Yes, they will. There are numerous reports of people shot in the heart by RIFLE rounds who kept fighting till they bled out, the most notable being the Red Baron who was shot through the heart and still managed to fly on for several miles before he finally bled out and crashed.
Battlefield reports are often contradictory and done in a rush. That applies to the Red Baron as well.
But shots to the heart will put a man on his but and into shock PDQ. Will they possibly have enough mind to keep doing low effort things like guide a joy stick to land an aircraft? yeah, possibly, depending on how high they are and other things.
But will they still be charging you swinging a machete? No.
And when a rifle round goes through the fleshy part of the body it tends to do a through and through wound. The 45 was designed to stop in the body and do as much damage within it without exiting. That is why it is better than the 9mm and the 308 for close up front shooting, IMO.
The death of the Red Baron has been EXTENSIVELY researched. Probably THE most researched death in history.
And also extensively argued about. The Canadian airmen wanted credit and the ground units wanted credit. They still argue about it.
Guns And Ammo published an article in the 1970's called "The Shock Myth Exploded" by Peter Hathaway Capstick a renowned African Big Game hunter and he very humorously destroys the whole concept of "knockdown power".
Putting a person into shock has to do with blood loss, not knockdown power.
He even uses science (which I like) to do it. Put another way, what exactly is a foot pound? What does it mean when a projectile is claimed to have 1,500 foot pounds? I'll give you a hint...it means that supposedly, that projectile can, upon impact, move an object that weighs 1,500 pounds one foot. I've never,ever seen that happen....you?
Yes, with metal targets that had roughly a pound of mass. Most things get penetrated by the bullet so it doesn't appear to have the effect described.
The use of foot pounds to measure the kenetic energy of a bullet when it leaves the muzzle is not scientific, since the bullet is decelerating as soon as it leaves the barrel. Foot pounds is a measurement of acceleration over a distance of displacement. Since the bullet is not accelerating, but decelerating instead, it should be measured in distance*mass/time, such as gram meters per second...
People use it to imply how much acceleration the moving body can impact onto another body like in a game of pool. But that is not necessarily true as torque and elasticity can absorb the energy and not all transfer into new speed of the struck object.
Further, as Newton taught us "for every action there is an opposite and equal reaction" how could you possibly hold on to a weapon firing a projectile with that type of energy? Obviously no one could...so we are left with the problem that the muzzle energy numbers don't really mean anything.
Dude, take a pound weight, then lift it over your head. You just did a foot pound of acceleration. A good crossbow can easily generate over 100 foot pounds of energy, mine does, though I cant recall the specs off hand other than it has a 150 pound pull.
If you really want to know how much energy is really being dumped into a target look at the recoil energy figures.... that is the theoretical maximum amount of energy that the target can soak up.
Not really. Let's say the total energy is X, as soon as the bullet is fired the should can have at most X/2 since there is an equal and opposite force applied tot he bullet and shoulder. Also the recoil can be largely absorbed by a spring and the gas blowback that drives the bolt, ejecting the spent round and loading a new one. M16's have very little recoil though they are military grade rounds for an assault weapon.
The 45 ACP is about 400 fp, so the hand actually handles about 200, less than that really.
Could you tie a 200 pound load to strap held in your grip and take a step up one foot? Sure you can, its not a problem.
But hey, that's just science...
science-ish, yeah
The English measurement system is a confusing thing since the word pound is used for mass and acceleration both, so it is confusing. I think science should be discussed with metric units to avoid confusion.
