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Effects on Humans
Common wisdom has it that .380ACP is barely enough bullet to qualify as a defensive handgun round, and anything lighter is more likely to enrage an aggressor than to stop him. My favorite study of this subject is An Alternate Look at Handgun Stopping Power by Greg Ellifritz. He analyzed nearly 1800 shootings during violent encounters and came up with some surprising results: 1. A lot of the time just shooting at someone is enough to get them to stop, regardless of caliber or whether they are hit. I.e., guns psychologically stop many assailants.
Based on this observation: Its more important to have a gun any gun than to be caught without one. 2. Determined aggressors do need to be physically stopped (incapacitated), and in that case shot placement is far more important than caliber. I.e., largely regardless of caliber: if you hit an assailant in the head they stop 75% of the time. Torso hits stop them 40% of the time. Put anther way: How well you shoot is more important than what you shoot. 3. However, independent of shot placement, calibers below .380ACP are twice as likely to fail to incapacitate as the larger calibers. So yes, there is something to the conventional wisdom that if youre carrying a gun it should shoot something no smaller than .380ACP.
Effects on Deer
Ive never had a chance to interview someone who was in a gunfight, but I know plenty of hunters. One in particular spent time working around a farm in a reasonably populated area where it was permissible to kill deer to protect crops. Given the out-of-control deer population he had killed too many deer to count. His weapon of choice was a suppressed . 22LR rifle from which he shot subsonic .40gr bullets. A good marksman, he would take headshots, aiming for the base of the brain under the ear. His furthest kill was at 160 yards. He reported that most of the time deer he shot would fall down dead on the spot. Some would manage to run a few yards before falling over. The rest of the time deer would fall immediately on their side but begin to kick their legs as if running. He used to think this was a reflexive instinct that they had taken a lethal shot to the head but that their body didnt realize it yet until one day his gun jammed readying for a follow-up shot and the deer climbed to its feet and ran away. Thats the only one that got away. Do you need a headshot to put down a deer with a .22? This hunter didnt want to make a study of that question on wild animals, but did admit that once he had a deer standing broadside at 70 yards with its head behind a tree. He decided to put a round in the traditional kill zone of the chest where the heart and lungs are. The deer took off and stopped in a thicket less than 30 yards from where it was shot. The hunter waited half an hour to follow it in. (He explained that this is an ethical way to let animals shot in the chest die: Chasing them as they lose blood pressure just panics them in their final moments.) Sure enough: The deer was as dead as if it had been hit in the chest with a highpowered .30-caliber bullet. For further reading there are plenty of references on this thread.