Oh holy cow man, where to even begin with this study. These doctors have waded into the caliber wars, and they are totally unequipped with even the basics.
I should leave this alone, but I'll go ahead and do a quick thread. The first thing to say is that militaries and state and federal law enforcement have spent years and tens of millions studying this exact issue. There is an endless literature around this specific question.
But none of that literature from the professional users and studiers of gun violence is cited, nor do they even seem to really care about it. If they had taken just a little time, they'd know about the role of 9mm NATO in the caliber wars & the reason for its popularity
9mm has been the subject of a few decades of intensive R&D from public & private entities, and in contrast to when it first became popular in the 90's it is now considered by most to be more lethal than the much larger .45ACP thanks mainly to these improvements.
So putting 9mm alongside similarly sized calibers like .38spl, and acting as if they're all "medium calibers" and using that as a unit of analysis, is nonsense. It would be almost like measuring the size of various viruses & correlating that to lethality absent other consideratns
My point is that when it comes to lethality and ESPECIALLY lethality's relationship to bullet size and weight, modern 9mm self-defense ammo is in a class by itself /by design/. Again, it has been specifically optimized for high lethality at a small size, & the other rounds havent
If they were going to divide these calibers up correctly, the way people who actually know things about ammo would do it, then the results would be totally predicable (again, decades of study & millions spent on this question) and nobody would care enough to pay attention.
I could go on about this, but I'll end at here: I see no place in the study where they've even acknowledged that different bullets in the same caliber have radically different lethality. Were the bad guys shooting ball ammo, or cheap hollow points, or legit self-defense rounds?
There is a section where they acknowledge limitations of the study, but they know so little about guns and ammo that they don't even know enough to talk about the OMG HUGE difference that bullet design makes in wound properties.
Oh, one more thing. As @RAVerBruggen points out, they're using the results of this bogus study to attack a straw man!
If you ever find yourself wondering why guns nuts seem so bitter & crazy, it's because of stuff like this. A bunch of doctors, writing JAMA, have produced a gun-related "study" that is "series of tubes" ignorant, & it is being promoted in the Washington Post.
Every one of us who cares enough to follow this issue has a groove worn in our desk where we've beaten our head on it because of this kind of thing. If this issue is so pressing and important, why can researchers who study it not be bothered to consult existing literature?
Ok I should stop, but I'll put in some links. Just some basic googling by these researchers would've helped. Again, all the head desks... all of them. policemag.com/channel/weapon…
Again, the FBI SPENT MILLIONS AND DID SCIENCE ON THIS QUESTION. looserounds.com/2014/09/21/fbi…
If you want to see what the government was thinking about this question in 50's and 60's, again much taxpayer money spent & science done, you can learn about it in the context of the AR-15 (M16 really) here: amazon.com/Black-Rifle-Re… Some of the sources are reproduced.
