ammunition, defense, home, over-penetrationWhat ammunition is the least likely to over-penetrate and go through walls?
I live in a neighborhood where houses are fairly close together and am considering buying a gun for home defense. Specifically, is there ammunition that would likely be stopped by by two outside walls?
JHP (Jacketed Hollow Point) rounds may be your best bet. They are designed to expend ALL of its energy into whatever you shoot it at. If you are using a Magnum round, you may be out of luck. Rifle rounds (outside of a .22) and you can forget about it. Shotguns, despite what internet forums will tell you, WILL punch through walls very easily. 4, 5, even 6 walls at a time. There is anecdotal evidence I’ve seen through pictures where a negligent discharge of 00 buck doing that and embedding themselves in his garage 4 walls over and a few pellets made it to the outside of the neighbor’s wall where they were stopped.
Bird shot will stop with minimal effort, but again there are witnesses to bird shot victims walking themselves to the ambulance.
Like Chris Upchurch said above, the rounds designed for safer use with walls lack force to be nearly as lethal to a man. I like his answer (and gave him a thumbs up) that marksmanship will probably solve the issue.
Any round that’s worth using for self defense is going to penetrate walls, unfortunately.
If it helps any, I have NEVER heard a single story where a self-defense shooting also resulted in a stray bullet hitting an innocent victim. Absolutely the chance exists… but you have to decide if it’s worth it.
There are certain types of handgun ammunition that are designed not to penetrate barriers, such as the Glaser Safety Slug. However, these rounds also have reduced penetration flesh. I prefer rounds that meet the FBI standard of 12” of penetration in ballistic gelatin. This provides enough penetration to reach an assailant’s vital organs, but not so much that it will overpenetrate and pass all the way through him. Such rounds will penetrate multiple interior walls, but that is a problem best solved with marksmanship, rather than using poorly penetrating ammunition.
As the others said, it's pretty solidly proven that any round with enough power to reliably stop an attacker is powerful enough to penetrate multiple walls and cause serious injury to anyone on the other side. See the Box O' Truth, specifically the shotgun test. Bird shot won't penetrate much, but is only effective at stopping birds. The best you can do is a good JHP that won't over-penetrate an attacker and hit somebody on the other side.
The least likely to penetrate is probably ballistic poly carbonate tipped rifle ammunition such as Winchester Ballistic Silvertips, designed for rapid fragmentation as soon as it encounters an obstacle, be it an intruder or drywall.
If you are ever in a defensive situation where you have to shoot inside your house, you have a lot bigger things to worry about than if the rounds will go through the wall. Plus the likelihood of a round actually doing any damage once it leaves your property (after passing through several walls) is fairly low.
Most walls are easier to punch through than humans when it comes to shooting so really anything that will do effective damage to a human will likely go through several layers of drywall or sheet rock before slowing enough to be harmless.
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