To begin with, the bullet jacket is heavier to provide increased strength. The Critical Duty FlexLock bullet shares a similar external appearance with the Critical Defense FTX bullet due to the use of a similar, compressible plug in the nose cavity, but it’s a different bullet on the inside. The result was the Critical Duty “FlexLock” bullet. An advantage of this kind of design is that the cavity is not susceptible to getting plugged with debris (such as clothing fibers) that might retard hydrostatic expansion of the bullet - a common issue with traditional, open-cavity JHPs.Īfter the success of the Critical Defense bullet in the commercial market, Hornady turned their attention back toward the full FBI protocol and the development of a suitable law enforcement bullet that would excel in all the tests, including barriers. When the FTX bullet strikes a target, the polymer plug gets compressed and produces outward force on the inside walls of the cavity, which opens up the bullet for controlled expansion. The Flex Tip eXpanding (FTX) bullet developed for Critical Defense ammunition looks like a traditional Jacketed Hollow Point (JHP) bullet whose cavity has been filled with a polymer plug. This makes the ammunition useful to armed citizens for concealed carry and home defense and to law enforcement officers in situations where barriers are not a likely concern, such as off-duty carry, back up guns, and possibly some undercover operations. They also increase muzzle flash, so the Hornady engineers had to address these concerns in the design of the product.Ĭritical Defense is optimized for short barrel performance in the bare gelatin and heavy clothing stages of the FBI protocol, with an emphasis on avoiding over-penetration. Those short barrels rob velocity and decrease energy, which often leads to under-expansion and over-penetration in soft targets. Instead, it was designed for defensive situations where no intermediate barrier (other than clothing) was involved, and it was assumed that it would be fired from compact carry guns with short barrels. The important thing to know about Hornady’s Critical Defense ammunition is that it was not designed to pass the full FBI protocol, because it was never envisioned as law enforcement-duty ammunition for service-size pistols. From an engineering standpoint, it’s a tough task to design a bullet that will perform all these jobs acceptably well, and some trade-offs are involved - you may wind up sacrificing performance on one test to ensure you’ll pass another.įor example, if you want a bullet that can pass the difficult auto glass test, you might end up with a design that penetrates more deeply than desired in bare gelatin. Properties such as penetration depth, recovered diameter, and retained weight are measured to compare bullets against each other, and against FBI-desired standards.įBI standards require ammunition designed for law enforcement is able to penetrate gel between 12 and 18 inches in each of the six tests, and the industry has responded with products that do. In the first of those tests, the bullets are fired into a bare gelatin block, but in the remaining five tests, the bullets must pass through specified barriers before entering the blocks, including heavy clothing, steel, wallboard, plywood, and automobile glass. The protocol is a series of six standardized tests, where bullets are fired into 10 percent ballistic gelatin, according to detailed procedures. Police ammunition: Considerations for storage and use
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