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Message: <blockquote data-quote="HeavenShallBurn" data-source="post: 4024042" data-attributes="member: 39593">What he said, and to expand upon it your definition is highly arbitrary.  Somehow pistols are civilian and all other firearms are military, rubbish. There is nothing to distinguish small arms into civilian and military categories other than law, which varies considerably between places.  You've conflated "firearms used commonly in crime or legally permissible to own in my location" with firearms for civilians.No one has argued that pistols (at least in the sense you mean the term) cause as much damage as rifle rounds.  Before I continue I'll note there are quite a few pistol cartridges that do considerably more damage than either 5.56NATO or 7.62x39 within the range constraints of a pistol they just aren't practical from a military perspective.  Regarding rifle rounds and stopping power the point is to render the enemy combat ineffective because over the few seconds during which any one target is engaged there is very little "hampered" either they are capable of continuing combat or they are not.  I was specifically pointing out that there is a similar degree of variance in incapacitating a target on the first successful shot with modern service rifle caliber weapons as pistols.  It doesn't matter if they're badly or fatally wounded and bleed out later if they can continue to assault you for the next few seconds that actually matter.  You can't even necessarily count on a headshot putting a target down, I've personally put three rounds into an unhelmeted head at less than 100 yards only to have them continue to fire for four running steps until the pig put a few more through the boiler. (What is it with irregulars and using automatic fire at a charge?  Is it some inner mental compulsion?  They have to realize they aren't going to hit crap and slowing down like that just makes them a better target.)   Because what takes them out of the fight isn't lethality it's tissue trauma which small-caliber rounds can seriously lack especially in FMJ projectiles that don't expand well.  This is where the 5.56 has its flaws in short barrels and at longer ranges.  Fired out of a barrel the length they were originally designed for 5.56NATO actually has similar characteristics to the 5.45.  Extreme velocity causes fragmentation and correspondingly large amounts of trauma that stop a target adequately.  But barrels keep getting shorter along with carbines due to the close in nature of most current combat which slows the round down below the threshold required for fragmentation.  Here you have the cause of the large variability I spoke about, the firearm is operating outside the intended design parameters of the cartridge.  Really they should either go to a larger caliber or swap from FMJ to something like an EPP or a bimetallic expander.Regarding the FBI files those are measuring an entirely different group and activity and the data inside is not very applicable to combat outside of Law Enforcement.</blockquote>

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