After reading some of the post in here it seems that when you go against the grain,have a gripe about a bullet ....you are either a liar, a dummy or a corporate troll. Well I feel that I am none of those, just a normal guy that's been around firearms and reloading all my life and have taken my share of game. With that said I had this happen to me about a month ago. This bullet was fired from a 300 WSM, the load consisted of 67.0 grs of R-19 behind a Barnes 168 TSX. I never chronographed this load but by the manual it should be doing 3000-3100 fps. The bullet entered the chest of a whitetail deer facing head on and slightly quartering and traveled through the vitals destroying them and then passed through the guts and stopped just under the hide just forward of the hindquarter. The deer was a mess inside and it appears the bullet tumbled some. The deer didnt run far after being shot but did not bleed a drop of blood. I am not saying that the bullet failed, though it did fail to expand. The range was slightly over 100 yards and I am certain the bullet had enough velocity at that range to expand properly. This is show some here that it can happen.

As I have said before, I have used X's in the past and have always had pass through's. There are many examples of pefectly "X" shaped mushrooms from the barnes bullets taken from inside of animals, great they did their job perfectly. I sometimes think that many pencil through game and one will never know without recovering the bullet.They are known for having small wound channels compared to conventional jacketed bullets.Any thought's?


The bullet on the left is an unfired 168 gr TSX and the bullet on the right was recovered from a Canadian Whitetail and weighed 166.8 grains. Good weight retention eh?