.223, 6mm, and 6.5 failures on big game

[WRO]

It’s a prototype outfit from first lite..


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[deerhunter628]

Oh boy. This thread has taken a wrong turn. All of the sudden i miss all the trivial arguing.

 

[SteveAndTheCrigBoys]

Oh boy. This thread has taken a wring turn. All of the sudden i miss all the trivial arguing.

I'm surprised it took 35 pages to get to this point.

 

[realunlucky]

Time to refocus on the topic

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[Ucsdryder]

Time to refocus on the topic

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Sorry…

Small calibers suck.

Better?

 

[The Fish Box]

Animals are just like people, one guy can take a complete beating and still keep swinging and the next guy has a glass jaw.

I have argued this shit with form before, back when I was a manly magnum only guy. I’ve had a few poor experiences with a 6.5 shooting copper bullets. Jumped back up to a 300 win mag which at distance with copper bullets sucked harder than pharmseller, but then shooting my 338 lapua with 300 grain Berger’s had some bang flops(not thru the spine) but also shot a forked horn buck at 120 yards thru the almighty shoulder only to have it run off over a 100 yards. The offside shoulder was only holding on by hide.

All that is to say I don’t think it matters what you shoot really but if shooting a big dog 338 works go for it, if a 22 creed works good for you. Unfortunately we form our opinions on the experiences we have and when you have a bad experience shooting a small gun it’s easy to say if I had a bigger gun it would have been better, but maybe you had the one in a million experience only to right the whole option off.

 

[Pharmseller]

Jumped back up to a 300 win mag which at distance with copper bullets sucked harder than pharmseller,

You say that like it’s a bad thing.

Rules and all, I’ve never shot anything with a 6.5.




P

 

[Stickmark]

Hardest to kill deer for me:
30-30, probably 150 grain Fusions, iirc, moving shot at @20 yards, very small coues buck trotting along with a group. I can still see the damage on first shot, lower shoulder, and second shot into upper boiler plate still did not "lights out" completely that deer.
Another N=1 story, but all these other "stories" do help a man think a little.
As close as I shoot, I need to pick my bullets accordingly.

 

[Spoonbill]

Hardest to kill deer for me:
30-30, probably 150 grain Fusions, iirc, moving shot at @20 yards, very small coues buck trotting along with a group. I can still see the damage on first shot, lower shoulder, and second shot into upper boiler plate still did not "lights out" completely that deer.
Another N=1 story, but all these other "stories" do help a man think a little.
As close as I shoot, I need to pick my bullets accordingly.

Have you ever thought loading a spitzer bullet for your first shot? I always thought about loading a spitzer bullet first then round nose bullets to follow but sold my 30-30 before I ever tested it out.

 

[FCCDerek]

So there are no bullet failures? It is either poor manufacturing, bad shot, or the wrong bullet was used? Is this just your opinion or is there data to support this?

I think a majority of what people perceive as bullet failures are bad hits at extreme angles. Or just plain bad shooting.

 

[Stickmark]

Have you ever thought loading a spitzer bullet for your first shot? I always thought about loading a spitzer bullet first then round nose bullets to follow but sold my 30-30 before I ever tested it out.

I felt the bullet(s) did their job. I shot the 2nd shot quickly. In context of this this thread, the big, uncontrollable variable is individual animal position, temperment?, etc...Some of you guys harvest more in one or two seasons than I have since I got back into this since 2008, rifle and stick bow. Good thread.
(30-30 went bye bye, courtesy of the "Big D, and don't mean Dallas")

 

[E.Shell]

I think a majority of what people perceive as bullet failures are bad hits at extreme angles. Or just plain bad shooting.

A LOT of truth to this...

I worked at the Ft Meade check-in station for two seasons in the 1990s. We signed hunters in and out to hunt the whitetails in the range impact areas - many acres of woods and swamps. The rules required hunters to be at the check-out (too) shortly after dark, so if you hit a deer just before dark, there often wasn't time to trail it up and get it out. The procedure was to come back to check-out and let us know you hit one, and a few of us would go back out with you, and trail up and help recover your deer. Great trailing practice and improved my understanding of wounded deer actions tremendously.

In spite of the shooting qualifications needed to hunt this federal property, (3 out of 5 shotgun slugs on a 9" paper plate at 50 yards, and/or 3 out of 5 arrows at 25 yards), we saw a lot of really bad shooting. When I worked the range for these qualifications, I was constantly amazed at how badly people can shoot and still think they can successfully deer hunt. Many needed multiple attempts to qualify.

Two or three evenings a week we would have someone come in to check-out and state that they had 'hit him perfectly' but failed to find the deer within 50 or 100 yards of the spot where the shot was taken. We would go back out with the hunter and search, sometimes for several hours. For every deer that actually was hit perfectly, we found 8 or 10 had been shot poorly. Almost invariably, those 'perfectly hit' deer were hit too high and/or too far back and some even shot in the hindquarters, yet the hunter swore they knew exactly where the animal was hit and it was 'definitely in the vitals...'.

 

[FCCDerek]

A LOT of truth to this...

I worked at the Ft Meade check-in station for two seasons in the 1990s. We signed hunters in and out to hunt the whitetails in the range impact areas - many acres of woods and swamps. The rules required hunters to be at the check-out (too) shortly after dark, so if you hit a deer just before dark, there often wasn't time to trail it up and get it out. The procedure was to come back to check-out and let us know you hit one, and a few of us would go back out with you, and trail up and help recover your deer. Great trailing practice and improved my understanding of wounded deer actions tremendously.

In spite of the shooting qualifications needed to hunt this federal property, (3 out of 5 shotgun slugs on a 9" paper plate at 50 yards, and/or 3 out of 5 arrows at 25 yards), we saw a lot of really bad shooting. When I worked the range for these qualifications, I was constantly amazed at how badly people can shoot and still think they can successfully deer hunt. Many needed multiple attempts to qualify.

Two or three evenings a week we would have someone come in to check-out and state that they had 'hit him perfectly' but failed to find the deer within 50 or 100 yards of the spot where the shot was taken. We would go back out with the hunter and search, sometimes for several hours. For every deer that actually was hit perfectly, we found 8 or 10 had been shot poorly. Almost invariably, those 'perfectly hit' deer were hit too high and/or too far back and some even shot in the hindquarters, yet the hunter swore they knew exactly where the animal was hit and it was 'definitely in the vitals...'.

Yup, manufacturing tolerances are immensely tight for the most part. Are there bullets out there with potential defects in them? Sure, statistically speaking that's inevitable. Now, let's think of the odds of one of those actual defective bullets being fired into an animal rather than at paper, steel, stumps, rocks, etc. Probably pretty slim. Now again, let's think of how well your average shooter out there actually shoots. Again, what are the odds of that said defective bullet being fired into an animal and that shot being placed well, at a reasonable angle and moving at sufficient velocity to perform correctly. Again, narrows the margin of that happening by a lot. I'd say maybe one shot in 1,000,000 on an animal in a hunting scenario is an actual wonky bullet shot well at an animal and hitting it inside of its performance window. Now, what is the measure of bullet failure? No way of saying that conclusively. The only way I'd consider a bullet as having clinically failed is if it comes apart in the air due to gross manufacturing defects before it even hits the animal. I've never had that happen and I've fired hundreds of thousands of rounds between my personal shooting and shooting in the military. I've cull killed hundreds and hundreds of deer on bases and never saw a bullet fail on one of them. They all died.