the war” or that “non-military types didn’t like pictures of ‘icky’ wounds”.
They were banned because of the idea that given a choice between (1) a weapon that injures someone for no benefit and (2) one that doesn’t, then the moral choice is not to gratuitously harm someone. If you’ve a choice between (1) a chemical weapon that blinds someone for 10 years and (2) one that blinds them for life, then you should use (1) so not to harm them more than is needed for no benefit.
I’m sure ammunition has changed in the last 100 years but there was a defensible moral reason behind the ban, even if we can debate whether it is justified by that reason or the practical choices we should make based upon it. The principle also should apply to the Met, they shouldn’t be trying to wound people unneccesarily.
reply to Perry – German use of cannon
First, I don’t disagree with you.
I had been relying on memory about German use in WW2, not afterwards. Most nations used aerial cannon after the first generation of jets and before good missles were available.
It seems I read that the ME-109s use of light cannon often did not get the job done, that the round exploded w/o penetration. And the guns were not reliable – which may not have been the ammo’s fault.
But worse, it burdened German logistics to supply these rounds plus regular machine gun rounds.
I suspect cannon was more effective in dealing with fabric covered and/or wooden frame planes. And those materials were being used into WW2. Against the newer structures the machine gun worked very well. And then jet structures were again better attacked by a round with a charge.
I didn’t mean the German military was pig-headed and determined to stick with the wrong weapon. The Germans just had logistic, production, and political trade-offs that differed from the Allies.
K: by as early as 1941 most UK and Luftwaffe fighters had cockpit armour and self-sealing fuel tanks. Armour tended to increase quite dramatically as the war progressed and as a result machinegun bullets were less and less effective (this was an even bigger problem for the USAF in Korea). The US decision to stick with 50 cal was a lemon as the increased rate of fire vis a vis cannon does not offset the superior punch of a 20mm or 30mm cannon shell (that link in my previous comment on this is most instructional on that score), particularly in the late war when aircraft are armoured up the wazzo. But at least the 50 cals were greatly superior to rifle calibre machineguns (i.e. it was wrong but not catastrophically wrong) and in any case sheer numbers of aircraft were the main allied weapon that overwhelmed all other factors in the end (in daylight at least).
Howdy everyone. I’ve been lurking, just not posting for a while, but I might re-up.
I’m not sure where the “I’m no gun experts” get the notion that a FMJ is somehow going to miraculously spare its target. It doesn’t. The purpose behind a JHP is to do what a FMJ does, only faster. FMJ rounds are absolutely lethal.
Disfigurement and maiming are more likely to occur with FMJ rounds. If you read up on the science behind bullet ballistics, you’ll quickly find that any type of bullet traveling through your center mass causes a ton of tissue trama and hemorrhaging. There are no metal bullets that are NOT designed to kill. JHP are just quicker and more humane.
By the way, frangibles are a ridiculous idea. They rarely immediately incapacitate their target, while generally proving fatal due to infection and complications arising from having dozens of metal particles distributed throughout the body and its organs.
Personally, my HK holds these, little dandies. If the situation presents itself where I feel compelled to use force to protect myself or someone else, I have not considered the notion that the aggressor will survive.
Except that really isn’t the choice on offer at all. If you are using a 9mm handgun, then if you use an expanding round you will have a reasonably effective weapon (not a great one, I might add). However if you use FMJ 9mm, you have a fairly marginal weapon. Just google and see the calls by US troops to bring back the .45.
There is nothing ‘gratuitous’ about wanting the most lethal weapon possible when you are fighting at close quarters because a gun that is better at dropping someone before they can shoot you is also a gun that is more lethal.
A bit but not much really.
But they are not trying to wound anyone when they shoot them, they are trying to ‘stop’ them to use the correct terminology. An expanding bullet does that better under most police type engagement profiles than a non-expanding one with the added advantage of being much less likely to over-penetrate and kill granny across the road while she is watching Eastenders. Frangible bullets also not over-penetrate but also tend to be very light and have less stopping power and any that are not like that are indistinguishable from expanding bullets anyway. Unless you are dealing with heavily armoured people or people behind cover (i.e. penetration is a major issue), an expanding bullet is more likely to put someone down per hit than a non-expanding one of the same calibre (this is most true of handgun calibres but gets less important the bigger the weapon for obvious reasons) and putting someone down is the whole point of shooting someone.
To get the same effect without using an expanding bullet, you need to use a bigger weapon (such a using a 40 or 45 rather than a 9mm) but I fail to see how shooting someone with a weapon that is more lethal weapon by virtue of the fact it is bigger is ok but using an expending bullet to get much the same effect is not.
Putting the target down so that he cannot shoot back is a non-trivial issue. If you are NOT trying to do that, you have no business shooting them in the first place and shooting them with a weaker weapon that just might kill them and just might put them down does not make it somehow okay. You might want to re-read Shannon’s comment on that issue.
The perps in the Miami Shootout were like terrorists in that they kept coming for not being death-shy.
Hmmm…Dirty War was a BBC/HBO collaboration and you British folk can’t see it without the right DVD player.
To Perry: You arguments favoring cannon over the MG in fighters is certainly correct. A sufficiently powerful cannon is going to beat a solid bullet in damaging things.
And after more reflection I see why the Germans in WW2 stayed with what they had. The wings on the ME-109 were not readily adaptable to more guns or heavier guns. And it had little space for ammunition. So a retrofit was not practical and the cannon they adopted, and stayed with, was probably the best among the a group of unsatifying choices.
The plane was developed in the mid-thirties and was able to dominate any potential foe. The light structure and small cannons were right for then.
I do disagree about the MG use by the Allies.
The allies were fighting light airframes in all theaters. The Japanese planes had almost no protection. These were choices made to enhance performance with less powerful engines. The Allies found the MG was enough and avoided the duplicate logistics needed to use aerial cannon. They tacked on more MG, which their planes could handle. The MG was right for them then whether or not it was still the right gun a decade later.
Some Allied fighter did use the cannon. I believe some P-38s tried them in combat. And it was a big war, the experiments with armour variations were endless.
I see exp.ammo as another way of using extreme and unusual circumstances to increase the fear level is the slippery slope to authoritarianism.
No, sir.
When expanding rounds are restricted to government employees only, then you’re on “the slippery slope to authoritarianism”.
Oh, and Winzeler- frangables aren’t intened to be more lethal, they’re intended to not overpenetrate things like walls, which is a consideration for people living in densely populated areas- you can shoot the burglar, but if you wound or kill a neighbor in the process, you’re still in pretty deep trouble. Minimizing the chances of that happening is the point of pre-fragmented ammo.
When expanding rounds are restricted to government employees only, then you’re on “the slippery slope to authoritarianism”.
Which of course has been the case in the UK since 1997, though there was a conflict with a legal requirement to use expanding ammunition when shooting deer–now fixed, I believe.
The differential treatment of ammunition is less concerning to me than the restriction of firearms to the state (and gangsters) alone, and I’m considerably more than that worried by the apparent effective exemption of police from the law of homicide by a semi-secret executive decision.
All the handwringing over horrible, inhumane weapons reminds me of the great hue and cry in the laser industry about ten years ago, over dazzle weapons.
“Oh, my, a laser weapon might cause permanent vision damage,” some cried. A young army captain at a technical conference set them straight: ” I don’t want to blind anyone permanently- just long enough to run up to him and put a bayonet through his guts!”
If you’re shooting at someone, you’ve already decided to try to kill him. Half measures are simply irrational.
I agree it is better if the round doesn’t go through the target, and with the stopping power argument.
However a lot of armed police carry a pistol as a secondary backup weapon to a carbine, for example the MP5. Many forces are in the process of converting from weapons like the MP5, and are changing to weapons that fire 5.56mm assault rifle rounds, like the H & K G36 and the Steyr Aug.
Why this is necessary when the UK police have never engaged a target at more than 75m is beyond me. I certainly don’t want to be within a 10 mile radius if the Police are going to be firing that calibre.
If you’ve ever seen 5.56mm fired at ballistic soap, you wouldn’t be concerned at what type of pistol round they were firing. I just hope they keep them with restricted selective fire, as I believe most currently are. 5.56mm, full auto? No thanks!
I agree it is better if the round doesn’t go through the target, and with the stopping power argument.
However a lot of armed police carry a pistol as a secondary backup weapon to a carbine/SMG, for example the MP5. Many forces are in the process of converting from weapons like the MP5, and are changing to weapons that fire 5.56mm assault rifle rounds, like the H & K G36 and the Steyr Aug.
Why this is necessary when the UK police have never engaged a target at more than 75m is beyond me. I certainly don’t want to be within a 10 mile radius if the Police are going to be firing that calibre.
If you’ve ever seen 5.56mm fired at ballistic soap, you wouldn’t be concerned at what type of pistol round they were firing. I just hope they keep them with restricted selective fire, as I believe most currently are. 5.56mm, full auto? No thanks!
Rosignol, your average JHP already addresses the issue of overpenetration while remaining particularly lethal. Fragmenting bullets address a pseudo-problem, while presenting a small problem of their own (namely, their ineffectiveness when it comes to stopping power).
Another example, aside from Miami. There was a bank robbery shootout in Toronto. A Mountie put a 5.56 round thru one alleged perp’s aorta. In the 1.6 seconds they figure it took the guy to exsanguinate, he got off a lethel shot. A heavier, energy transferring bullet could have saved a life.
Oh, by the way, Dum-Dum was the name of a town where the British had an arsenal in India. The Bangalore torpedo, an explosive charge on the end of a pole, got its name the same way.
triticale – Interesting!
I’m not sure I understand what this debate is all about. If the British police want to make sure that the suspects they shoot at are no longer in a position to harm themselves or others, then hollow point ammuntion is the way to go. Hollow point ammunition is common in the United States, for the reasons that many folks have mentioned here. In New York City, for example, the NYPD has been using hollow point ammunition for the past several years because New York has a half a million more people than London does stuffed into half the space; a bullet that smashs through someone in Manhattan, for instance, will likely hit a passerby; cramming 1.5 million residents and as many daily commuters onto an island only 23 square miles in size practically guarantees this. Contrary to the impression that many American police dramas may have given you, the vast majority–I think the percentage is somewhere in the high 90’s–of American police officers go their entire careers without firing their weapons, in many cases without ever having to draw their weapons, and those police officers that do draw their weapons on a regular basis are usually officers in specific high risk assignments; they are usually narcotics, fugitive apprehension, or SWAT officers going after heavily armed criminals. Most police departments rigorously control the conditions under which their officers may use their weapons; failure to use their weapons in the prescribed manner may leave officers open to prosecution. Witness, for example, the recent prosecution of NYPD officers in the Amadou Diallo shooting case. They were found not guilty in the criminal case, but many people, especially cops, find the fact that the city prosecuted them at all somewhat hard to swallow, since the officers followed the necessary protocols and were made to stand trial anyway.
Barbara W. Tuchman has a bit about the use of the dum-dum round in the chapter about the first Hague conferences in her book, The Proud Tower. Apparently British infantrymen serving in the colonial wars came up with the idea as a way of stopping charging tribesmen dead in their tracks, pardon the pun. One of the British delegates defended the Tommys’ right to alter their ammunition like this, saying that while a civilized soldier, when hit, had the good sense to lay down and go to hospital, your average tribesman, not having the advantages of a good British education, was more likely than not to keep coming on, and by the time you had explained to him that his behavior was not the norm for wounded men, your tribesman had cut off your head.
Martin GL’s explanation of military doctrine with respect to using non-expanding bullets is exactly what is taught to military officers in my country. You may disagree with the doctrine, but Martin is accurately portraying it.
Barbara W. Tuchman has a bit about the use of the dum-dum round in the chapter about the first Hague conferences in her book, The Proud Tower. Apparently British infantrymen serving in the colonial wars came up with the idea as a way of stopping charging tribesmen dead in their tracks, pardon the pun. One of the British delegates defended the Tommys’ right to alter their ammunition like this, saying that while a civilized soldier, when hit, had the good sense to lay down and go to hospital, your average tribesman, not having the advantages of a good British education, was more likely than not to keep coming on, and by the time you had explained to him that his behavior was not the norm for wounded men, your tribesman had cut off your head.
Sort of. In the late 19th Century, the British Army used .45 calibre Martini Henry rifles which fired a heavy unjacketed lead bullet. It was a black powder round, and thus of quite low velocity, but this did not matter so much because the heavy soft lead bullet had good stopping power.
When the single shot Martini Henry was replaced by a magazine rifle, the Lee Metford, the Army found itself using a smaller .303 bullet, which was round nosed and jacketed, but still quite low velocity, as it was again a black powder round. This bullet was found to have poor stopping power against the sort of savage enemies we were up against in the late 19th Century, and that’s why the Dum Dum arsenal came up with the idea of nicking the tip of the round nosed bullet, so it would expand in the unruly tribesman, and bring him to a halt.
Such bullets ceased to be needed when the new .303 ammunition for the Lee Enfield was adopted early in the 20th Century. Because it was loaded with cordite, this round was of a much higher velocity. The pointed bullet had its mass to the rear, aided by the fact that the tip was filled with aluminium rather than lead. Thus, when the bullet hit an enemy, the tip deformed, and the bullet tended to tumble so that it would exit, if it did, base first. This produces more than enough of a shock to the enemy without requiring soft points or the like, which as has been pointed out, do not work well in machine guns anyway. So the Great Powers were quite happy to outlaw Dum Dum bullets in the Hague Convention, because they were already obsolete.
Almost true, though the suggestion the Brits were happy with the Hague declaration isn’t accurate. We were fighting the Boers at the time, and it was a damned inconvenience to have to withdraw the hollow point cartridges (the Mark 5 hollow nose had only been distributed by the army that year).
THough Britain started using cordite from 1891/2, it hadn’t spread throughout the colonies, which left us using uncivilized bullets against fellow white men, something other European powers (notably France) took great delight in using against us.
We finally got a better cartridge in 1910, IIRC. Just in time for a certain European War.