Here is a good link for anyone who might be interested in military bullet wound patterns. Check out the M193, 5.56mm round. Fackler is the foremost wound ballistics person in the world today.

http://home.snafu.de/l.moeller/Zielwirkung/military_bullet_wound_patterns.html

I honestly believe that the energy dump theory is a myth. Bullets do not kill by energy transfer. They kill by causing permanent trauma to a vital organ or organs. Bullets that do not exit often kill a little faster not because of energy transfer but because of why the bullet did not exit. The main reason that a bullet doesn't exit is because it is probably of a typethat violently rapidly expands which has the potential to cause more internal trauma.

Here is a good read on the subject.

A Short Disquisition On The Bullet's Killing Mechanism
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Part I: "Energy Dumping" Is A Myth
Let me state right here and now that there are two terms you're going to hear that have no meaning. If you haven't heard them yet, you will, if you spend any time at all on a shooting range or hanging around the wiseacres in gun shops. Both refer to popular myths among shooters about how a bullet kills, and are based on thorough misunderstanding of ballisitics and biology.
"Hydrostatic shock" is the idea that a bullet kills by setting up a "shock wave" in the incompressible water of which an animal's body is largely composed. "Energy dumping" is the concept that if a bullet stops within an animal, it will kill more effectively than one that goes through and exits, since it "releases its entire amount of energy within the body."
The bullet does indeed have a good deal of kinetic energy, and the faster it's moving the more it has, of course. In the USA bullet energy levels are rated in "foot-pounds", a relatively obscure unit implying the amount of energy needed to move one pound of weight one foot.
European countries use the much more sensible metric system, and in this system the energy unit is the "joule". While both these units refer to energy of movement, the joule has the advantage that it can easily be converted to units used to measure heat. One calorie is equivalent to 4.1 joules, the calorie being a unit of heat. Specifically, one calorie is the amount of heat needed to raise one gram of water one degree Celsius. (The comparable unit in the US system is the BTU, but converting foot-pounds to BTU's is not so straightforward as converting joules to calories.)
A bullet fired from a reasonably powerful handgun, say a hot 9mm Parabellum load, has an energy level of perhaps 500 joules at the muzzle.
So why do I care about converting muzzle energy figures into heat? Because if a bullet is stopped in its target, that's exactly what happens: its residual kinetic energy is, in fact released (or, as the wiseacres have it, "dumped") into the animal's body; but it's released as heat, in accordance with the laws of thermodynamics. (This is the reason why your car's brakes heat up when you stop: that energy can't be destroyed, it can only be converted to another form, and the "defaut" is to convert it to heat.)
The amount of heat liberated by stopping a bullet is surprisingly small: 500 joules works out to be about 106 calories. That would be enough to raise 106 grams (about 0.25 pounds) of water one degree Celsius (about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit). That's not all that much, especially when compared to the size of animal it has to be "dumped" into.
A man is a pretty large animal (about the size of a deer) and 500 joules (or 106 calories) of energy diffused through the body of a 150-pound (68,100 gram) human would not suffice to raise his body temperature even one-one-hundreth of a degree Fahrenheit. And that is a maximum amount, which assumes the bullet is stopped and that the shot was fired at point-blank range. To have a noticeable effect on tissue temperature you would have to "dump" a great deal more energy than 500 or so joules: the amount of heat liberated even by the biggest and baddest bullet available is very far below the capacity of the body's water to absorb it. It should be obvious, then, that the theory of "energy dumping" is based on an exaggerated idea of how much energy a bullet actually has, and is meaningless as a part of the killing mechanism.
Believers in the "energy dumping" theory never seem to have an adequate explanation for the fact that there are many, many gunshot victims are still walking around with bullets that "dumped" all their energy, and are still inside the victims. Many people with such retained bullets received them at close range from large-caliber guns, and were therefore the unlucky recipients of lots of "dumped" energy, but they are still alive. The answer, however, is really very simple: they are still alive because they were lucky enough not to have received a hit in a vital area.
[hr]Proponents of the "hydrostatic shock" theory usually argue that animals are composed largely of water, and therefore a bullet causes a "shock wave" to be set up in them, which causes displacement of organs, and rupture of tissues. Their belief in this concept is bolstered by the spectacular splashes that expanding bullets make when fired into plastic milk jugs filled with water: they imagine that something of the same thing happens in an animal body. They are wrong.
First, animals aren't jugs of water, and don't resemble jugs of water in the least. Animals don't have uniform internal density, and the response of muscle to a bullet is very different than that of, say, the bones or the lungs. At the microscopic level, animals are actually very compartmentalized, and there is almost no "free" water (or any other liquid) to constitute a homogeneous medium in which a "shock wave" can be propagated for more than few millimeters. About the only places where large quantities of fluids are found sloshing around are in the spleen and liver, both of which contain sizeable volumes of "loose" blood.
Second, it has been demonstrated quite conclusively that most body tissues are very tolerant of momentary deformation and quite resilient. Unless a bullet physically cuts a blood vessel or nerve, little more than localized damage is done by its passage.
It is true that in passing through, a bullet does form a so-called "temporary wound cavity" of considerable size, which lasts for milliseconds. Inside this volume a "shock wave" does form, and it even displaces some organs. But the effect of the temporary wound cavity is small, and most tissues and organs resist this very brief deformation. There is certainly no possibility--as you will frequently be told by ignorant gunshop clerks--that you can "...hit a man in the arm and the shock will travel through the blood to his brain and kill him..." Blood is carried in blood vessels, and those vessels are tough. Anyone who has dissected a freshly-dead animal will testify to the strength of an artery: it takes a good deal of force to rupture one, and physical displacement for a few milliseconds isn't enough. It's perfectly possible to displace an artery by several inches permanently with no loss of function. To do significant damage the artery has actually to be hit by the bullet, preferably by the sharp edges of the expanded outer jacket, which will cut it.
Furthermore, there is no way the "shock wave" could "travel through the blood" because the design of the system is such that a) it permits only one-way flow; and 2) it dampens pressure oscillations of considerable magnitude. Arteries that carry blood to the body are very muscular structures and designed to resist considerable heads of pressure lest they burst. And as they get smaller and smaller, ramifying to all the organs, the resistance to flow increases greatly. Even if you were to set up a significant "shock wave" locally, it wouldn't get very far in the system before the increasing resistance to its passage would dampen it out completely.
The True Believers in the "hydrostatic shock" myth often point to the messy soup found inside the chest of deer hit in the lungs as "proof" they are right. But they are really pointing to a major hole in their argument. There isn't any "free" blood in the chest of any mammal: like blood elsewhere, it's in blood vessels.
The lungs are a sort of enormous capillary bed, with millions of small blood vessels lying between the gas-exchange surfaces. Most of the volume of the chest is air. The vast quantities of blood found in the chest cavity of a lung-shot animal weren't there when the shot was fired. The free blood found in the chest after a shooting got there because the bullet damaged the blood vessels running through the area.
An expanding bullet does a fearful amount of damage to the extremely delicate tissue of the lungs, but this region also includes major blood vessels (the aorta and pulmonary artery, to name two) which are usually damaged as well. These pour enormous quantities of blood into the thoracic cavity when they're ruptured. Contraction of the body musculature and the pumping of the heart (if it too isn't hit) will assure this. The blood in the chest cavity is the result of the damage, not the cause of it, and the "shock wave" isn't propagated through it at all.
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Thanks so much. Now we are getting to some of the interesting things that I was hoping the post would do, such as this:

"Whether we like to admit it or not, the primary purpose of military rifle bullets is to disrupt human tissue. Yet the effects of bullets on bodies - the characteristic tissue disruption patterns produced by various bullets - remains unclear even to many of those who design and produce bullets. Surgeons who are called upon to treat the damage bullets cause, with few exceptions, lack practical knowledge of bullet effects. Attempts to fill this information void with formulae, graphs, flawed experiments, invalid assumptions, and theories based on half-truth (or no truth at all) have only increased confusion. "

I will look up further things by this author. Chap Gleason

About 20 years ago one Evan Marshall and one Sanow wrote a book. Later Masaad Ayoobgot involved.These are the folks who came up with the rating of hand gun bullets by "percentage of one shot stops"in "actual shootings." For a long time gun writers referred to handgun bullet effectiveness by "percentage of one shot stops."Marshall, Sanow and Ayoob are proponents of smaller caliber fast bullets. Turns out it was all phoney. Fackler and several others put the lie to it all.

http://www.firearmstactical.com/streetstoppers.htm

http://www.firearmstactical.com/marshall-sanow-discrepancies.htm

Excellent read.I agree bullets kill by causing permanent trauma to vital organs, not hydro static shock. Thanks for posting this. Chap

Todd1700

I have know credibilty to say this other than personal experiance, on animals not water jugs, but I pretty much totally disagree with this author has written.

One example, of many,I can provide you is last years little buck. It was shot with a 260 grain Nosler Partition @ about 170 yards. The bullet entered the the front of the chest cavity passes through the chest and exited out the left side of the body behind the front quarter. I really wish i had taken a picture of the insides if the chest cavity. Everything in the cavity was jello - there was no heart of lungs just dark read jello. I know the bullet expanded some on the way through, butno way did it get big enough to shoot through all of those organs. The pressure, hydrualic or hydrostatic,caused bythe bullet passing through an air tight cavity cavity cause the rupture and disinegration of those vital organs. This is just one experiance of many.

As you can see both the entrance and exit holes are nice neat holes, really would not expect much, but inside a totally different story. It may not be "hydrostatic" but every thing in the cavity literally ran out the carcess when the diaphram was cut.... it was nothing but chunky jello...

Another instance when science sometimes does not follow reality....

I agree with you sabotloader. My cartridge rifle is a 25-06 shooting little 100 grain BARNES Triple Shock bulletat 3200 fps. This bullet expands to no more than1/2inch and does not break up at all - no fragment projectiles. A mid-chest shot rupturesthe organsin the entire chest cavity.

That one deer i shot @ 148 yards a couple years back also was nothing but thick jello on the inside. The only part i found was the heart that was starting to come apart and a fist size chunk of liver. Lungs wernt even there. If you watch some movies on TV when a deer gets shot with a big bullet, you'll see the entire side of that deer just ripple when the bullet enters. Roger raglin always talked about the shock big heavy bullet causes VS a smaller lighter weight bullet.

This is the kind of topic I am afraid,where many just have to agree to disagree. Each have their own theory of bullet performance based on reading, range testing, and in the field circumstances and experiences. I personally think shot placement is the first and formost step to effectivly taking an animal, no matter what your shooting.

For years my friends would kid me about hunting with a simple roundball in .54 caliber during modern season. We'd go hunting, them with their modern rifles and me with my Renegade. At the end of the day, they had a deer and I had a deer. Did the rifle make the difference? Maybe, but I always just considered myself lucky when I got a good close shot at one. I then concerned myself with putting that roundball in a spot where it did the most damage.

I personally do believe in the importance of the hydro static shock theory. I've seen too many deer hit poorly, go down with massive internal trama in a short period of time. I also am one that wants that projectile to pass through and not the bullet stopping inside the cavity. Again, that would be my personal preference. I want a projectile that is ACCURATE and after it hits does not fragment too badly,it destroys major organs while at the same time transfering its energy to the other body tissue. In my experiences, when I have a projectile like that, I have deer on the ground.

I have seen what the different projectiles do to deer. Which one is best is dependent on where I am hunting, and the distance I might have to shoot. But this has been a most interesting thread and I thank you for all the good reading.

FG

That statement is not totally true, it really depends on velocity of the given projectile...

A couple of years ago, and I know they are not scientists, but the "Myth Busters" really disproved this therory based on size only by shooting a bunch of different bullets into slaughtered and skinned animals.

Now if you cold shoot that heavy big bullet as fast as I can a lighter smaller bullet then bigger would be better.

I am currently shooting 460 grain conicals @ 1400 fps second, but given the choice I would much prefer to shoot a smaller, faster bullets with an equal amount of energy...

Example 460 gr @ 1400 fps muzzle -> 2002 lbs of energy
1280 fps 50 yds -> 1674 lbs of energy
1182 fps 100 yds ->1428 lbs of energy

250 gr @ 1875 fps muzzle -> 1956 lbs of energy
1741 fps 50 yds -> 1683lbs of energy
1617 fps 100 yds -> 1452 lbs of energy

XTP 200 gr @ 2480 fps muzzle -> 2731 lbs of energy
2281 fps 50 yds -> 2310 lbs of energy
2092 fps 100 yds -> 1943 lbs of energy

Do not even want to talk about the amount of drop with each bullet or the amount of wind defection that can occur on that big slow conical...

Big is better is a myth.... UNLESS you believe the article written above by the guy saying wound channel is the only thing that kills an animal... It is true back in the days of round ball, or even early muzzle loading but not today.