Over-penetration: The Correct Solution

Whether you’re a civilian interested in protecting your family or you’re part of a military or law enforcement tactical team you’ve got to think through a bunch of different considerations pertaining to selecting the right weapon system for your mission. Here are several of these below:

• Cartridge lethality
• Ammo capacity
• Accessory capability (lights, lasers, optics, etc.)
• Ease of use (intuitive controls)
• Maneuverability (can you fight in and around structures?)

There are many elements to consider for a fighting firearm that deserve deliberate attention, but there is one factor that I am asked about that I am simply tired of: over-penetration.

While you should give over-penetration the consideration it is due, we need to seek the correct solution and not obsess over what we think the correct solution is: a magic bullet.

My Frustration with Over-Penetration: A Magic Bullet

My frustration with the constant conversation surrounding over-penetration is that it’s this obsessive snipe hunt for the perfect magical bullet. It’s this desire for a bullet that shoots through what I want it to shoot through but not what I don’t want it to shoot through.

So, if someone engages a home invader intent on harming their family, but the round travels through the bad guy, through several walls, and hits an innocent, that’s what everyone means by over-penetration.

The injury inflicted upon that innocent individual would be the home defenders fault. The idea then is to create a bullet that will achieve the penetration needed to pound through flesh to stop a threat but won’t go through a wall or more walls.

The problem is that this bullet doesn’t exist!

Some bullets do better than others, but there is no bullet that will punch into a body, deliver the damage needed to save the day, but not go through a wall of sheetrock if the good guy were to miss. You need the penetration power to put down the threat, and that power is going to be much greater than what the average home wall is capable of stopping.

Just about every single bullet is going to penetrate through a few boards of sheetrock. That’s just how it is. The point of a bullet is to penetrate. When you ask for a bullet that is sufficiently lethal but won’t over-penetrate, you’re asking for a non-penetrating, penetrating projectile. It’s like asking for a mug of cold, hot cocoa or a round triangle. You just can’t have it both ways.

Over-Penetration is Always Going to be a Problem

Over-penetration is always going to be a problem, you cannot get around it, and you just have to know your universal firearm safety rule: know your target, what’s beyond it, what’s around it, and what’s in front of it.

Ultimately, you’re responsible for every bullet you fire until the round stops moving. Every bullet has a lawyer attached to it, as the old saying goes.

If You’re Worried about Over-Penetration, You Might Have Already Failed.

We have the tactical luxury of setting up the defenses in our homes however we want. We get to set the battlefield before the fight ever comes our way. So, calculate all the places in your home that you are most likely to engage a threat and determine the best sectors of fire that provide the most defensive advantage. Then employ the right tactics to make sure your firing sectors never fall across your kid’s bedrooms or that if you are taking fire, that those rounds aren’t passing by you or through you and into your family.

We get to preplan where we will engage the threat on our home turf and therefore we can ensure—with proper family planning—that no one except for us and the bad guys are in the line of fire.

If we do this correctly, then we don’t have to worry about the problem of over-penetration. If we’ve selected the right weapon system and cartridge, understood oursectors of fire, and planned and drilled our family to respond well, then we have fixed the issue of over-penetration and hopefully won the day. Yay for that!

Conclusion

The solution to over-penetration is not just bullet selection. Tactics and battlefield preparation have way more to do with not only winning the fight but ensuring that in the messy chaos of a gunfight our misses or any return fire don’t hurt anyone we are trying to protect. You should be able to employ your defensive tactics with 9mm, 5.56, .308, 00 Buck, or whatever and achieve the same result of not endangering innocent lives
around you.

Remember, Train Hard. Train Smart. And know your target, what’s beyond it, in front of it, and all around it.