Re: 45 carry ammo
A pistol of any caliber is nothing more than a remote-controlled high-speed drill. The bullets it fires make holes. In most pistols, the bullet velocity is insufficient to even think about the kind of hydrostatic shock a rifle would produce. Therefore, you want a bullet that will make the biggest possible hole, and thereby destroys the most tissue. This is why we use .45 ACPs. The simple fact is that hollowpoints of any type sometimes penetrate, but fail to expand (especially those fired at low velocity, such as in a .45ACP, compared to, for example, those from a .357 Magnum), and sometimes expand too much, and penetrate too little. Even if they perform as advertised most of the time, you may or may not want to stake your life on those odds.
The problem with most test media, including ballistic gelatin, is that people and animals are not homogeneous, and almost all of the test media are homogeneous. So testing with ballistic gelatin, water, sand, etc. will only give information related to the bullet's performance in ballistic gelatin, water, sand, etc. Correlations between such tests and one-shot stops in actual shootings, no matter how good the figures appear, are therefore only partially useful in trying to determine what your gun and bullet will do at the time you pull the trigger. Let's not forget that a heart-shot (with a RIFLE) deer will sometimes run many tens of yards before falling down, so your pistol (no matter what you load it with) might not be as likely to immediately stop your attacker with one torso-shot as you might think.
Testing bullets on game animals is only part of the answer, because a lot of the time, game animals are shot in the chest, from the side, and the bullet therefore goes through both lungs. In defensive shootings, people are usually shot from the front, so the bullet only goes through one lung. To further complicate matters, a bullet used in game shooting or defensive shooting will have to pass through skin, fat, and muscle, and may have to pass through bone, as well. Obviously, any hollowpoint will perform differently in each of these tissue types, so from one shot to the next, you really have no way of knowing exactly what the bullet will do. FMJs will solve that problem to a much greater extent than any hollowpoint, but also have a much greater chance of overpenetration and ricochet. You pay your money and you take your choice.
Decades ago, I got myself a large shoulder roast, hung it from a tree branch with a hillside behind it, and shot it with an assortment of pistols (using hollowpoints), including .38 Special, .357 Magnum, 9mm, .44 Special, and .44 Magnum (we did not have the 10mm or the .40 S&W that long ago). All of these rounds made holes in the shoulder roast, but did nothing especially meaningful in terms of causing it to move, or come apart. A 12 gauge shotgun loaded with 3-0 buckshot blew the roast apart. I understand that that was nowhere near a definitive test of anything, but it did not increase my faith in any pistol bullets' ability to reliably stop someone with just one shot.
For these reasons, if I had to choose a hollowpoint in .45ACP, I would want one of the more stoutly constructed ones, such as the Remington 230 grain Golden Saber. I would accept the fact that the bullet might not expand properly in fat, in exchange for a better chance of penetrating, for example, a rib. Personally, I would prefer the .45 Super. Or, better still, a shotgun.
Obviously, if you don't practice enough to be able to reliably put the bullets where you want them (which means much more than just the number of rounds required to see that the gun will function with them), none of the above will matter.
