I'll tell you what. Assume a hypothetical situation where you and I agree to square in a gun fight on Main Street at 25 paces. I'll let you shoot the frangible .380, but I'll stick with my Winchester Ranger T .45 ACP +P (RA45TP).djjoshuad wrote:maybe this will help... imagine a BB fired from a classic Red Ryder BB gun, which moves at 280 ft/sec (that's just over 190 mph). Imagine that thing hitting you and how it will feel... I think most of us have been shot by a BB gun before :). Then imagine a locomotive moving at 19 mph (10% of the speed of the BB). Which do you think will "overpenetrate"? ;) The point of that analogy is to take two extremes and compare them. The locomotive has a thousands of tons of mass, and moving slowly will still demolish any living thing in its path because of the amount of force applied. The BB leaves a nice red mark and *might* draw blood... but will rarely even penetrate the skin, again because of the force applied. These are two extremes... now imagine two things in the middle of this spectrum. a .380 round and a .45 round. The 45 moves a lot slower but has a lot more mass. The .380 has very little mass comparatively, but is moving much more quickly. That lighter weight is compensated for by the speed... resulting in similar amounts of force for each.
Link?djjoshuad wrote:The ballistics of some ammo I just picked up (RCBO?) in .45 is insane - 2200 ft/sec muzzle velocity and 815-ish lb/ft of force applied to the target at 15 yards. And that's a 90 grain load.
Never heard of 90 grain .45 ACP.