shot placement is also huge
in everything
you don't should shoot a hog with a 22lr because you know it won't do much
so you make the better shot
also hand guns just are not death rays especially small ones , even people who will be dead in 5 minutes can walk and talk often.
CNS is the only right now stop on anything
Any handgun round even the vaulted 44 mag is at best a poor round compared to a rifle, and even a 45 needs to hit a vital spot to stop and attacking person even one not hopped up on drugs or alcohol, back in the late 80s local cops answered a call about a man waving around a machete, when they arrived he charged them screaming and took 2 rounds from a 12gauge in the chest and still managed to close with the officers and cut them up badly even though he died at the scene he still lived long enough to come close to killing those cops
You say ya someone’s high on drugs can take a lot of killing but he had none in his system not even alcohol, just a hard old man that had lived on the streets for years
Any expert on self defense will have multiple stories about some guy taking multiple shots and still being on their feet and fighting effectively
a cop here made a traffic stop and ended up taking a 44 mag round right in the chest missed his heart by inches, this was before all cops started wearing body armor the shooter just stood there looking down at that officer who raised up and shot him dead with his 9mm, that officer survived to go on and have a long career the bad guy ended up in a box
Lots of such stories out there going back to the first time a gun was ever used, unless you hit the brain, heart or the central nervous system your unlikely to drop them on the spot, and even that’s no guarantee of a one shot stop, look up the story of bullet head Johnson who was shot in the head during the Lawrence Kansas raid during the civil war and survived, the wound which never healed ended up killing him in the end due to infection but that wasn’t till decades later
My own personal story of a failure to stop involves a scrawny feral cat that I caught after it killed over 30 half grown ducklings and caused up a tree and shot with my trusty 1911 45acp with a direct chest hit, I went back inside and had diner then came back out to bury the remains and when I bent down to pick up up it up and bit me
On the plus side several years ago I got mugged and put both my would be muggers down with a single shot from my 9mm neither died but both ended up on the ground screaming and crying