Gel vs. Bone

[A.J. Holst]

Penetration, expansion, bullet weight, caliber barrel length, all factors in the great debate, but what about solid objects?

All these tests are done in gel or water-based stops by the D-I-Y'er.

Nobody seems to address what happens when the bullet hits bone.

we practice torso / chest shots for SD, good chance you'll hit a rib or two, so unless you practice gut shots, does gel give a good indicator of bullet performance?

[roverboy]

Some bullet companies will take a large leg bone and put in a block of ballistic gel to see what they're bullets do when hitting bone. It takes a mean bullet in my opinion to keep going after hitting a big bone.

[Dolomite_supafly]

I think gels give you the ideal performance of a bullet. Other things such as clothing, walls or glass can negatively affect bullet performance.

If someone wanted to test it wouldn't be that had to use a piece of hard wood or get some bones from a local meat processor. Or to make it standard use some sort of polymer that mimics the density of bone.

One good thing about hits on bone is they can create secondary missles that can also do damage.

Dolomite

[Guest BungieCord]

Not true. People have been doing real-world tests with animal (and human) carcasses since the earliest matchlock muskets. Probably the most noteworthy (or notorious, depending) were the Thompson-LaGarde tests.

The reason ballistic gelatin has become the default is that it is a uniform medium. Every bullet tested encounters essentially the same "tissue" as every other, which gives you a valid basis for apples-to-apples comparisons. If you incorporate bone or any similar material into the testing, you can't necessarily make that apples-to-apples comparison unless you have some fashion of standardization.

If you do incorporate a bone-like material, there still is no way to have a single standard that would approximate terminal effects against every region of the body. The ribs are just beneath the skin but the femur is wrapped in several inches of muscle and fat. And your "gut shot" has neither, unless the bullet penetrates far enough to reach the spine.

So you'd be abandoning a single, simple standard for half a dozen complex ones, none of which offers any valid comparison to any of the others. And none of that would tell you anything you couldn't have discovered by visiting Farmer Brown and buying the main course for your next luau, shooting it, and performing a necropsy.

The FBI, BTW, does have a "heavy clothing" ballistic gel test.

[JAB]

Not true. People have been doing real-world tests with animal (and human) carcasses since the earliest matchlock muskets. Probably the most noteworthy (or notorious, depending) were the Thompson-LaGarde tests.

The reason ballistic gelatin has become the default is that it is a uniform medium. Every bullet tested encounters essentially the same "tissue" as every other, which gives you a valid basis for apples-to-apples comparisons. If you incorporate bone or any similar material into the testing, you can't necessarily make that apples-to-apples comparison unless you have some fashion of standardization.

If you do incorporate a bone-like material, there still is no way to have a single standard that would approximate terminal effects against every region of the body. The ribs are just beneath the skin but the femur is wrapped in several inches of muscle and fat. And your "gut shot" has neither, unless the bullet penetrates far enough to reach the spine.

I agree with you about the reason companies want to use a standard media. However, does it really tell us anything about 'real world' shootings? After all, no two human bodies are going to be 'uniform' even if shot in the exact, same spot on the body. Some folks are going to have more muscle, some will have a thicker subcutaneous fat layer, some may be 'skin and bones' - not to mention that some people are just plain physically 'tougher' (an attribute that is pretty much impossible to quantify) than others.

Therefore, I don't believe that gel testing yields much, if any, specific information regarding how a round would perform inside a living body. What gel testing does is allow one round/bullet to be tested against another in the same, uniform media - the idea being that the bullet that performs the best relative to other rounds has a good chance of outperforming those other rounds when fired into an assailant, etc. That is why I also see value in informal tests using water jugs or wetpack newspaper, as well. While water jugs (for instance) might not be homogenous and while there might be slight differences in the plastic from one jug to the next, it is my belief that they are similar enough for the basic function of comparing performance of one round to the next. In other words, to my mind, a block of gelatin is no more 'analagous' to a human body than a line of water jugs but useful information can be gathered from both.

I have seen posts on some forums where folks have used pork ribs or pork roasts to represent shooting a human assailant. In some instances, these people have covered the pork ribs or roasts with a couple of layers of denim before shooting. In such tests, there is clothing, bone, fat and muscle tissue involved so this might actually be 'closer' to a 'real world' shooting than gel, water jugs or anything else. It is my guess that dead tissue might not react exactly like living tissue - not to mention the probability that no two pigs are alike, no two humans are alike and no pig is going to be exactly like a human. Still, as it at least still involves shooting real bone, fat, muscle, etc. it is my opinion (which is worth about as much as you are paying for it) that this method probably at least gives some 'practical but unscientific' idea of how your ammo would perform in a self defense situation.

Edited December 9, 2011 by JAB