(Not directed at you)
This article ignores reality.
The 5.56mm is a medium distance varmint round. It over-penetrates and is illegal to use to hunt deer in many states because it is insufficient to bring down the animal in single shot. The 7.62x39mm and similar.30-30 are far more effective one-shot killers and used for deer and pigs.
This yawing/tumbling/magical BB effect is more associated with the 5.45x39mm from the AK74, which earned it the name “poison bullet.” Like the 5.56mm, the 5.45x39mm is designed to be lightweight and capable of hitting targets up to 500m-600m with a DMR.
The 5.56mm is facing increased scrutiny by our military because jihadists are taking several hits before staying down. The magical yawing is not doing much to stop them.
Good point...and there is no "logistical logjam" as a result of Mustafa Bin Sky Hook going down.
His compadres simply know that allah and mohamhead (p p be upon BOTH their heads) will either cure him or send him on to his dubious paradise.
I want the goat humping jihadi to suffer as much as possible, scream, thrash about, moan, groan, call out to his moon-god...so that his fellow goat humping jihadis know that even if allah (p p be on his head) does take him off to paradise, it's going to be one hell of a rocky road.
Interesting as one of the reasons the Army switched to the 1911 Browning .45 was the previous side arm had insufficient stopping power used against fanatical Muslims in the Philippines.
Which seems to me why for the majority of basic fighters, particularly non professional soldiers, the 7.62x39 and the AK would be more real world effective. My accuracy out to 100-150 yds is, for all practical purposes, no different with AK or AR. Also, if I could afford the optics that would make me reliably effective at 500 yards, I wouldn't put them on an AR.
If I may amplify on what you have written, Azeem, I’m sure Doc Pronk is quite a fine practitioner of the medicinal arts, but his grounding in physical science is somewhat lacking. Just because you can quote Newton’s laws of motion does not make you Richard Feynman. Especially when you misapply them.
I congratulate the good doctor for “discovering” the same schtick that Eugene Stoner used as his sales pitch going on 57 years ago. Little bullets going really fast make gruesome wounds. But his understanding of why it’s happening isn’t quite up to scratch.
First, he simplistically reduces all the myriad aspects of energy down to “kinetic” energy, as in “...the [kinetic] energy that [the bullet] delivers into the target....” Does he (errantly) think KE is the only game in town? Just where does that leave momentum? As any bow hunter will tell you (a class of hunters who work with much more meager sums of energy than gun hunters), penetration favors momentum. Fired from the same bow, the heavier arrow always produces better penetration, despite its lower velocity (and hence lower KE). This also is why dangerous game hunters use enormous thumb-sized monolithic bullets driven to modest velocities rather than bullets smaller than your pinky finger flung at warp factor four.
Second, unlike momentum, there is no law of conservation of kinetic energy, nor any principle of physics that stipulates that all of a bullet’s KE must be transferred to the target, even if the target arrests the bullet and it does not exit. Furthermore, greater KE does not guarantee improved terminal effects.
And third, he assumes that kinetic energy is an apt metric for determining wounding potential. A 77-gr .224 SMK @4055 fps has a virtually identical KE to a 220-gr .308 SMK @2400, yet the wound patterns the two bullets would produce would be so dissimilar as to defy comparison.
For that matter, a 570-gr .500 NE has nearly half again more KE (at the muzzle) than either of those two examples, but produces very limited if any hydrostatic shock. Which is significant, because the trauma he’s gushing over is primarily a demonstration of hydrostatic shock, which is a factor separate and apart from the matter of KE.
Doc Pronk’s observations are what they are, but his analysis of why they’re that way aren’t what he represents them to be.
Just a thought. When we fought set wars, our enemy has logistics backing them up. They had medical units and cared for their wounded. When you are fighting an enemy who does not fear death—who looks forward to it—the wounding aspect goes out the door. It would make sense to adapt a larger, more lethal round.