Stopping Power

There is a term that is often bandied about in the gun press: "Stopping power." I suppose there are a ton of definitions for that, but a working one is probably: "The power of a cartridge to stop someone from harming you."

Then there is also "killing power," which is probably fairly self-evident.

They are not the same thing.

Back in the days before sterile technique came into wide use, even minor gunshot wounds had killing power. Sure, it took awhile for sepsis and gangrene to do the job, but the shots still killed. Even after sterile technique and before the development of sulfa drugs and then all of the antibiotics, a gunshot wound in the abdomen was a death shot. Somewhere I read that during the Spanish-American War, every American soldier who was shot in the abdomen died.

(Think of the "self-operation" scene in the movie "The Far Side of the World". Consider that nobody operated with sterile instruments around 1800.)

So even though what today would be considered a flesh wound would kill your opponent, such a wound would not prevent your opponent from beating you to death and, in all probability, would damn near guarantee such an outcome.

These days, though, they're probably nearly synonymous, as a wound that is serious enough to stop a dedicated attacker probably will kill him, and things won't change until we can "set phasers to stun." But "stopping power" sounds so much more benign.

Of course, if you point a firearm at someone and they stop bothering you for fear of getting shot, then you have deterred them and whether that qualifies as "stopping power" is another question.