Knowing what you are slinging down range and the effects it has on the intended target is critical anytime you are hunting.
Bullet lethality is defined by how much damage it does and how much energy it dumps once it reaches a target. How do new bullets measure up in these departments?
- In hunting, how much damage a bullet does is more important than its toughness.
- A bullet that sheds weight and deforms chaotically causes more damage.
- Conventional mono-metal bullets dump about 50% of their energy in the first 8 inches.
- Traditional cup-and-core and lead core dump about 80%.
Somewhere along the way, the notion that you can decipher a bullet’s lethality by weighing, measuring and looking at it after you pull it from a dead animal became common practice. Pragmatically speaking, there’s no logic to support this conclusion. In fact, trying to equate the lethality of a bullet to its recovered shape and weight is about as precise as looking at a turd and trying to divine what someone had for dinner.
Bullets matter, but what matters most is the damage they do, not their ultimate shape.
Hunters and gun writers often get too caught up in the advertising hype of manufacturers. And then too, by exercising what might seem to be a reasonable deduction, we assume a bullet that is tough — one that holds together and sheds no weight — will kill better. Admittedly, a tough bullet sounds like a great idea; after all, we’re shoving it into an animal at velocities sometimes as high as 3,000 fps. It should be tough, right? The truth is we want the bullet to damage as much tissue as possible. That damage, not the recovered bullet, is the true measure of lethality.
Defining Lethality
The point of all this is that hunters should evaluate bullets on how well they kill, not what they look like when we recover them or if they shoot through the animal. For example, I participated in a whitetail cull hunt in Texas. We were using .308 Winchester rifles loaded with 168-grain Barnes Triple Shock bullets. At the end of the first day, we’d killed 20 deer, but the hunters were complaining because none of the deer were falling down when hit. Granted, you generally expect a deer to run a short distance after the shot, but we should have had at least one “bang-flop” out of 20. What we were getting were 100-yard dashes into the pucker brush.
One hunter had a case of Hornady Zombie Max ammo for range play. The next day several shooters switched to that load. (Zombie Max ammo is loaded with Hornady SST bullets.) We immediately started seeing bang-flops, like you would expect with high heart shots when using a .308 Winchester on whitetail deer.
The question is, “Why were the SST bullets putting deer down faster than the Barnes Triple Shocks?” After all, the Triple Shock is a much tougher bullet and almost always deforms into a beautiful mushroom.
The answer is really very simple and two fold. First of all, the lethality of a bullet is tied to the damage it causes, not its toughness. Because SST bullets shed weight and chaotically deform, they create a more violent wound cavity than the Triple Shock, which essentially just expands and pushes a hole through the animal. This violent wound cavity creates more hemorrhaging, faster.
The other reason is a bit more scientific and one I tested and confirmed at the Barnes Bullets laboratory in Mona, Utah. We chronographed various bullets after they’d passed through 8 inches of ordnance gelatin. We found that a Barnes Triple Shock and similar mono-metal bullets only dump about 50 percent of their energy during the first 8 inches of penetration. A cup-and-core or more conventional lead-core bullet like the SST, Core-Lokt or Ballistic Tip will dump as much as 80 percent of its energy through the same distance. This energy dump results in massive tissue destruction and a serious shock to the animal’s system, often causing instant collapse.
Notice I said collapse, not death. Death is a result of the brain running out of oxygen. However, when an animal goes down after a lethal hit, it’s much less likely to get up and run off before it dies.
None of this is to suggest a Hornady SST bullet will kill better than a Barnes Triple Shock. All of the deer hit correctly with Triple Shocks ended up on the meat pole; they just managed to run a ways before realizing it was pointless. The Triple Shock is a very good bullet, but to deliver the bang-flop so many hunters like to see, Triple Shocks need to be pushed faster so they can dump more energy. On the other hand…