American military surgeon Louis A. LaGarde’s Gunshot Injuries was the standard on ballistics and war surgery for many years:
La Garde’s involvement in assessing weapons effectiveness dated hack to the Spanish-American War and the ensuing Philippine insurrection. Then as now, some ballisticians believed that a bullet striking almost anywhere on the body could cause immediate incapacitation due to shock. The shock itself was thought to make the victim fall down and stop fighting. The pathophysiology of this mysterious phenomenon was believed to be related to an indirect effect of the bullet on the nervous system, and this attribute was referred to as the bullet’s stopping power or its knockdown power. Military handguns then in use were found to have inadequate stopping power, since the enemy did not fall down unless the bullet fractured a leg bone or hit a vital organ such as the heart.
LaGarde and members of the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps were assigned the task of testing existing pistol ammunition and finding a pistol round with the desired stopping power. Working in the Chicago stockyards in 1904, they shot unanesthetized cattle with various weapons, assessing incapacitation by recording the number of bullets required to knock the animal down. Recognizing that a shot into the heart would have similar stopping power regardless of the ammunition they used, they tried to hit only body parts that would not cause immediate death. In a typical experiment, they shot one animal for each type of ammunition tested and reported:
.45 Colt 220-grain lead bullet with small flat on point
720 fps, 288 foot-pounds
7th animal Bull, 10 years old, 1,300 lbsShot through lungs. At 1 minute, shot again through lungs. At 2 minutes 35 seconds, shut through abdomen and fell. At 2 minutes 45 seconds, shot again through abdomen, got up, then fell again — tried to regain his feet for 70 seconds — and was killed by hammer blows to the head.
The sad truth about wound-ballistics research is that much information that could be relevant and important is gathered under conditions that are barbarous as well as scientifically unsound, and information that is more aesthetically pleasing and scientifically elegant often consists of esoterica that are meaningful in a laboratory but irrelevant to battlefield conditions. While LaGarde’s Chicago-stockyard experiments fall into the relevant-but-barbarous category, they showed that no shock, stopping, or knockdown power was observable beyond that directly attributable to the effect of the bullet at the site of wound. His official report stated the only reasonable conclusion regarding handguns: “[They] offer no hope of stopping an adversary by shock. Inexplicably, not only did La Garde not restate this firm conclusion in Gunshot Injuries, he also misquoted his own official report, and suggested that he had actually observed shock. Because of this misinformation, for the past 70 years ballisticians have continued to search for a mathematical explanation of the shock that La Garde said he observed in bullet wounds made by handguns.
Wounds made by military rifles and machine guns are frequently incapacitating, however. One of the specific goals of the WDMET study was to collect information on the behavior of soldiers after they were wounded. The database also includes the soldiers’ (and their buddies’) recollections of their behavior just before they were wounded. Almost every casualty who was shot — whether in the head, trunk, legs, or arms — immediately stopped his pre-wounding behavior. In fact, most casualties fell to the ground and lay there, suggesting that assault rifles and machine guns do indeed have stopping power.
(From Conventional Warfare: Ballistic, Blast and Burn Injuries.)