There is a serious lack of understanding when it comes to terminal ballistics. This holds true whether we are talking about shooting animals or bad guys. A recent Facebook discussion resulted in a blog post by my esteemed colleague and arguing partner, Bryce Towsley. I don’t agree with everything in his post – surprise – but there are some valid and factual points. When someone has shot as much game with as many different things as Bryce, he deserves a listen.
As an almost lifelong student of terminal ballistics I’ve learned some things too. What I’m about to suggest will likely come as a surprise, particularly since for most of my writing career I’ve been measuring and reporting on bullets recovered from various test medias and animals. I’ve concluded that recovered bullets are practically useless. For starters, they are not made of gold and we are not going to reuse them. 200 years ago mountain men melted their recovered lead balls and in the future, given some apocalyptic event, we might do the same. Until that time, what’s the point?
Pass-Throughs
If you shoot a whitetail deer and it falls down and dies or runs 75 yards and dies, the recovered bullet will tell you very little. In fact, very few bullets will be stopped by a whitetail unless raking shots are taken. Those pass-throughs are unrecoverable so all a recovered bullet really tells you is that it did not pass through. Now some may argue they want to recover the bullet to see if it expanded. Um, if it does not expand the chances of recovering it are slim to none. Non-expanded bullets are hard to stop.
Mushrooms
Secondly, this mushroom formation we all look for in expanded bullets only really leads to comments about how pretty a bullet looks. Pretty bullets do not kill; bullets that damage tissues kill. In fact, the prettier the bullet, the less tissue it is likely to have damaged. You see, bullets are really simple machines designed to impart energy inside a creature. The less the bullet deforms, the less energy it imparts.
Recovered Weight
Similarly, the idea that recovered weight means anything is just as misleading. Admittedly, it sounds good that a bullet retained all of its weight, that means its tough. Right? And, bullets that we are pushing into creatures at high velocity should be tough. Right? Yes and no. Some creatures are tough and big and need bullets that penetrate deep. Bullets that destroy lots of tissue get mangled and fail to penetrate deep. Not so much because they lose weight but more often because they deform into a shape with a large frontal diameter. A 25% increase in frontal diameter will reduce penetration more than a 25% increase in weight retention will increase it. Years of test data supports this.
So why do we – hunters – and especially gun writers worship recovered bullets and measure every aspect of them? Mostly because we don’t have anything else to measure. Wound cavities in animals or gelatin are difficult to analyze. In fact, with all but a few exceptions it is near impossible to look in a gel block or an animal and determine the bullet or cartridge that was used. Humans are addicted to numbers and in the absence of being able to measure damage we measure the thing that caused the damage.
Pardon the nastiness of the analogy but that makes about as much sense as looking in the toilet to determine the quality of your last meal.
What Really Matters?
So how should we evaluate or measure terminal performance? I think there are two good ways. The first is how effective a bullet is at killing an animal. Granted, this is akin to marrying a woman you have never met but it is after all the real test. Regardless of everything else if a bullet of any caliber, size, weight or shape reliably kills animals quickly, it is suitable to the task.
A recent whitetail cull hunt in Texas is a perfect example. I shot 14 deer with the same bullet and the only two deer I could put down in their tracks were purposely spine shot. I got tired of 100 plus yard blood trails! All bullets passed through the deer and all deer died within the usual 20 seconds. They just ran too far for my liking, especially in the rattlesnake infested brush country of east Texas.
Conversely, I’ve used another type bullet of the same weight and caliber, pushed at the same velocity to take sable, waterbuck, impala, blesbok and whitetail. All of these animals dropped at the shot and 20 seconds later were dead. What was the difference in these bullets? Aside from their construction, it was the way these bullets lost energy.
Recent experimental testing has shown that the first bullet only lost about 50% of its energy in the first few inches of penetration. The second bullet lost about 25% more. The result is the bang flop we all like to see and the only logical explanation is that it was the result of that energy loss.
Interestingly, if you push low energy depositing bullets really fast, they often drop animals too. Could it be that there is a time-distance threshold of energy release that is needed to make this happen?
Now, I’m not saying the energy dump or transfer is what caused this. (I might be wrong but we are not dealing with a lot of energy here.) What I’m saying is that the way the bullet reacted to impact with the animal caused more trauma and damage over a shorter distance. The result was that the animal had a subconscious reaction to that trauma – it fell down – and therefore the 20 seconds of oxygen its brain had left did not allow it to get very far away. What I’m really trying to do is get you to think about what happens when a bullet hits the bone.
Penetration and Blood Trails
Of course, you always need enough penetration and sometimes enough is more than it is at other times. The good thing is that when you need a bullet that penetrates deep it very often produces an exit wound. That’s important because bullets that penetrate deep damage less tissue and that extra blood on the ground will make the animal easier to find.
Dead is dead but I like the dead stuff I don’t have to look for.
My investigations will continue and as I learn I will share. In the mean time, after you pull the trigger, forget the bullet. There are better ways to discover how well it worked than admiring how pretty it is. Until the riddle is solved I expect you’ll still see photos of recovered bullets next to charts with all their unimportant measurements. Simply saying the animal died in a hurry does just not seem analytical enough…Or does it?
