ShootersNotes! Newsletter — July, 2014

The ideal bullet weight calculator is on line at Recommended Bullet Weight Calculator.

Alternatively, one can visit the weight recommendations at Ideal Bullet Weight. Here is an extract from the landing page:

 A good way of thinking of what bullet weight is “ideal” is to consider the balance between one’s ability to hit the vital zone and the size of the bullet needed when it gets there. For the most part, this balance takes one to the lightest weight bullet for a caliber and that happens also to be heavy enough to routinely anchor reasonably well hit game.

The methodology is described in detail here: Defining Ideal Bullet Weight.

These bullet weights should create a wound channel big enough to cause the animal to faint within about ten seconds of being hit in the vital zone of the thorax. The odds of losing a wounded animal to a long and painful death increase dramatically as one drops below the recommended calibers and bullet weights for a given game species. Conversely, recoil from using significantly heavier than necessary bullets often results in poorly hit and lost animals. This is one of the problems that relatively inexperienced shooters unknowingly face when they go to a super-magnum caliber that is much more gun than is needed to reliably anchor their quarry.

Note: Some confuse the permanent wound channel with the dynamic wound channel. The dynamic channel is what we see in videos of ballistic gelatin tests. This phenomena results in explosive results when one shoots a milk carton or squirrel with high velocity bullets. Go to a large enough container and one frequently sees only a caliber-size entry hole, frequently an exit, but not much else. This behavior results because the membrane (plastic wall or hide) ruptures when the cavity is close enough to cause significant stretching. But, comparatively little damage from “hydrostatic shock” occurs when the dynamic cavity doesn’t get close to an air boundary.