I came across a box of 9mm Black Talons at an estate sale. Are these of any interest to a collector or should I load them in my EDC and be happy?

I have BTs on the shelf in 9, .357 and .45. I'm loading current production Federal and Hornady these days. I'm also curious about collector interest.

There is a story about them. I don't remember the details, but they were used in a San Francisco mass shooting in 1993, and they generated a load of bad publicity for Winchester (among other reasons, for having "Black" in their name). I believe in the wake of that incident, Winchester changed the name to "Ranger" and dropped the black jacket coloring. I imagine there could be some collector interest for a full box, but I have no idea how much.

A quick check of gb completed auctions shows prices from $3 to over $6 per round, but then someone sold a few boxes here recently in the classifieds for only $25 per box of 20.

WTS: Boxed Ammo Estate Sale

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USS Brewton FF1086
SWCA#3597

Lore has it that the Black Talons were referred to differently on the street, and that medical professionals took issue with the devastating wounds inflicted by the Black Talon projectiles. Personally, I would consider the medical professional complaints as an endorsement of the rounds' effectiveness.

I have a box or two in 9mm, which I would carry without hesitation! But then, I also have a box of 41 Magnum Silvertips!

I would say carry them in pursuit of good health!

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Judge control not gun control!

I have had quite a few boxes of BTs in the past and they mostly sold pretty well at a premium...but these days they don't seem to interest newer shooters who don't know the history. Some collectors interest. There does happen to be some interest in the 9s that were sold for police use. They were BTs but in brass cases instead of nickeled cases. I just have a few examples left from 20 boxes. They were purchased from a police officer who had issue ammo left when his agency went to the 40. I remember the boxes were marked for LE use only. I was also told by a factory rep that the newer silver tip ammo is the same as BT except for the coating on the bullet itself. Who knows??

Black Talons don't just mushroom, but their jackets peel back and create "petals" that curl outward. Hence the "Talon" moniker. I fired a few into water-filled milk jugs years ago and confirmed they do this.

There was quite a dust-up about these rounds at the time. According to some sources, the spinning petals create more tissue damage. Black Talons didn't stick around for long before being discontinued.

I have read that Ranger T is the same ammo but cosmetically more acceptable; whatever that means. Presumably the name Ranger T is less controversial than Black Talon. I have never fired any Ranger T ammo, so I don't know if they have the "petals" associated with Black Talon or use more conventional jackets.

I did some reading about the Black Talon round a few years back. Here's a Wiki article that reads about the same as the info I read back then... Black Talon - Wikipedia

I have also read the Ranger T ammo is the same as the BT ammo without the black coating. They are devastating according to all reports.

Someone above mentioned the Silvertip ammo, I don't think they have anything to do with BT ammo.

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Freedom is never free!!
SWCA #3437

A lot of all the bad press that surrounded these rounds came from the medical profession. These came on the market just about the time that the big crack wars of the late eighties and early nineties started to get out of control.
These being the big force that also drove the big Clinton crime bill.
Well this just also happened to coincide with the AIDS virus looming large across the country. And nobody more than medical professionals were more aware of this. Treatments for this were still in the stage of infancy. And medical professionals, surgeons etc. That were tasked with treating gunshot victims that were often shot with these projectiles found themselves in a position where their rubber gloves would get pierced by the "petals" of these bullets. And subsequently exposing them to the AIDs virus.

Here's a pretty decent video about Black Talon and Ranger T:

Winchester Black Talon vs. T-Series! 1992 Bullet Tech Compared to Today - YouTube

There was a segment on "20/20" years ago that mentioned the potential danger confronted by surgeons when removing these bullets with the very jagged edges. I guess the Black Talon name change soon followed.

BT's are an example of pure marketing genius as well as bad judgement.

Starting to fade now, but for a time ANY caliber BT's held near Urban-Legend status.
Somehow got confused with "cop killer" bullets that were being covered a lot in the media at the time. No relation whatsoever.

Technology has moved on in pistol-caliber controlled expansion JHP's.
While BT's were certainly better performers than what came before, there's nothing magical about them.

Working behind a LGS counter some, it was a little hard not to do an eye-roll when some hard-charging nimrod would exclaim far and wide that the ONLY ammo his SD guns see is the super-deadly Black Talons!

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Ret'd LEO
SWCA #2275

Black Talon ammo does bring a premium. Full boxes were selling for $50 or more, before the current ammo shortage. I recommending saving them.

I’ve stashed a few boxes away over the years.

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"I also cook."

Um, aren't the Ranger STX pretty much the same thing except without the black???

Not sure that the color of the bullet makes a difference. If so, I am going to start to paint mine pink.

I have a 2 page Word Document which has a brief history of the Black Talon Ammunition.

There is a lot of Mystic around Black Talon, most of which is Urban Legend and has been, shell we say, expanded a bit :-)

"A Brief History of Winchester Black Talon Ammunition
October 7, 2020 - The Gear Bunker"

You can search for it on the internet.
or
Shoot me a PM and I will email it to you.

Gun shows in Arizona almost always some Black Talon in various calibers, usually with a price of $80++/box.

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Who are? "They"

And the Super Vel ammo is very collectible also....

Nice stash...

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.............SmithNut

Actually the Ranger is SXT, which I am told stands for Same eXact Thing.

I have some Black Talon left over from those days

The issue was two fold, the NAACP and other such organizations claimed that by calling the product Black Talon, Winchester was telling people that it was for shooting black people. This is kind of like the lawsuit against the FBI claiming that by using black B27 targets the Bureau was training the agents to shoot black people.

The second issue is the wicked look of an expanded Black Talon projectile.

After the ammunition was used in a shooting or two, several Doctors (not from those cases) hit the Television Media outlets calling the projectile a FLYING BUZZ SAW

These two issues caused increasing tension for Winchester and they announced the voluntary withdrawal of Black Talon from the market.

The Cop Killer moniker was not a consequential factor in the Black Talon Saga

Shortly after all this drama started, Winchester introduced the SXT (Supreme eXpansion Talon) ammunition to the Public. This was the same projectile in the same nickel plated case in amazing similar black boxes with the only difference being that the projectile was now coated in gold instead of black. Winchester eventually changed the word Talon to Technology when advertising or discussing the projectile. This solved the last of the Public Relations crisis

Before Winchester released SXT, the Ranger line for Law Enforcement appeared. This was the same old black projectile loaded into brass cases. This may have just been a way to use up all of the projectiles that were already black since today's Ranger SXT uses the gold colored projectile.

A round that I really liked, the 357 Magnum Black Talon loading was lost in the transition. It was a 180 grain projectile that ran right at 1100 FPS from a 4" revolver and hit more than 1525 FPS from a 16" (18" ?) lever action, I can't recall which lever I chronographed it from. This projectile was never moved to a different line of ammunition

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"Acta non verba"

Whatever value they may have will be gone once you shoot them.

I changed career paths from law enforcement to a med unit and a Doc that knew guns and liked to shoot told me what bothered him the most professionally was that "Talons" and other rapid expansions slugs produced sharp edged petals that did not just push through a human.

He made sense when he explained that a sharp edged projectile spinning at a tremendous rate did far more damage passing through a people than just a big slug plowing through or a little one going fast.

1,000 fps from a 1:12 barrel means a slug, at least initially, would be spinning at around 60,000 (1000x60) rpm and rotating 360 degrees in 12 inches of forward travel. That's fast enough to make one complete revolution while passing through a human thereby increasing the lacerating, meaning cutting, effect of the petals as well as pushing tissue out of it's way. Doc said they make a bloody mess and made it unnecessarily difficult to get the bleeding stopped: When he could.

Besides getting maligned in the press for your choice of ammo before your trial if you shot somebody with one at said trial your only hope would be that a "Magnum" with a "Custom Lightened Trigger" and "Gunfighter Grips" and "Night Sights" scandalously "not even equipped with a safety catch" was not involved.

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On the whistle draw and fire 6

The idea that the BT's we're " dangerous" to a gloved hand was more myth than fact. Any metal bullet could cut a glove, but broken ribs were a much higher risk than any BT round. Being in Medicine at that time, the AIDS virus was and still is a risk, you do not jam your hand into a GSW. Surgery was often done double gloved at that time, being in an ER in Chicago during the 80's , and being exposed to a great deal of GSW's, you did not know what bullet caused the wound, so care was taken more for bone fragments than bullets. I have done a fair amount of shooting BT's and they expand very nicely. The ranger load initially was a brass case with non black bullet, but has since changed and the mushroom is not as pretty! I am going to be putting a 2 sets of all rifle and pistol cals together. Will let everyone know when they become available. Be Safe

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I BACK OUR BLUE

I guess he did not understand the purpose of a bullet fired in self defense. It may be on the street or in the woods hunting, you want a bullet that does the maximum damage that stops the attack or an animal. You would not hunt with FMJ's, since you do not want to put a pencil hole through a deer. Maximum damage, increased bleeding, faster and greater blood loss is the goal of all defensive bullets, and they are less likely to exit and injure someone else. Silvertips, XTP's, etc are all made to cause the most damage, to stop an attack or an animal when hunting, you are not trying to kill an attacker, but if damage is greater, the attack will probably stop sooner and attacker will pose less risk to others. When we get Phasers we can set them to stun, till then use the best bullet possible. About 1.5 years ago there was a video on the forum of a Michigan deputy firing 13 shots with 7 hits on a suspect, she got lucky since he got close enough to hit her hand with a stick and cause her to run a malfunction drill, fortunately it was not the knife in his other hand. The best way to avoid being shot by someone is, to not attack someone, listen to LE commands. Be Safe,

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I BACK OUR BLUE

It's rumored that the "SXT" in the Ranger replacement ammo stood for "Same eXact Thing".... don't know if that's true or not, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was, with Winchester thumbing their noses at the anti Talon crowd too stupid to know the sleight of hand.

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Conrad
SWCA #1830 SWHF #222

I heard the Same eXact Thing tale as well.
Made me grin.

Say what you want, but I know based on the words of a firearms experts that those things will “blow your lungs out of your body”.

Then we see 9mm Vs 45 wound channels in ballistic gelatin and a very narrow range of difference. The medical professionals can just stay in their lane

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it just needs more voltage

Oh oh, the sharp talons of the bullet cut my gloves! That's what forceps are for fool lol...

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Freedom is never free!!
SWCA #3437

They were a decent hollow point but am amused at the "posers" that whisper to me that they carry 20 year old Black Talons in their EDC like they are getting away with something! Winchester took one for the team and removed the black coating and round the barbs off the bullet jacket and called it Ranger SXT.

ER docs deal with sharp things embedded in people all the time. Think car accidents and industrial accidents, stabbings where the knife breaks. I don't think there was a ground swell of complaints from the medical community. There may have been one or two complaints that the media jumped on and made it look like every ER doctor was concerned about these new, super lethal bullets. It reminds me of the media dust up about the invisible Glocks.

I shot a grouse once with a black talon out of a kahr pm40. I'd like to say it turned the grouse inside out but nope. I ended up having to chase the thing down an embankment and pulled it still alive out from under a stump. Plugged him center mass and only poked a small hole through and through.

That's my only black talon story.

"C'mon, man!"

A classic example of a "moral panic" invented out of thin air by the media.

The media circus about Black Talons occurred shortly before my retirement from LE in 1995. Winchester withdrew Black Talon products from public sale and offered them as Law Enforcement Only, thus there was a short-term glut of supply and LE prices dropped way down.

I sent in letterhead orders for case lots of .45ACP and 9X19 at prices in the range of $13 to $15 per box (LE orders are exempt from federal excise taxes).

After I retired these were put away and I figured I had a lifetime supply of carry ammo in those calibers. Went several years happily carrying Black Talons without giving it much more thought. Then about 2005 or so I happened to see GB auctions bringing $3-plus per round! Not wanting to flood the market and drive prices down, I sold off a couple of boxes per week and cashed in about $3K on my remaining supply! Couple of ridiculously high bids, and I mentioned to those folks that I had more if they wanted them at same price, felt the rod twitch and quickly set the hook!

Ordered several boxes of Speer Gold Dots in my preferred calibers, spent a couple hundred. Now I still have a lifetime supply of carry ammo and a healthy profit!

Still have a few of the Black Talons, which were open boxes I had been using. Still excellent carry ammo, but I would probably sell it before popping the caps. Even having been in and out of the magazines, handled, a little bit of surface tarnish, probably still bring $200 per box pretty easy.

By the way, Black Talon was the marketing name seized onto by the media talking heads. Winchester actually called these SXT (Supreme Expansion Technology) and moved to the Black Talon moniker (with black box, etc) only after all the free publicity provided by the investigative news reports filled with breathless ranting and predictions of the end times reminiscent of the Middle Ages furor demanding that the crossbow be banned before humanity was exterminated!

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Life of the party until 8:00PM

If I recall correctly Black Talon also came in centerfire rifle calibers way back. Not surprised it is selling for big bucks these days.

I was told by a Forensic Pathologist that his experience in removing Black Talon bullets, that their appearance was different than firing through ballistic gelatin. The bullets fired through several layers of clothing had a tendency to pick up pieces of fabric that clogged the hollow point and prevented it from expanding.


Of course, there was an anti-gun ER doctor that claimed that a single shot in the arm by one of the Black Talons caused traumatic amputation. Basically, a single shot in the arm causes the arm to fall off.

I had some years back and while they were descent rounds, they are not as good as some of the top shelf offerings by Federal ammo and others now-days. IMHO the Federal HST's are superior to the BT's. As some have said, Winchester changed the name and the coating color as well so if desired, they are basically still available.

Never had any BT's, but I kinda got a thing for Ranger T's.

Got a lot of boxes of 40, and several in 9mm. The 380 cost more than the 45.