.300 Blackout vs. 5.56mm Gel Test

300 blackout. We know it's a great hunting round. We know that it's a very quiet round. But what about personal defense inside of the home or workplace or what about a patrol rifle or maybe a special operations or SWAT team rifle in the law enforcement realm? Well, we've got 32 inches of ballistic gelatin.

I've got a 125 grain Barnes TSX round loaded here and I've got a nine inch barrel saint pistol in 300 blackout, the hollow sun. I've checked out where it's gonna be as far as the, uh, offset where I need to be pointing. That green dot Let's take a look. I'm gonna go back kind of, uh, you know, patrol rifle, distance, home defense, environment distance. Uh, this is about 20 ft 21 ft away.

I'm gonna go ahead and chamber around and get into position here. Obviously, we're shooting through light clothing. Uh, this is 10% gelatin and guns locked open. I'm gonna leave that there and take a look. Obviously, you see a lot of energy transfer and movement and I don't think we could ask for a more perfect, uh, gel demo as far as what I'm seeing here.

Uh Absolutely a nice linear track. We see a lot of expansion right here. We see that that polymer black tip breaking up in this area. We see a little bit of fragmentation here very early in the penetration. We start to see activity from the bullet doing what bullets do inside of the human body starting to expand, starting to break up.

So this bullet is designed to hold its mass to have the front of the bullet peel back and then at the base of the bullet, its weight and that gives you the momentum for the depth of penetration. Now, we're always interested in what happens in that 1st 12 to 15 inches, right? That's the most important. One of the things that we look for in a defensive round is that it does penetrate before it really starts to perform in terms of expansion and tearing up tissue. Because if you think about it going into the human body, well, I'm pretty skinny, right?

I'm relatively strong guy. So going through my pectoral muscle doesn't take much. Then the rib cage, then you start getting into the good stuff, which tends to be the two at the back of the human torso. Somebody's got a bigger chest. Uh they, they're a female, we've got a big belly, we're shooting through something like that or multiple layers of clothing.

We really don't want to see this kind of rapid expansion or see like the bulk of the work being done. We see this very, very early. So it already at 2.5, 3 inches of penetration, we start to see sort of the widest part of this performance. We get to, you know, if you're trying to take out a deer or something, this may be great. Don't worry about that.

Start trying to take out a deer or something. It may be great, but it really did kind of do its most significant damage early on now. This is a lot of energy and with a bullet that's going to be doing hydrostatic shock because of the speed that it moves through there, that that hydrostatic or hydrodynamic shock is actually going to be causing damage also inside of the body. We know that I'm not saying this is a bad round, but I am saying this isn't where we want the most damage. We really want it to be back in that 1215 to 18 inches, a 16 inch block.

And our total penetration here is 27 inches and the bullet is beautifully expanded. It does exactly what it's supposed to do. So that's the 300 blackout 125 grain Barnes PSX, very well regarded bullet, great hunting bullet and something you might see put into use in a patrol rifle or for home or homeland defense. In other words, your property, if you're out there, especially against you know, critters, things like that, but human threats as well, not the optimal performance but certainly great performance out of that nine inch barrel. So now what we're going to do next is look at comparing this 300 blackout round to a 556 round.

We're going to use the tap PFD round. So this is the round that Hornaday sells. It's very comparable to law enforcement ammunition, which is very proven performance. It's very comparable to some of the light skinned small varmint type ammo that they have very proven in the uh hunting realm. We're gonna take a look and see what it does inside of this uh tissue simulant through light clothing under the same conditions.

All right. So what I've done, I've gone ahead and just taken a test shot because we just put this optic on here to make sure I know where I am. You know, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna try to actually kind of cheat this a little bit to the left of our other tracks and that'll put me behind it relative to the cameras. Let me get down in an even plane here. And, well, that's kind of what we expect to see when it comes to 308.

We'll lock that open and rebuild our display here and put everything back together. All right. So we kind of rebuild our situation here. Lots and lots of energy coming out of that 7625 51 right? So what do we expect out of that, that tap round?

This was 100 and 55 grain. Well, one thing you might expect is that we definitely got into our second block of gelatin. One thing you may not expect is that once again, out of this very high speed round, when we look at what's happening, I'm gonna get my tape measure from over here when we look at this very high speed round coming out of this 308762 by 51 even out of a 12 inch barrel, we see the vast majority of the the damage the energy transfer that's done is done in that first few inches. Again, very counter intuitive. You think about how a pistol bullet works?

We see most of that expansion happening out here in that 8 to 12 inches kind of right where we want it. But here the vast majority of that damage that tissue damage is done in that uh maybe second to eight or nine inches in even with the 308. So we'll compare and contrast this kind of what we had before. But that round came in just behind and below the 223 lots and lots of deposit, more shrapnel, more fragmentation. And that round came all the way back here to about 24.5 inches.

So maybe surprising to some people that the 300 blackout round that Barnes down. This has everything to do with the construction of the bullet that Barnes round, which is essentially hunting round, made it all the way back about three inches deeper than the 308 round. If you think apples to apples, if we had a 308 hunting round, it probably would have sell out of the back. But the point is here, not necessarily to count on the hunting rounds, but really to have your purpose built defensive rounds. And what makes the most sense to me between the 308, the 300 blackout and the 556 I still like the 556.

Remember a lot of times you hear about people giving these anecdotal stories based on ball ammunition based on standard rounds or even the armor piercing like the 69 grain in the green tip. Well, are they going to poke through this? Absolutely, the purpose built defensive rounds, however, are going to do what you want them to do. And in this case, the 556 is very likely to stay inside the body. The 308 and 300 blackout are very likely to over penetrate.

Now, be interesting to see something similar to the rounds that were designed for personal defense out of that 300 blackout, maybe we'll do that next time right now. In this test today, the 556 round is definitely where I would go in this environment.