OTM stands for "open tip match," which M855A1 is not. One would think that a self-described ballistics expert such as yourself would know that, but okay...Originally Posted by vicious_cb
TMK is also not in that category, and contrary to what you might assume, the tip was added for aerodynamic reasons, and for feeding in magazines. While the tip behaves similarly to a so-called ballistic tip, like the OTMs kind of behave like HPs sometimes, that's not the impetus behind the design.
Bonded self defense bullets are marketed to do what they were designed to do, which is penetrate flesh and bone. From Speer's own marketing:
They give honorable mention to barrier performance as an afterthought.Their exclusive manufacturing process bonds the uniform jacket to the core one atom at a time, ensuring proper expansion and nearly 100 percent weight retention. The result is superb accuracy and immediate, threat-stopping performance.In other words, there's no cavity to get clogged with drywall is what they're saying.Consistent penetration and expansion through common barriers
All that said, the manufacturers can market them however they want, but the fact remains that bonded self defense bullets are merely plain old bonded soft point bullets, no different technologically from the bonded SPs you find in larger calibers for hunting medium to large game. Bonding processes also do very much introduce inconsistency, which is why you don't see match grade bullets using any of those methods. There are claims about new proprietary bonding methods that offer match grade performance, but I don't know whether that's true or not.
You're correct that any bullet can glance off bone, but what you either fail to appreciate or are unwilling to concede is that the more mass a bullet has, the less chance there is of that happening. Inertia, which is defined as the tendency of an object to remain unchanged (i.e. keep its velocity and trajectory), is directly proportional to its mass. It's also inaccurate to say that bullet cores keep their trajectory. They have more inertia than the smaller fragments so they generally deflect in larger arcs, but you can even see in bare gel that they almost always deflect. And again, whatever you see in gel will be greatly magnified in an actual human body. Gel has no variables, whereas the human body is full of them, meaning any deflection observed in gel is likely to be much more extreme.
As far as evidence, you've effectively provided none, so get off your high horse. An out of context quote about 100gr OTMs and a data dump doesn't net you any points I'm afraid.
I'm not sure if that's literally true or not, but even if it is, there's next to zero chance of it traveling all the way through in a straight line. After passing through arms or a shoulder the base fragment would stand a pretty good chance of going very wide of wherever it was originally headed.
This is pretty typical:
Again, keep in mind that that's in a homogeneous block of gel, which is a best case scenario in terms of getting it to fly straight. Any tendency to yaw or deflect is going to be greatly increased in a real person because you have the bullet passing through many layers of many types of heterogeneous tissue, all separated by intersecting tissue planes, fibrous sacks, and interspersed with bone and sinew. Wound profiles in people are also generally abbreviated compared to the gel profile, which is usually elongated by comparison. So were that bullet in the photo a representation of a shoulder shot, it's theoretically unlikely that the fragments would have penetrated deeply enough, much less stayed on track.
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