[SJSAMPLE]

Holy Shit.
After "tumbling", this is the worst poorly defined myth.
The 5.56 round was designed to fragment, EXPLOSIVELY.
There was never any ingtent to "wound".

[wyattearp]

The 5.56 round was designed to fragment, EXPLOSIVELY.

I've fired a lot of .223, and I've never seen ball ammo fragment. On the other hand, I have seen one tumble, AFTER hitting the target. Fired a round into a line of water soaked phone books. It went in about a foot and blew out one side at a 90-degree angle. The recovered bullet was bent in the middle, also at about a 90-degree angle.

It blew one hell of a ragged hole, BTW. Although it was NOTHING compared to what I did to a similar line of phone books with a .30-30. The difference was that the .30-30 made a massive wound channel in a straight line (totally destroying 3 phone books at its largest diameter), while the .223 was clearly tumbling. It was one ragged, jagged hole.

You should have seen what happened when I used a .223 hollow point. It went in about 8 inches and basically detonated. Soaking wet yellow paper flew in every direction, about one phone books' worth. There was no round to recover. It was ugly.

[colderwater]

According to surgeon Dr. M. Fackler, the American .223 projectile tumbles after penetrating the human body just like any other pointed bullet. If the impact velocity is high enough, the forces on the tumbling bullet cause it to fracture at the cannelure. Anyone can Google Fackler and check this out.

I dispute that 7.62mm is a hands-down better general purpose round; it does not always fragment nor always kill instantly. (I'm sure many freepers have shot deer with .308 winchester or .30-30 and discovered the animal does not drop on the spot; but runs some tens of yards first even though hit with expanding bullets. And a deer is no hyped-up hajji.)

Even the Russians switched to .22 caliber (I think 5.45mm) more than 20 years ago. Given the restriction to FMJ, this caliber has much to commend for general purpose, high volume of accurate fire.

As for Mr Kalashnikov,his gun is nice in that it is reliable, but I've never seen an accurate one on the range (maybe accurate ones exist somewhere). Beyond 100 yards or so, I'm better served with some variant of the M16.

C.W.