Stop It With Stopping Power

  So let me start off by saying, I’m not a ballistics expert…but I know a few things. I don’t just toss things out into the world because it’s cool or trendy, I do my research, then come to my own conclusions. I don’t subscribe to the group think or drink the Kool-Aid. If I haven’t had hands on experience with something, I won’t speak to it. The following however, are my findings, based upon real world experience, and data I’ve gathered personally.

                If you read back a few posts, you’ll see a few postings about my first time bear hunting. You’ll see more postings about my choices in ammunition. Well, here’s a culmination of sorts.

                So, before my first bear hunt, I was told that .308 was too small of a round to kill a bear. 30 caliber projectiles bounce off of bears, and I’d need something more along the lines of a 45/70 or .444…anything else was just a waste because it wouldn’t work. I’m in every bear hunting group and forum imaginable, and at the start of every season, the posts are littered with “going on my first bear hunt, what caliber should I use?”. The answers vary, but I ALWAYS see, 45/70, .444, .300 Win Mag, .338 and other large over the top caliber suggestions due to their “stopping power” and “one shot stop” capability.

                Listen…I get it. You’re in the woods with a top predator…you want to make sure the damn thing is dead when you shoot it, because NOBODY wants to be on the ground with a wounded bear. 100%…I get it. Teeth, claws, big angry thing…I get it. That being said, the size of your bullet does NOT compensate for shitty shooting.

                So, what sparked this latest blog post? I just got back from my annual bear hunt in Maine. I had tagged out earlier in the week, and we were helping another hunter get his bear. It was his first time bear hunting, and his first time hunting over hounds. After the dogs chased the bear for a few hours, he trees about 800 yards off the road. Off we go. Our guide had his trusty .44Mag revolver, the hunter had a Ruger .44 Mag carbine. Me? Well, I had already tagged out, so I didn’t have a rifle, but I was carrying my Glock 48.

(Yep…puny little 9mm. Now, if you’ve read my past posts, you can guess what I carry in my gun. Lehigh Defense 90gr Xtreme Defense ammo. A solid copper projectile, better known as a Fluid Transfer Monolithic, with “flutes” instead of a standard hollow point. Why? Because I know what the round will do, and I know it’ll penetrate auto glass, and a car door if need be in a self-defense situation. I also know it’ll punch through bone no problem and create an incredible permanent wound channel.)

So, we get closer to the tree, inform the hunter how things SHOULD go, psyche ourselves up, and make the mad dash the last 50 yards to the tree, over dead falls and through marsh into a good size tree in a swampy area. The guide grabs 2 dogs off the tree and leashes them up, trying to secure them to the tree. I grab the third dog and pull him back off the tree while the hunter gets in position at the base of the tree to take his shot.

The hunter steps back to shoulder the rifle and as he does, the bear begins to slide down the tree. He panics and rips a shot off, then another, then another. The first shot hit the bear square in the hind quarters, the second shot grazed the bear on his ribs, the third shot, no idea. The bear began to fall out of the tree, as the hunter stepped back and fell himself, into a mud hole, but not before firing his last 2 shots into the ground at the bear.

                Now I’m about 12 feet away as this is happening, and the bear is in between me, and the hunter, as our guide is about 20 feet away to my left. The bear is smack in between me and the downed hunter, and rears his head up, visibly shaken, pissed off, and very much alive and he turns towards the hunter, which was the direction he was trying to go in the first place to get off the tree. We yell for the hunter to shoot the bear again, and he squeals back he’s out of ammo and needs help.

Chaos ensues. Fight or flight kicks in, the guide grabs his gun and rushes over, I’m closer, and like I’ve done a million times before on the range, reach for my pistol, pull it out of my IWB holster, and one hand on the gun, one holding a barking dog, let a shot off at the bears broadside. Smoke clears, dead bear, no one’s injured, the chaos is over. What a rush.

                We begin skinning the bear out, and find one of the .44mag projectiles, (an old school soft point) fully expanded, through a layer of fat, but hadn’t penetrated the muscle. We see the entrance wound of my 9mm, as well as the exit wound, back a little way behind the elbow of the bear (bear vitals are located lower than a deer’s). We gut the bear and remove the heart for the dogs. There’s about a 2” tear right through the middle of the heart from my 9mm. We sat back and looked at that hard, and the entry and exit wounds, and said, no wonder why that bear dropped dead like it did, and man, that bullet did EXACTLY what it was supposed to.

                So, this would make bear number two that I’ve shot with this SAME projectile. This was a smaller, maybe 150lb bear. The other bear I killed with it, was 3 times the size. A 450lb beast, with 1 shot from a .357Mag, with the same bullet technology. I’ve also used that same bullet technology to kill other bears in other calibers, as well as seen MULTIPLE large wild boars killed with it as well, including one 350lb pig that was shot end to end with it…48” of pig hollowed out with a S&W .500 Mag.

                In conclusion…Will big calibers work at dropping game? Yes. Will smaller calibers work? Also, Yes. What trumps all of that? Shot placement. You can shoot an animal all day long and make Swiss cheese out of them and not hit vitals. Or, you could practice your shooting, study your desired game’s vitals, and execute one well placed, ethical, shot that results in a quick death. Again, I get it, nerves take over, and sometimes we get frantic and miss…it’s part of it. But suggesting a larger caliber to compensate for shitty shooting is dumb. No matter how large the caliber is, it’s not going to “stop” anything if you don’t hit it somewhere that’s going to turn the lights off. So saying a larger caliber bullet has more “stopping power” than a smaller caliber is an old wives’ tale, and lore you hear around the camp fire, or from your local fudd at the gun range. Stop it. Practice. Get better. Be better. Make your shots count. Stop making excuses.