[David Armstrong]

It does if they are shooting while retreating and your hits penetrate well at the different angles you may encounter by a moving bad guy.

If the BG is running away you don't need to keep shooting at him, IMO. Hunker down and stay safe.

Unfortunately history isn't going to smash the bad guys bones or penetrate deeply for me when Mr Murphy sees to it that I get the long shot.

Sigh. Once again simple logic just goes whizzing by. Since you seem to have missed the point, history indicates that you don't need to do that stuff. As for Mr. Murphy, you have chosen to compromise what you carry, why do you think it OK for you to now criticize how others compromise in what they carry?

And as I have also pointed out many times I'm not for bigger is better in the traditional debate.

Strange. Let's see now...."The same guys who tout how they would bring a rifle to a gunfight and not a handgun refuse to admit that bigger is better. Thats hypocritical thinking in my book." Looks like you are having a hard time figuring out just what it is you believe. One post you are all for bigger is better. Next post you are not for bigger is better. Sort of hypocritical??

I'm simply saying that the caliber should be big enough to consistently do what needs to be done to force compliance by a bad guy under gun fight dynamics.

Everybody knows what you are saying. We are simply pointing out that what you say is contradicted by the reality of gunfights. You are mandating a performance parameter that is virtually irrelevant in the conventional CCW environment. Very few BG need to be forced into compliance. They do it anyway!

One of the reasons is power and the ability to do what needs to be done to stop a threat.

Those are two reasons. For me it is simple, and it is one reason--it improves my chances to get rounds on the BG. Again, caliber is fairly irrelevant.

The shortest list in the world would be that of folks who would chose the 22 or 25 if a shootout was eminent.

Well, we might disagree. As we have seen here, I think that short list would be folks who would choose any handgun if a shootout was imminent. You don't carry a CCW handgun because you think a shootout is imminent, so that entire line of thought is rather silly.

You keep justifying puny and I'll keep debating against it.

You can debate all you want, but until you can come up with some reasons to explain why we should ignore the history of success it is sort of like arguing that birds cannot fly.

Because David in the end even with all your stats indicating just how adequate the puny calibers are, even you will choose bigger if a shoot out was eminent. For me that speaks volumes.

For you to continually have to resort to a situation where few folks would pick ANY handgun at all in order to justify your selection of handgun speaks volumes also.

Something that the puny ones simply cannot reliably do.

And which they apparently do not need to do. That is your main problem on this issue.

Dave, one of the ideas that I miss reading about is the idea of confidence.

I think I addressed that in the other thread, or at least tried to do so. And I agree, confidence is important. Some people put confidence in their tools, some have confidence in themselves.

However, as you point out it is the history and it is hard to dispute.

You would think so, yet so many regularly try to argue against the lessons of history. This is only one of those areas.

We know movement is likely. We know hits are difficult to get under the duress of a life and death struggle (low hit ratio's in actual shoot outs). We know that 22/25's lack sufficient penetration to reliably penetrate at the different angles we are likely to encounter much less if bone is contacted.

And we also know that doesn't seem to matter much to the success of a DGU incident. We know you usually don't have to get a hit. We know that any hit, with any caliber, usually stops the incident. We know that sufficient penetration usually has no impact on the BG stopping. Strange that you keep ignoring all those other "we knows".