Regulators in action

[Ian Batten]

On 21 Feb 08, at 2215, Matthew Pemble wrote:
> From a military perspective it is moral that you kill the enemy  
> rather than leave them to die horribly on the battlefield (remember  
> the Crimea, no matter what modern 'accurate' history has made of  
> Florence, and Solferino) .  Equally from the law enforcement  
> perspective, it is IMHO moral and right that the bullet stops,  
> colloquially rather than actually, 'dead' the target, who can be  
> hospitalised, healed, charged and then acquitted or convicted.

Actually, the reason for using hollow-point ammunition is precisely  
the opposite to that.  Hollow point will kill, rather than leave a  
nice clean hole, and it will stop inside the target rather than  
emerge from the other side carrying significant energy.  When they  
talking about `stopping' power, they mean rapid kill power.  The  
ultimate expression of hollow point, which is things like Magsafe  
ammunition, give up all the kinetic energy into the target; at the  
other extreme, FMJ rifle ammunition  might exit the target carrying a  
substantial proportion of the energy it entered with.

If the police were to need to shoot someone --- and whatever the  
rights and wrongs of the bad decisions, there will always be cases  
where the decision is a good one --- and were to only use Geneva- 
convention-compliant FMJ, you wouldn't want to be behind the  
target.   The military, by the way, would rather leave people wounded  
rather than dead: they consume resources in treatment and evacuation  
that corpses don't.

The Swiss, by the way, won't (or certainly didn't) use NATO standard  
5.56x45 FMJ, suspecting that the jacketing isn't quite strong  
enough.   They had their own version made: Geneva being in  
Switzerland, they takea strong line on the convention.

ian