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Message: <blockquote data-quote="buzzard" data-source="post: 1116331" data-attributes="member: 3003">Granted, it does come close to a religious matter with some, but as I will say you can create a bullet loading for a .40 which will exceed a 9mm in muzzle energy, and still have the greater cross section. Though I do recognize that the average damages are the same, I would prefer if the .40 got the nod in max damage. There must be some reason for the FBI and most police departments switching over. I imagine that for your calculations you took the 180 grain .40, while I would have run with the 165 grain. Not that it matters but I could look up some numbers in the ol' reloading manual. I had a feeling you guys got caught by the ban. I did just pick up a book on guns (Jane's Guns Recognition Guide), which does have magazine capacity. Maybe if I'm sufficiently bored I'll check over the magazine capacities of things I don't own and let you know. The problem with this book is that it doesn't describe all the variations by caliber (which is how you ended up with a 9 shot P220 in .45). <a href="http://www.federalcartridge.com" target="_blank">www.federalcartridge.com</a>Though the law is enough of an argument. Back in the 80s the Feds decided that "cop killer bullets" had to be banned. This meant that any pistol caliber round made of anything harder than lead or copper was a no no. Thus if the Hydra-Shoks had a steel core, I couldn't own them. Though to be more directly factual, the Federal site has a nice little Hydra-shok diagram showing the post as part of the lead core. Ahh, here we need a history lesson.Back in the early 80's a number of FBI agents were trying to track down a couple of bank robbers/murderers in Miami. One way or another they managed to stop the perp's car (rammed it into a tree in a residential area- DOH!). A rather major shootout occured. Over a hundred rounds were exchanged. The Feds were armed with S&W 9mms using Winchester silvertip ammo (standard JHPs), .38s and shotguns (only one agent used a shotgun). The bad guys had a mini-14, and .357s. While the perps(2) eventually went down, a few of the feds were killed (3 or 4), and others were wounded. The perps soaked up the 9mm rounds without being stopped (one of them I think had 14 rounds in him before a shotgun finished him off- this is all reliant on my crappy memory, though I have a reference I can check). This confrontation had two major effects. A) The FBI decided that 9mm wasn't "good enough for government work" and they had S&W develop the 10mm (which for those who don't know is like a .40 magnum). This became their standard issue weapon(later changed to the .40). B) Winchester decided to re-design their ammo because it was found that many of the shots were not achieving sufficient penetration. In fact, the car windows were stopping a lot of the JHP rounds. Thus they had to find a way to get better penetration, but still get expansion to keep the lethality(and not shoot through people). This led to the development of the Black Talon. The idea here was to increase the strength of the copper jacket, but to score it in places so the jacket could tear when the cavity was under hydrostatic pressure. This does result in a petal type arrangement when it expands. However the copper core and jacket are designed to stick together. This means you don't get the "vicious claw like edges" that HCI was having a fit over. Well then I misunderstand vitality. I prefer to think of it as dodging. In any case why could the thing stop doing the extra damage once it is in wounds? (I know the gods of balance). I'd make them something like +1 damage (a flat lead round will deform fairly extensively, but not in a nice controlled mushroom like a JHP), but with really lousy armor penetration. The main advantage I would give them is make them dirt cheap. They would be easily half the cost of FMJ (which should be cheaper than JHP, but isn't). While I do use a nice isosceles stance, I could not be called perfect. I'll have to check out that errata.</blockquote>

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