Thread: A question for the doubters

Originally Posted by 7mmwsm

And you cannot compare deer. The size and nature are totally different.
A yearling fallow or sika is a way different beast to a pumped up rutting stag of any breed.
The stated example of 594 ft/lbs is fine when all goes well. But an animal can recover (enough to get away) from 600 lbs a lot easier than the old fashioned recommendation of 1000ft/lbs.

I have shot every stag I've shot in the roar for the past 5 years with a .224" 80gr ELDM at 2700-2800fps mv, and I haven't found any cause for complaint. Ranges to 380 metres.

There is a large body of scientific literature studying "wound ballistics". The information available is much more coherent and informative than the hearsay, speculation and voodoo found in hunting circles. The most prominent person in the field in recent decades was Martin Fackler.

Foot pounds of energy don't kill deer.

Wounds in parts of deer, that the deer needs to not have a hole in it in order to continue living, are what kill deer. Major blood vessels, important organs, central nervous system.

Commonly used "high velocity" rifle bullets create wounds with 2 characteristics:

1. a permanent wound cavity - this is caused by physical destruction of tissue - crushing, tearing and cutting - by direct contact with the projectile or fragments. The permanent wound cavity is the primary cause of tissue destruction that causes loss of CNS function or loss of blood pressure causing death. The larger a bullet is, and the nature of expansion and particularly fragmentation dictates the size - width and depth (penetration) of the permanent wound cavity. A larger bullet by no means can be predicted to cause a larger wound cavity. Specific construction and how that behaves at the impact velocity is the primary determinant of permanent wound cavities. A large bullet that does not fragment at that specific impact velocity creates a smaller wound than a small bullet that does fragment.

2. a temporary wound cavity. this is caused by the "deposit/transfer of energy" and is the dramatically visible temporary deformation or movement of a ballistic gel block for example. There can be some minor to major additional permanent damage as a result of the temporary cavity depending on the elasticity of the relevant tissue. In most tissue we are trying to shoot bullets into (muscle, lungs), the temporary cavity largely rebounds with the expense of energy but minimal wounding effects. Liver, bone or brain tissue is not elastic. However you don't need to rely on a large temporary cavity to destroy sufficient brain tissue or bone when you hit it with a bullet. In elastic tissue, the "energy transfer" is largely wasted.


The size of permanent wound cavity from the use of the bullets that are commonly assessed as effective from cartridges like the .223 (e.g. the heavy ELDM or TMK), at the ranges where those bullets fragment effectively (e.g. above 1800fps impact velocity or so) are sufficiently large to penetrate to the important bits of a deer and destroy sufficient of those bits for it to die quickly and impressively.


This is not my opinion, this is empirically demonstrable. The literature describing how bullets actually kill is not my opinion. Read sections 9.2.1, 9.2.2, and 9.2.3 of this paper for a good summary (which includes citations at the end if you wish to go peer review the source literature).

https://www.scribd.com/document/2307...listics-Karger