Shooting any .357 jacketed bullet that is rated to be shot in a .357 Magnum at magnum velocities is not going to expand at all in a human body at the low end of their supposed velocity range. .
Ballistic gelatin is a solid homogeneous mass...a human body is not. Bullets taken from actual shootings look nothing like the ones in the adds...
If you want expansion under 1000 fps look at the lead HPs from GT Bullets or Rim Rock.
I just have one .38 snubbie left...a 649-2, and it is only carried with the Buffalo Bore 158 +P loads in both solid and HP...
Bob
As noted in my prior post, it’s still a fine line between leading and expansion at .38 +P velocities with LSWCHP bullets. The GT bullets use 2-2-96 alloy that is soft enough to expand with a Brinell hardness of about 9-10. But leading is still an issue.
The Rimrock bullets are gas checked, but are generally too hard to expand with a Brinell hardness around 12-15.
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Otherwise I’m in agreement. The gel junkies get the whole concept of ballistic gel at least partly wrong. It’s not meant to perfectly replicate a human body. It’s designed to provide a repeatable test medium where bullet expansion and performance can be reliably measured, replicated and compared.
Folks who don’t understand the difference between “reliability” and “validity” in statistical terms get the two confused.
The irony is that the gel junkies then attack the data folks who look at data culled from actual shoots. They seem to forget, or never understood, that large data sets on actual shoots were used to identify effective loads, that in turn were fired into ballistic gel to see what a good performing load looked like in ballistic gelatin.
At some point the tail started wagging the dog and gel performance started to be what mattered in many peoples’ eyes. That has created some interesting problems. For example there are a number of loads that have performed well in real world shoots and are well regarded by many police departments that do not perform well in ballistic gelatin. That is particularly the case in the “4 layer denim” test that has far too often become a proxy for the FBIs heavy clothing test, which has a single layer each of:
- cotton t shirt,
- cotton shirt,
- polar fleece, and
- denim.
I’ve tested a few of those well regarded loads and they often don’t expand or expand poorly in the FBIs preferred 10% ballistic gel, but do just fine in something similar to Paul Harrell’s meat target, and often perform fine in the US military’s preferred 20% ballistic gel.
Unfortunately the use of 10% ballistic gel has driven development of bullets that perform really well in ballistic gel, that probably doesn’t have all that much validity.
