.30 cal carbine round is not a full rifle charge. 5.56mm is. Weight and speed of the round determines wound channel. (greater weight and slower speed equal bigger wound channel) The .30 cal carbine does not bring people down. If given enough time to bleed out you will die from a .30 cal carbine round but it will take awhile. You are correct in your description of deer running and bleeding out, the same thing occurs with people. Especially people drugged up trying to die for mohammed. Knock down power is the ability to put the bad guy down fast, especially at close ranges (urban/jungle combat). We had serious problems with this in Falluejah with green tip ammo. It was too heavy and especially too fast. It creates the ice pick wound - straight and narrow creating a slow bleed out rate. This allows hajhi more time to close and kill. The 5.56mm green tip was given greate weight and higher propulsion in the early 1980s to allow it to be used as belted ammo for the Squad Automatic Weapon. SAW needed performance to 700m so the upped the charge and weight. Result was when ammo used at short range on thin chested bad guys it just spike through the body and the body continued to charge. Big problem. Not being a know it all but .30 cal carbine was never produced after WWII for a reason. We used it in Korea because it was available and our little asian allies found it easier to shoot. It is not a combat weapon, and will get people killed who think it is.
1. “Knock Down Power” is a myth. It’s a mathematical computation that doesn’t correlate to actual performance on tissue. Greater weight and slower speed DO NOT equal a bigger wound channel. A larger bullet diameter MIGHT, but the hydrostatic effect on tissue (from velocity) and fragmentation is what really makes the permanent wound channel larger.
2. It isn’t perfect, but there are plenty of people who use the same reasoning for the 5.56mm, which you call a “full rifle charge”. It isn’t. It’s an assault rifle cartridge (med power round). I could easily argue that Lake City isn’t making 30.06 any more, but that wouldn’t prove a thing. We moved on from the M-1 Garand as well. Doesn’t mean it was particularly bad, does it?
3. Green tip (M855) is acutally slower than the previous M913 55gr round. You’re correct in the “ice pick” effect, because while the M855 isn’t really “armor piercing”, it didn’t fragment as well as the M193. For that matter, 7.62mm FMJ doen’t fragment like the M193 and, as far as terminal ballistics go, relies 100% on the 37% greater bullet diameter. It’s really only better at much longer ranges and for shooting through cover/armor. Inside common combat ranges (under 100m), the 5.56mm has greater terminal ballistics on the body. Velocity and fragmentation.
Again, there are THOUSANDS of stories about people taking 5, 10 or even “41” rounds to go down. That alone should make any reasonable skeptic say, “WTF?” and rethink the story.
I’ve been told, “I fired the entire magazine and he didn’t go down.”
To which, I immediately reply, “You missed.”