John Fogh offers this advice from John Holschen:
Believing that the 5.56 “stopping power problem” is solved by a different bullet and/or cartridge is likely delusional in my opinion.
This statement doesn't stand on it's own because I'm pretty sure a 16" shell from the Missouri is an instantaneous (for all practical purposes) man stopper. Just the muzzle blast will kill. But that's the nit-picky engineer in me. And besides, Holschen qualifies it as referring to handheld firearms:
The stopping power “problem” is based on the misconception that there exists a hand-held firearm which can instantly terminate hostile behavior (reliably and repeatedly).
But the most interesting part to me was the conclusive evidence that:
...[A] BG was hit 12 times with an AR at a range of 9-12 yds.
- 10 rounds struck his torso producing fatal damage to his liver, spleen, heart and both lungs.
- 1 round struck his right femur fracturing same (and starting his fall toward the ground.)
- 1 round entered through his left eye and destroyed a significant portion of his brain (this was the last shot according to forensics but they noted the BG was already falling at the time this round hit him.)
- The shooting was captured on both video and (separate) audio recordings. The elapsed time from the LEO’s first shot to his 15th shot (total rounds fired) was just under 5 seconds.
- During those 5 seconds the BG continued to fight, firing 6 rounds from a .357 revolver.
The LEO fired three rounds per second and got 12 of his 15 shots on target and one of those was a head shot, all while being shot at by the bad guy. Impressive. Had he been shooting a .30 caliber rifle I doubt he could gotten near as many shots on target in that time frame. What this may mean is that in a similar event the .30 caliber rifleman would have put only two or three shots in the target and the BG stopped his attack in the same amount of time.
So which caliber has more "stopping power"? Remember, you can double the effectiveness of any bullet by putting another round through your target.