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Old 06-28-2018, 02:23 PM
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BC38 BC38 is offline
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Originally Posted by Bamabred View Post
If you're going hollow point, I think the old Hydro-shoks are the best you can do. For whatever reason, the old tech works well in .380. It's what I have in my LCP.
I'm fond of that load myself. I carry them in my TCP.

I shot one into wet sand on the beach once, just to see what the bullet would look like.

The bullet mushroomed beautifully out to nearly 3/4" diameter with nice sharp petals of jacket material all the way around and it appeared to have 100% weight retention. Looked like it would do some SERIOUS damage if it did the same thing in tissue.

It also penetrated about 5 inches. That much penetration despite the expansion really surprised me. When you consider the way that wet sand "packs", it is a far more resistive media than water or tissue or wet newspaper. If the round penetrated that far with that much expansion in such a "hard" media, it seems to me like it would just about have to penetrate two to three times that far in tissue, even with the nice expansion.

I figure in the worst case where it doesn't expand at all it is still going to penetrate like hardball - but with the added bonus of what amounts to a very sharp-edged flat meplat.

Pretty hard to imagine doing much better than that in a mouse gun round.
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