Shooting While in Contact Gel Demo

We're gonna do a demo here that I've never done before. We're in our 20th year of personal defense network, various TV shows, lots of live range demos for students and conferences, and even working with some ammunition companies, done a lot of ballistic gel testing, but I don't recall ever doing or seeing a shooting-while-in-contact gel demo, particularly with a 9 millimeter handgun. So what we're looking at here is what can we expect to happen, maybe different. From what we normally get if we're shooting while in contact. Now remember, when we talk about shooting while in contact, we're not talking about the gun being in contact, hopefully; we're talking about being in contact with the threat.

So I would have fought to some situation where I am still in lethal danger. I've created some space. I'm able to get my gun out of my holster, wherever I carry it, and get it into a good retention shooting position, so the muzzle of the gun should not be in. We don't want to get into a situation where if I demonstrate against this table, I push the gun out of battery, or when I jam the gun against someone, that they pull back or sweep the gun away. This may be my one chance to survive this situation.

So I want to make sure that I stay off of the target, but I'm in contact with the threat, off of the target, not in contact with the gun, but physically there's some balance of control here where I've been able to get the gun out and now I'm gonna go ahead and shoot. What we're probably gonna see is a big difference in what we usually refer to as a temporary wound cavity. In other words, when you look at gel demos in slow motion, you see a much larger expansion into the gel than we see when we go up to the gel after it settles and the bullets pass through or gotten trapped, and we just see the permanent wound cavity. What I'm expecting here is to see much bigger expansion of the temporary wound cavity and a much larger permanent wound cavity because it's not just the bullets that are doing the damage, now we're also gonna have some level of damage from the gases that are still expanding as they come out of the front of the firearm, so I'm gonna go ahead and put my glasses on. We'll go through that, that imaginary, in my head that simulation of controlling a knife, maybe pinning somebody against the wall.

I create that space down here. I'm gonna bring the gun up and. Any time we're practicing our contact shooting, if we have a training partner, we don't have to look down because that's very artificial, right? We want them to give us the thumbs up, so I'm gonna look to my camera guys right now, make sure that I have a good thumbs up in terms of my safety and especially on the angle going through this because I don't want to put a round in the table. I want to put a round into the gel.

I'm gonna go ahead and engage the trigger, having gotten that thumbs up, I turned my head away. And take that shot. And yes, when you're this close, you feel that warmth; you definitely feel those expanding gasses. I'm gonna go ahead and put the firearm back into the holster. And I've got some blue thread on myself from the shirt.

Let's take a look and see what we got here. And a lot more dramatic, obviously, on the cover garment that we normally have in front of the gel and. Well, we got a lot of good contrast, that's for sure. You can actually look from the other side and you can see that with some earlier penetration tests that we did with a different kind of ammo, we just have some clean tracks through the gel. Now we've got all that kind of unburned powder, the dust, the debris, the powder that's continuing to burn that's coming out in that gas ball, that flame that you'll see the muzzle blast, that's now going into our threat, right?

And all of that's going in there. Now we're probably not relying on an infection to set in later to defend us, but you can imagine that this wound is going to be a lot nastier than the wound would otherwise be, and you can see that track. We can see that the bullet went in. We've probably got about 10 to 12 inches of penetration in a 16 inch block, so I'm gonna put that at probably about 11 to 12 inches of penetration with the round. We got good expansion from the round, no problem there, right?

No change in what the bullet actually does, but. What is happening here is we have a much larger expansion damaged hole, the track that's going through here — our permanent cavity, if we compare it to what we've got on the other end of the gel block, we can see that's very narrow until the bullet expands. We really don't have any permanent wound in that trail, in that cavity down here with these two rounds on the opposite end of the block we see that we have a much wider trail of permanent damage in close. So as expected, if you're in contact with your threat and that gas is still expanding when you create that hole and some of it's gonna go in there and continue to disrupt the tissue, you are going to have more damage to the threat at close quarters. Of course if you can avoid it, you're better off being at full extension, more than two arms reach away and not in contact with a lethal threat.

If you are, you can be sure your bullet's gonna do what you want it to do if you put it in the right place.