i thought hollow point rounds are more damaging than ball rounds?
i think they should use five seven:lovegrin: ...
That's the point. When any organization selects ammunition, they look at 3 things; stopping power, range, and availability. Price is rarely a factor unless it's really extravagant. Range is the maximum distance a bullet is able to travel while maintaining acceptable accuracy, availability is how many other countries or organization within that country uses it, and how easy it is to acquire it on the market (the NATO rounds are shared by all NATO countries and more because on the battlefield it makes logistics much more simple), and stopping power is the ability to stop a person. Stopping power is what is in focus here.
On any battlefield, including on in an urban setting, the escalation to using weapons means that the weapon operator's job is now shoot to kill. Studies show that if a bullet doesn't permanently disable a person on impact, his adrenaline system will render all subsequent shots painless, thus unless the subsequent shots disable him by striking the brain or critical joints in the body, they won't stop him through pain or shock, because of the adrenaline coursing through his bloodstream. More bullets fire also raises the chances of a weapon jam or collateral damage, thus increasing the need for a one-shot-stop weapon. Hollowpoint ammunition does this by expanding upon impact, causing massive internal injuries and bleeding. This ensures that even if the victim doesn't die by the impact of the bullet, he will by bleeding out in minutes. If minutes is too long, supposing he had a weapon, the the operator has the option of shooting him a few more times, and with the expanding properties of the bullet, he is far more likely to critically injure major organs within the body, such as the kidneys, the heart, the spinal cord, the neck, or the brain.
The five-seven's ammunition, the SS190, has had many debates raised about it's stopping power. The SS190 was developed to be armor piercing, or AP, but remember that the bullet on measures 5.7mm across. It's a small bullet, and consequently doesn't produce too much damage by kinetic energy on impact. Because of it's design, optimized to pierce armor, the SS190 also tends to travel right through the target. Besides the obvious problems with collateral damage (traveling through the target and injuring innocent people), this also means even less kinetic energy is transferred into the body.