6 pages in less than 12 hours. This must be a touchy subject. Why are people bothered by opening a thread to hear about failures, when there's already the giant threads about success. Let failure reports come. If they don't, this thread can die.
I don’t think anyone is truly opposed to the idea, I just think there is a little bit of a disconnect on what constitutes a failure, and how one should go about proving it.
The more wild and/or unlikely a claim is, the more evidence needed to prove it. If I told you I bang-flopped a whitetail with a 30-06 you probably wouldn’t need pictures or a video to believe me, it’s reasonable enough, happens all the time.
If I said that I shot an elephant behind the shoulder and bang-flopped it with a .22lr, you would not believe me for a second and would need a lot of irrefutable evidence to accept is as the truth. Nobody would believe me. Even with video evidence and necropsy. It’s crazy.
Obviously two extremes, but the examples are extreme to prove a point. The more reasonable something is, the less evidence generally required to prove it and to convince people it happened. The less reasonable is the opposite.
The notion that a reasonably high SD and reasonably heavy for caliber 140+grain piece of copper and lead was essentially unable to penetrate *its own length* in meat is a pretty wild one. A 143 ELD-X has SD’s very comparable to a 170 class .30 caliber bullet. How many 170-something .30 cal bullets have you heard about splashing and only penetrating a couple of inches, even at WM impact velocities? Probably none.
Its such a crazy notion that what has been portrayed to of happened that it is unbelievable without further evidence. To the point that there is a lot of “there must have been another animal in front of it” “maybe there was a branch that was hit before impact” “maybe it wasn’t broadside and it was a raking shot” (still unlikely with this one)”
Again, the idea that a reasonably high SD 140+ grain piece of lead and copper failed to penetrate its own length essentially, when all of the data and testing shows that this projectile has no issues penetrating multiple times that after going through a barrier even at higher impact velocities, is a wild idea that needs irrefutable evidence to be proven or to be accepted as factual.
In the instance that has been referenced multiple times already in this thread, the only thing that could prove what has alleged to have happened to be factual is a video from the POV of the shooter that shows the orientation of the animal, the fact that there were no other animals in front of it, and that there were no branches in the way. Bonus points if the video clearly shows the impact to match up with the necropsy photos that were posted. Sans the video, the claim is a little too “out there” and unreasonable to be taken as factual.
If the video existed and clearly depicted what had happened, I’m sure a lot of people (probably Form included but I cant speak for anyone) would say “holy crap, yep, write that one in the history books, it happened”.