Are you saying that a perfectly placed shot from a 130gr 6.5 is just as deadly as a perfectly placed 18gr 30? Or is it just as deadly regardless of shot placement? If that's the case, how are they equivalent? Does kinetic energy not matter, or are you saying that they are close enough that it is negligible?
This is a legitimate question, no snark or pretense.
I’ve written about terminal ballistics quite a bit, in short:
Think of lethality as ultimate death with little regard for speed of death, and incapacitation as inability to move, with little regard for speed of death. As hunters, we want animals to be both incapacitated quickly and to expire relatively quickly. Ft-lbs of energy is not a wounding mechanism, it will not tell you anything that actually matters about how a bullet will preform.n There is not a single legitimate terminal ballistics facility that even looks at ft-lbs when measuring bullet performance. Every time a real study is done on how bullets kill, it is proven that placement, penetration, and tissue damage is what physiologically determines incapacitation and death.
In order of importance for both incapacitation and leathality-
Placement
Sufficient penetration to reach vital organs
Width of wound channel
Shape of wound channel
Using elk, and focusing on shots that land in the chest cavity coming or going, and ignoring poor placement like gut shots (as you need something very big and frangible, I.E.,- 200+ grain Berger/ELD-M/ATIP to make a measurable difference for poor shots) there is little measurable difference between most bullet diameters. Given like construction, and especially when each individual round is paired with an ideal projectile for its impact velocity, you do not notice much difference between them. Peoples perception is very different however. What is noticeable when watching people is that the bigger the recoil, the faster they perceive the animal going down. YouTube is full of this. Shooters will use a big cartridge, shoot an elk, it stands there for 10-15 seconds before falling, and proclaim “it’s a bad azz powerful round, and elk are tough”. Then from the same people, you will see them shoot a smaller round (these days it’s mostly 6.5 CM), the elk has the same reaction, and they’ll say “it’s marginal”.
In general it’s just that- perception and an expectation that “bigger is better”. When controlled for placement and impact velocity and when paired with the quickest killers for each (for instance 155gr to 168gr Berger/ELD-M for 308/30-06, and 140-147gr Berger ELD-M for 6.5 CM) one can not tell which is which on deer from watching the animal get shot and go down. Reaction to shot and distance traveled are variable between each animal, yet when taken in aggregate there is no discernible difference when seen in large numbers such as culling or crop depredation and when used side by side. To that point, there is no discernible difference between those two (or any caliber in between) and the 77gr TMK from a 223. Reaction to shot, distance traveled, time to expiration, and tissue damage are all very close. Yes, you will have outliers with all, but in aggregate, there’s just not much difference.
What does deer have to do with elk? Well, the difference between a 77gr bullet and a 165gr bullet in deer is WAY bigger than the difference between a 130gr bullet and a 165 grain bullet in elk.... and yet differences in lethality and incapacitation times on 200lb mammals between the 77gr and 165gr bullet are so similar as to be almost non observable. What is consistently observable is that as long as placemat is decent and penetration reaches vital organs; the more tissue that is destroyed, the faster animals go down. Placement and width of wound channel is where incapacitation is sped up.
What is also very evident is that hit rates, and therefore speed of incapacitation is directly proportional to recoil. One would think that the bigger the bullet, the faster animals die, and the less animals are lost. The exact opposite is the case. The least amount of animals lost or wounded, given like ranges and using the best killing bullets, is with .224’s, then .243’s, then 6.5mm, then .284’s, etc. That is because placement is the biggest factor in killing. It does not matter who you are, the less a gun moves, the less the explosion in front of your face, the closer your shots land to center.
If I showed people an elk shot with a 180gr Barnes TSX shot through the lungs, and a 147gr ELD-M shot through the lungs at the same impact velocity, and just said one was shot with a 30cal magnum, the other with a 6.5mm- everyone would pick the 147gr ELD-M animal as the one shot by a magnum. Everyone.
