Originally Posted by
Mr.Flintlock
Well Old Bob, your statement that you consider hunting with round ball less than .600 to be unethical, also says that you consider anyone who hunts with patched round balls less than .600 unethical hunters, even though you said it "nicely." I take exception to that!
Perhaps I was not sufficiently explicit in my statement. I was not directed toward any individual or group; it was merely the recognition of the ballistic properties of the round ball.
I have hunted with patched round balls since 1980 and have had great success with them over the years. I do not have a track record of wounding deer. I have used patched round balls from .445 - .575 and all of the standard calibers in between for all of these years. I will admit that patched round balls are not a 200 yard bullet but at moderate ranges (10 - 75 yards) they are very accurate and kill quickly and cleanly. I make this statement, not from something that I read out of a magazine but from personal experience.
I'm not a big fan of magazines, which these days seem to be additional advertising for the magazine's clients. What I have been quoting is from the ballistic tables that are in virtually every reloading manual. I'll bet most of us have a bunch of these manuals on our bookshelves.
I know that there are those of you who can quote all kinds of ballistic data from charts but deer don't read charts.
Neither do many hunters, apparently. I never expected the reaction toward me for asking what was to me, a simple question. I think this is because many never make it past the FPS readings for their load of choice.
The only deer that I have ever shot with a .445 round ball. went down like I had hit him in the head with a baseball bat. The last deer that I shot was with a .570 round ball and he ran 35 yards and crashed. No matter what a hunter chooses as a tool to hunt with, he/she must know the limitations of the equipment that they are using and must also know their own personal limitations and place that shot exactly where it needs to go. That is what an ethical hunter does. Those who will take a marginal shot at game with any gun, bow or bullet combination are unethical hunters. It is personally insulting to me that you would lump all of us who hunt with patched round ball into the unethical hunter group.
Try an experiment: drive down a residential road at 10 MPH. Run the window down, and stick your hand out the window. The gentle breeze you feel on your hand is a 10 MPH wind, a not-uncommon field condition, and certainly a lot less than the winds we had this past few days. This gentle breeze is enough to blow your roundball toward the edge of the sure-kill zone on a whitetail; a bullet with the BC of the one I was thinking of, the 230 XTP, will be deflected less than an inch. There are two reasons the BC has such an effect. One is that at any instant, the roundball is being pushed harder by that wind. The second is that there is more time for the ball to be deflected by the wind, since the increased velocity loss increases time of flight.
Hence my original question: given these arributes of the roundball, why would you choose to use one, when there are projectiles that do not have thses liabilities, and can provide as good or better terminal performance?
OldBob