I have a xerox copy of Barsness's article on the development of his 338-06, 'way back in the 80s. It has been interesting and instructive to note his continuing education and increasingly valuable observations over these years.OPINIONS OF KILLING POWER
by John Barsness
Humans have been hunting a long time, so have argued over “killing power” for a long time, whether their hunting tools were rocks, spears or rifles. It would seem obvious that a larger rock/spear/bullet would render big game into what’s legally called “possession” more effectively than a smaller rock/spear/bullet, but the limits of human physics also limit projectile size. Evidence indicates Neanderthals may have been the strongest early humans, but also indicates they didn’t use 100-pound spears.
People use various techniques when arguing about killing power. Sometimes we provide real-life examples, and sometimes we develop formulas supposedly reflecting such empirical evidence. Both techniques have been part of the scientific method for several centuries, but very few hunters are trained scientists. Consequently most evidence reflects personal biases rather than rigorous testing.
One of the best-known formulas reflecting long-term empirical evidence is John “Pondoro” Taylor’s Knock-out (KO) Formula, an example of the “heavier spear” theory. I’ve been part of gatherings of hunters, both around campfires and at international conventions, where cartridge effectiveness has been argued by citing Taylor’s figures.
Taylor’s books are well-written and based on vast experience, acquired when African wildlife was very abundant and African humans far less abundant, including game department officials. But Taylor’s formula was far less universal than many hunters believe. It originally appeared in his book BIG GAME AND BIG GAME RIFLES, not his more popular AFRICAN RIFLES AND CARTRIDGES. Both were published in 1948, but Taylor had been working on BIG GAME AND BIG GAME RIFLES since before World War Two, and a British firm finally agreed to publish it in 1946, taking two years to bring it out.
The much larger AFRICAN RIFLES AND CARTRIDGES was written in 1946-47 and published by an American company. There were far more hunters in the U.S. than Great Britain, and after World War II Americans were more affluent. Consequently AFRICAN RIFLES AND CARTRIDGES became popular, but many of today’s hunters don’t even know BIG GAME AND BIG GAME RIFLES exists.
In BIG GAME Taylor says what he calls “theoretical energy” (kinetic foot-pounds) doesn’t truly indicate the relative power of different cartridges, so included bullet diameter in the K.O. formula. He also plainly states K.O. numbers only apply to “bluff-nosed, solid bullets used against heavy, massive-boned animals,” and admits, “Theoretical energy probably gives a surer indication when expanding bullets on soft-skinned game are concerned.”
In AFRICAN RIFLES AND CARTRIDGES he repeats a few of the same statements, in particular a comparison of the .416 Rigby as opposed to a .465 (in Big Game) or a .470 (African Rifles). He claims an elephant head-shot with a .416 solid that misses the brain will quickly recover, but a .465 or .470 will knock the elephant out “for anything up to about five minutes. “ But he never mentions that his formula only applies to solids on really big game, or admits “theoretical energy” might be more applicable to expanding bullets on smaller animals. As a result many hunters think the Taylor formula applies to all cartridges and bullets.
Another difference in AFRICAN RIFLES is a long rant about high velocity, probably because it was becoming a hot topic, thanks in part to Roy Weatherby, whose rifles and theories of killing power were getting a lot of attention. Unlike Taylor, however, Weatherby didn’t have much big game experience. He’d grown up in Kansas in the 1920s and 30s, when almost no deer lived in the state.
Weatherby eventually migrated to California, becoming an insurance salesman in the Los Angeles area, and in 1942 took his first big game animal, a mule deer in Utah. He also bought a lathe and started gunsmithing in his garage, developing the first Weatherby magnums and his theory of high-velocity killing power.
This wasn’t all that long after the first factory big game cartridges reached 3000 fps, and most hunters used far slower cartridges. The much higher velocities of Weatherby’s wildcats became possible due to the appearance of IMR4350 in 1940, by far the slowest-burning powder then available to handloaders.
Some hunters, including Weatherby, theorized that ultra-velocity killed “like lightning” when bullets landed almost anywhere on a big game animal by compressing the blood in the circulatory system like fluid in a car’s brake lines, sending a “shock wave” to the animal’s heart and brain. Weatherby embellished this theory in several magazine articles, and his hot cartridges and “California style” rifles started getting national attention. By the end of the war he’d quit his insurance job and opened a sporting goods/gunsmithing shop.
Many hunters bought the ultra-velocity theory in part because, like Roy Weatherby, their hunting only involved a few deer. Weatherby was certain ultra-velocity would work on any kind of game, and after a successful 1947 hunt in British Columbia booked an African safari with some friends, to prove Weatherby cartridges worked on larger game as well. He kept a journal of the safari, reprinted in the book WEATHERBY, THE MAN, THE GUN, THE LEGEND by Grits and Tom Gresham. It’s very interesting reading, in part because of how it modified Weatherby’s theories.
Early on a hyena fell to Roy’s .257 Magnum, and he crowed that “nothing can withstand the shock of high velocity bullets.” But as more and larger animals were taken this universal enthusiasm started changing: “I have used all my rifles now and so have the other men, but not under identical enough conditions for comparison. One thing is sure and that is—the bullet must be traveling at a certain velocity when it hits an animal in order to kill it. I must find out at what distance…the bullet must hit the animal so the shock kills instantly…. You must hit them right unless the bullet has sufficient velocity to disintegrate.” (Emphasis mine.) Eventually he discovered high velocity had definite limits, but didn’t admit it very often in public.
Today big game hunters tend to prefer bullets that don’t disintegrate, in part because of another book, Bob Hagel’s 1977 GAME LOADS AND PRACTICAL BALLISTIC FOR THE AMERICAN HUNTER. Hagel was a life-long hunter and Idaho guide who emphasized the use of “premium” bullets. The bullets both Taylor and Weatherby used were all so-called “cup and cores,” with a lead core inside a harder jacket of copper alloy. Expanding bullets had the core exposed at the front end, in a soft- or hollow-point, while “solid” bullets had the jacket wrapped over the front end, leaving the core exposed at the rear.
Cup-and-core expanding bullets (or “softs,” as the British called them) often separated or even disintegrated, the reason most hunters after really big game used solids. But in 1948—the same year Taylor’s books were published and Roy Weatherby went to Africa—a hunter in Oregon started selling what many consider the first premium expanding bullet, the Nosler Partition.
John Nosler had experienced cup-and-cores failing to penetrate British Columbia moose, so he developed a bullet essentially combining the solid and soft cup-and-cores, separated by a wall of jacket material. The soft front core was designed to disintegrate, as Roy Weatherby believed was necessary for quick kills on thin-skinned game, while the rear “solid” portion continued to penetrate, as John Taylor and many other well-known African hunters believed necessary on heavier animals.
Hagel was an admirer of the Nosler Partition, but also a newer bullet called the Bitterroot Bonded Core, made by another Idaho hunter named Bill Steigers, with a heavy jacket firmly connected to the lead core. Hagel’s book became very popular, and more hunters started using Nosler Partitions and Bitterroot Bonded Cores—though far more used Partitions because they were far more widely available.
Bitterroots typically retained a higher percentage of their original weight than Partitions, and eventually many hunters came to believe higher weight retention resulted in greater killing power. Over the next 40 years many more premium bullets appeared, including some “monometal” expanding bullets designed to retain all their weight.
As a result, today many killing-power arguments are over bullets rather than cartridges, though evidently some hunters will always argue over whether a .30-06 Springfield or .300 magnum kills deader, or the .416 Rigby or .470 Nitro-Express thumps pachyderms harder.
The argument for 100% weight-retention makes sense, as they definitely penetrate deeper. But retaining more weight and penetrating deeper do not mean they kill quicker. If it did, solids would still be the solution for heavier game—and they’re not, mostly because they don’t kill quickly unless precisely placed in some part of the central nervous system. In fact, some modern African hunters are convinced Cape buffalo acquired such a reputation for being incredibly hard to kill because of the wide-spread use of solids back when “softs” didn’t penetrate consistently.
The reason solids don’t kill quickly is pretty simple: The wound channel’s very small. Shoot a big animal through the lungs with a solid and it takes a long time for the circulatory system to lose pressure, and the animal to lose consciousness. African hunting literature contains dozens of examples of buffalo shot with numerous solids living an hour or more, yet still being dangerously lively when found.
The theory that the permanent wound-channel’s size makes the most difference in killing power is held by many “forensic ballisticians,” scientists who study the effects of wound channels—though mostly on humans, for law enforcement and military purposes. However, forensic ballisticians don’t always agree, any more than all elk hunters or African PHs.
The owner of the first safari company I hunted with was John van der Meulen, who’d grown up in what was then Rhodesia. Before the country’s safari industry took off, van der Meulen (like many Rhodesian hunters) culled a bunch of wild animals to make room for domestic cattle, because in those days beef paid better. This was long before reliable “softs” were available, and van der Meulen’s choice for his .458 Winchester Magnum was a “solid” bullet Winchester used to manufacture, with a relatively thin gilding-metal jacket. Many other hunters disliked these bullets, including Jack O’Connor, because they often expanded--“riveted”--upon hitting bone. Van der Meulen, however, loved them because they expanded, creating a larger wound channel and killing buffalo quicker than stouter solids.
A somewhat similar conversation took place years later with now-retired PH Kevin Thomas, also a former culler born in Rhodesia. Kevin often used a .375 H&H when backing up buffalo hunters which, as he noted, meant he was often “seriously outgunned” by his clients. Yet Kevin still had to finish plenty of bulls, and favored expanding bullets. I asked what bullet he favored, and he said, “Whatever left-over ammo clients leave in camp. These days they’re all good!”
I’ve been keeping notes on all the big game my hunting companions and I have taken since the late 1970s. One of the details added while going on a lot of cull hunts myself, starting in 2002, was how far animals traveled after accurate chest shots with various expanding bullets. The quickest-killing bullets, it turned out, were Berger Hunting VLDs.
Most expanding bullets fully open by the time they penetrate their length, the reason most meat damage occurs around the entrance hole. Bergers, and some other “target” hollow-points, tend to penetrate a couple of inches before expanding, then lose considerable weight or even disintegrate (to use Roy Weatherby’s word), resulting in a massive wound channel. Consequently most meat damage is around the exit hole—if one exists—rather than the entrance. Animals shot with Bergers averaged slightly less than 20 yards before falling.
At the other extreme are expanding bullets that normally retain all their weight, where animals traveled an average of over 50 yards. But on a recent antelope hunt I used one of these “100%” bullets, because they tend to ruin less delicious pronghorn meat—and there’s only about 40 pounds on a mature buck. Plus, it doesn’t matter if an antelope travels a ways across the open plains before falling. But I’ve also used “disintegrating” bullets on animals weighing 500 pounds, because they drop big game quickly, before they can go far in thick cover or fall off a mountain.
Like John Taylor, many hunters believe larger diameter bullets kill big game quicker, often citing “physics” as the reason, because obviously a larger-caliber bullet puts a bigger hole in animals. In North America, the poster-child for this belief is usually the .338 Winchester Magnum, because it’s the most popular step up from the cartridges most of us use, both in powder room and bullet diameter.
That was certainly what I anticipated back in 1987, when I put together a custom .338. Before then, most of my big game had been taken with a pair of Remington 700s in .243 and .270 Winchester, plus a couple of .30-06s. There had also been a .30-30, .308 Winchester and, briefly, a .338-06, sold after a few months to make ends meet, thanks in part to what a friend calls a “practice wife,” whose spending habits not only made it hard for ends to meet, but to come within sight of each other through 10x binoculars.
The divorce resulted in the liquidation of the rest of my small collection of big game rifles, but the collection started again a few months later with a Ruger 77 .30-06. For several years the ‘06 worked fine on the standard array of Montana big game—antelope, deer, black bear and elk—but like all rifle loonies I remained convinced something better existed.
After thinking a while, the “logical” candidate was the .338 Winchester. Any .300 magnum would use the same .30 caliber bullets as the .30-06, and the editor of the magazine providing most of my income was convinced the .338 was magic.
I used the FN .338 a lot over the next dozen years, which coincided with a rapid rise in my fortunes, including a number of hunts across northern North America from Alaska to Quebec, plus a couple of African safaris. Of course, “everybody” knew the .338 was enough gun to handle big, tough animals like moose, musk ox, wildebeest and eland. It was, but eventually I had to admit to myself that the .338 wasn’t consistently more magic than the .30-06, or a couple of .300 magnums also used during that period.
The .338 did result in some spectacular kills, including a Quebec caribou taken with the brand-new 200-grain Ballistic Tip, the first of the heavy-jacket models. The bull stood quartering away slightly at just about 200 yards, and the bullet landed behind the near shoulder, breaking the far shoulder on the way out. All four legs instantly folded up, the bull dropping on his belly and staying there, ready for the hero photo. He was the biggest-bodied of the dozen caribou I’ve taken, as large as an average 5-point elk.
The .338’s second caribou, however, was taken three years later in Alaska at 300 yards with a 210-grain Nosler Partition, and ran over 50 yards before falling, despite being shot right behind the shoulders. That could be blamed on the “tougher” bullet, but the interior damage from the 210 matched the 200-grain Ballistic Tip.
A couple days earlier I’d taken my first moose, a mature bull with antlers spreading 58 inches, using the then-new 230-grain Winchester Fail Safe. The bullet landed in the center of the chest as the bull stood almost directly facing me at 100 yards. I’d heard from several people that the .338 was an excellent choice because moose often head for water when shot, yet the bull made it into a nearby salmon river, dying with only one antler tine above the surface.
Luckily it was a relatively small river, and with a rope tied to the guide’s jetboat, we pulled the moose downstream to shallower water, then spent five hours butchering from the top down, while being punctured by abundant mosquitoes. The bullet had performed very well, tearing a big hole through the bull’s chest before stopping against the pelvis, retaining 96% of its weight.
In Namibia the rifle killed an eland pretty well, despite the first bullet hitting a tiny thorn-branch and entering sideways just behind the bull’s shoulder, cutting a perfect silhouette of a 250-grain Nosler Partition. The bullet still did enough damage to make the eland stop within 100 yards, where it stood, head lowered. I put another Partition point-on through the lungs, whereupon the bull dropped.
But a few days later another 250 Partition landed too high on a blue wildebeest, thanks to my professional hunter. He was one of those PHs who believe their shoulder’s as steady as a pair of shooting sticks. This worked on the eland but not the wildebeest, because the PH took a breath just as I squeezed the trigger.
The wildebeest dropped, but immediately jumped up and started running directly away, whereupon I put another Partition between its hams. This did not slow the wildebeest down until half a mile later, when some interesting tracking in the fading light found it standing in a small patch of thornbush. The bull dropped to my third shot, but again jumped right back up. Luckily it stayed down after yet another shot.
Since then I’ve seen plenty of other wildebeest taken, including several by me. Most fell with one well-placed shot from cartridges ranging from the 7x57 and 7mm-08 to the 9.3x62 Mauser and .375 Ruger. None of those required tracking, but I’ve also seen wildebeest shot around the edges, all requiring considerable tracking, occasionally without results, sometimes with cartridges more powerful than the .338 Winchester Magnum. From this I’ve concluded that moderate “deer” cartridges work on wildebeest, but even pretty powerful medium-bores won’t drop them with incorrectly placed shots, even if the bullet lands close to where it should have.
Eventually it occurred to me the diameter of .338 bullets is only 3/100th of an inch larger than .308 bullets, which ain’t much. After experimenting a little with a Starrett digital micrometer, I found that wrapping a .30 caliber bullet in a single layer of stiff business card resulted in a diameter of just about .338 inch.
It also occurred to me that an expanding bullet’s initial diameter isn’t what kills big game. Instead it’s the “mushroomed” diameter, which punches a much larger hole. So I opened the over-sized tackle box containing my collection of recovered bullets from half a century of big game hunting, and took out all the .30s and .33s.
The bullets included a pretty comprehensive list: Barnes TSX; Hornady Interlock and Interbond; Norma Oryx; Federal Deep Shok; Nosler AccuBond, Ballistic Tip, E-Tip and Partition; Speer Hot-Cor; Swift A-Frame, and Winchester Fail Safe. I measured the width of each bullet’s mushroom at its widest point, then measured the next-greatest width, averaging the two measurements.
Since there’s only .03 inch difference in unexpanded .30 and .33 bullets, I didn’t expect the average difference in expanded bullets to be much larger, and it wasn’t, turning out to be just about exactly .05 inch. But the .30s averaged larger, not the .33s!
This seemed odd, so I looked closer at the results and discovered the reason: Two kinds of .30 caliber bullets expanded very widely, Hornady Interbonds and Norma Oryxes, all averaging over .7 inch across their mushrooms, while none of the others measured over .668.
None of the .33s were Interbonds or Oryxes, so I eliminated those two bullets from the .30 caliber results, then re-averaged the rest. However, this still came out slightly in favor of the .30s, .631 to .620. Obviously, results might be slightly different for other batches of recovered .30 and .33 caliber bullets, but my results indicate there’s no major difference in their expanded mushrooms.
Now, I’ve sometimes observed a difference in how larger-caliber bullets work on big game compared to .30s and .33s. In 2011 I went to Tanzania on an 18-day safari with several companions, as a “light” rifle using my CZ 9.3x62 with 286-grain Nosler Partitions, while my primary hunting companion used a .300 Winchester Magnum with 180-grain AccuBonds. We both shot the same variety of plains game, from impala and hartebeest to zebra and wildebeest. My companion was so impressed with how the 9.3x62 put game down that upon our return to the U.S. he bought a 9.3x62.
But was the difference due to bullet diameter, or bullet weight? Or even shot placement? I had plenty of confidence in the 286-grain Partition’s ability to penetrate bone, and the bullet broke at least one shoulder on the larger animals. My companion’s larger animals were shot through the lungs, without a shoulder being involved.
What I will say is that bullets wider and heavier than used in most .300 and .338 magnums do seem to hit harder and kill quicker—but only sometimes. I’ve witnessed plenty of occasions when they didn’t, the cartridges ranging from the 9.3x62 (and the 9.3 Barsness-Sisk wildcat, with similar ballistics) to various .375s including the Holland & Holland, Ruger and .378 Weatherby.
So I got out the recovered 9.3mm and .375 bullets. These weren’t as abundant as recovered .33 caliber bullets, though I’ve shot more big game with the 9.3x62 Mauser and .375 H&H combined than the .338. The lack of recovered bullets is probably due to the 9.3s and .375s weighing considerably more. The heaviest .338 bullets used have been 250s, with most weighing 200-230 grains. The lightest 9.3mm bullets weighed 250 grains, with many weighing 286 and one 300. The .375 bullets weighed 260, 270 and 300 grains.
The mushrooms of expanded 9.3mm bullets averaged just about exactly the same as expanded .338 bullets, .621 inch compared to .620 for the .338s. However, the sample of 9.3s was less than half the number of .338 bullets.
The mushrooms of .375 bullets did measure considerably larger than those of .338 and 9.3 bullets, averaging .669 inch. Still, that’s not a vast difference, and not much larger than the average of ALL .30 caliber bullets, .659 inch.
At this point I became curious about .270 and 7mm bullets. Did their expanded mushrooms also measure close to .33 caliber bullets? It turned out that 7mm mushrooms averaged .597 inch in diameter, not much smaller than the .620 of the .338s!
However, the .270s averaged .555 inch, considerably smaller. This seemed odd, since there’s only .007 inch difference in diameter between unexpanded .270 and 7mm bullets. But eliminating one extreme “outlier” from each caliber resulted in averages of .565 for the .270s and .585 for the 7mms. That’s pretty close, as we’d expect from such similar bullets, but apparently .270 and 7mm bullets do expand to less frontal area than .30s or .33s.
Bullets of at least .40 caliber also seem to hit harder than “medium bores” up to .375. I only have three recovered +.40 bullets in my collection, all .416s, a 300-grain Barnes X and a pair of 400-grain Partitions. Their mushrooms averaged .773 inch, so the unexpanded diameter did result in greater expansion, at least in this small sample.
After all this measuring, my educated guess is that with cartridges up to .375 caliber that most of us shoot at big game, bullet weight may have more to do with how “hard” a bullet impacts a big game animal than its diameter, either initial or expanded. Whether that extra weight kills them quicker is another question, though it should help them plow deeper on angling shots, resulting in a longer wound channel of slightly larger diameter.
Among the animals taken the first year with my .338 was an eating-size mule deer buck, shot with a 250-grain Nosler Partition at 50 yards as it walked angling away, about to disappear behind a small stand of quaking aspens. The bullet entered the rear of the ribs on the left side, exiting just inside the right shoulder, and from the state of the innards expanded nicely. Yet the buck never reacted to the shot, continuing to walk behind the aspens before emerging on the other side. I was about to shoot again when the buck stopped, gently laid down, and died. Which is just one of several examples of why I know—not guess—there isn’t any magic in .338 bullets.
Or indeed in bullets of most common calibers, whether “deer” cartridges or those usually used on 400-800 pound game. Instead the magic lies in where we place them, a sometimes neglected part of hunting physics. In fact placement is the primary reason big game animals fall quickly, especially when hit through bone, whether shoulders, spine or both.
Breaking heavy bone is a far more concrete example of physics than several hundredths of an inch in bullet diameter, whether expanded or unexpanded. Yet true believers in caliber often don’t differentiate between bone shots and bullets that only hit ribs, preferring to believe caliber made the difference when an animal flinches, or falls quickly. Since this is America, everybody’s entitled to an opinion (and even entitled to tell the rest of the world on Facebook), but that still doesn’t turn selective examples of one into real evidence.
If one recognizes and judiciously applies what Barsness says here, the basic principles of hunting bullets and self defense issues are similar, and one can reasonably come to some conclusions on this matter, even though there may not be much one can do about it.
It may be observed that hunting is illegal in India and that it is unlikely that one will ever take a trip to Africa, or the USA, or wherever to go hunting for various reasons, probably related to finances. My response is that I will never go to Africa for any reason (again, because of finances). Nor am I likely to hunt in the USA anymore, although on this point, I'm not ready to say "never."
To the objection of "What's the point?" due to hunting being illegal in India, then, I reply that there are people who will never hunt in Africa, or wherever, but are still interested in reading about others doing so. I'll never be a WW2 aircraft pilot, nor will I ever command a battleship in combat, but I like reading about those subjects, too.
Perhaps someone else here is interested in the subject of this article, and I post it here for you.
). Jr made an interesting and true observation. Hunting dangerous game alone is a very difficult and dangerous proposition. Even the best of hunters prefer a hunting partner for a backup shot. You never know when you may need one. A successful dangerous game hunt may appear on Youtube like a video game in the sense you aim, squeeze the trigger and the animal falls. But in many cases the animal does not fall and charges at you. Then it is a game of life and death. Whose death depends on your rifle and shooting. In Africa now you have a PH to back you up always, but when dangerous game is wounded and has to be followed up and finished even the professional hunters take a backup.
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. For me the threshold is a 375 H and H. Many professional Hunters use a 577 NE, or even 600 NE while some others use 505 Gibbs or a 500 NE. There are many other options possible. My rifle (375 H and H) with the scope tops at a little over 10 lbs and is very pleasant to shoot. If I cannot followthrough the shot then the recoil is too much for me. The 404 Jeff is much like the 375 with a little more recoil, the 425 and 416 kick appreciably more. Among the doubles(That I have used) the 450 NE is more pleasant to shoot than the 465 or the 470 though they all produce around the same Energy. The 458 Lott with full loads is positively unpleasant (for me at least) to shoot.