I took the family back home to Kansas in June and did the whole “sweat in the humidity thing” for a week. Kansas is great, but if you’re from there, you know the summer humidity saps your spirit and calls for showers several times a day. While my son was down for a nap one afternoon, I took the opportunity to user my in-laws broadband (yeah, they have the Internet in Kansas, despite what you might hear on the coasts), and checked up on the site.
I firmly subscribe to the “measure what you value” school of thought, and consequently use a couple of analytics packages (Google Analytics and Clicky) to see web site stats and keep up with its “health”. On that particular day, the number of hits had gone up a fair bit, and as I dug into it, it became apparent that a number of them were coming in from Italy. Apparently, a group of guys were debating various pistol stopping powers, and had referenced the site in their conversation/debate.
My first thought was “Italy?”
But given a bit to think about it, it’s really not very surprising. Beretta, Rossi, and Benelli are common enough names in the firearms world. Realistically a lot of their arms are made all over the world (of the various components). Naturally, I was interested, but I don’t speak Italian. Google Translate only goes so far, but I ran the page through it, and finally got down to the important question they seemed to have of “I wish they’d shoot something harder.” Of course, we aim to please, so I posted my reply (via Google Translate again) asking what targets they’d like to see. And we finally get to the punch line, because they requested:
A frying pan
(Of course they also requested an iron, but I wasn’t too sure I wanted to shoot one of those, as there’s a fair bit of metal in them. Comment on this if you want). Anyway, we returned to sunny New Mexico, and my wife hit up the local Goodwill and got a couple of frying pans. The first (and the only one we’ve shot so far) was a standard, garden variety frying pan. Not terribly thick, but a good representative of the kind you’d get at Wal-Mart. The other was a cast-iron pan, and we haven’t taken a crack at that one yet, because we’re still debating the necessary safety issues involved in that one.
While stout, the frying pan didn’t hold up all that well to most of the pistol rounds. The diminutive.22 LR round caused a dent, but didn’t penetrate as most of us expected. The .38 Special also didn’t penetrate when shot out of the Ruger GP100 (pistol). If you watch fairly closely, you can in fact see the bullet break up on impact. The same round out of a Winchester 1894 penetrated with no problem however. A number of factors could have led to the different outcomes.
- It could be that the shots were in different enough spots on the frying pan, that it isn’t really an apple to apple comparison.
- There’s much less velocity for the round coming out of the 6” pistol barrel vs the 16” rifle barrel.
- Other?
The other two pistol rounds we tested (.40 and .45 ACP) didn’t have a problem with it either. And in the theory of completeness, we tested the .223 from a Mini-14, and got the expected nice little puncture hole expected from a rifle round.
Let me know if you have any questions.
- Frank
