If you accept ammo maker claims at face value, you might have a point. I trust personally-witnessed chronography from actual carried firearms to make my assessments and choices, and the 380 ACP is conspicuous by its absence in my carry rotation. The 380 does raise quite a welt, to paraphrase one of my fellow rangemasters. 9mm Makarov remains my “floor” caliber for exchanges of finality, and I rate the 38 Special slightly ahead of the 9 Mak.
I arrived at my conclusions via actual participation in these exchanges, and via investigations of several hundred such exchanges–to include attendance at trauma rooms and autopsy suites–where the win/loss records REALLY get registered. Boutique-made ammo or not, you need to thoroughly assess the likely target(s) of your defensive strategy. “Here Be Dragons”, as the old ocean charts once claimed. If you can reliably place shots in an eye socket at the contemplated engagement ranges, then pocket blowbacks (many 380s are of this type) will suffice. A bit larger margin of error seems wise to me, though.
Think of it this way…as a general rule, we do not hunt deer with 380 ACP pistols. Even a 9 x 19 pistol seems a bit light for the venue. I do hunt deer with handguns, usually a 357 or 44 Magnum or a Ruger-level 45 Colt load. A lot of handgun hunters consider the 357 Magnum a little lacking for deer-sized game. Most deer are taken by long guns, some of which are quite powerful, several orders of magnitude more so than most handguns.
Deer seldom attack hunters or other humans. Violent, predatory humans DO attack other humans with intent to do great bodily harm or prompt death. Deer and humans are both thin-skinned mammals weighing between 100# and 300#. Deer do not ingest most intoxicants (they do love fresh, growing marijuana); humans ingest all manner of racing fuels and combinations of same, and often prep for their depredations by ingesting these fuels.
The 22 LR, 25 ACP, 32 ACP, and 380 ACP are all well-past their “Sell-by” dates. They were developed during an era before advanced trauma care and antibiotics, and during a time when many (if not most) targeted subjects were fleeing apprehension or detection. These calibers are “Marking pellets”, not serious defensive tools. People fled at the sight of a deployed firearm because life experience 80-100 years ago taught them that the lingering, agonizing death by a festering gunshot wound was best avoided. Gunshot victims sought care at hospitals, leading to their identification as ne’er-do-wells, and hospitals are mandated reporters of GSWs for this reason.
Gunfight dynamics have changed–radically. In the modern era we ONLY shoot people that are posing a lethal/GBI threat and are demonstrably capable of completing that course of conduct. They aren’t going away–they are coming at you and/or in your face, likely blitzed out of their minds on intoxicants and therefore anaesthetized past any pain compliance even registering. A 32 or 380 ACP? REALLY?
Many of us need to re-assess our defensive strategies and tooling.
