All shotgun and rifle shells manufactured in living memory are “high powered”. The ones that gave a wimp pop and just king of fell out of the end of the barrel didn’t sell as well as they thought. Popular terminology, especially in the media, doesn’t do well when it comes to guns. An M-16 fires a pathetic little round when compared to a 50 year old, dusty, bolt action 30.06 (developed in 1906!) kept in a farm closet but you don’t hear much about that. Gun technology is remarkably mature and stable and terms like “high-powered” don’t mean much except in occasional marketing terms. The highest-powered common guns except maybe for the .50 caliber are the most boring and the least offensive to even the most die-hard anti-gun activists. 12 gauge shotguns and long-range deer rifles have the most killing power for humans but they don’t look sexy, high-tech, or scary so most people ignore those.
Each individual DD round carries a $200 tax. I’d expect even the guys who can afford transferable NFA weapons to choke at that price tag.
“Armor piercing ammunition” has more to do with the design characteristics of the bullet than it’s actually effectiveness at piercing body armor. Plastic sheathing, non-lead cores of certain materials/shapes, etc. Many commonly available hunting rounds will pierce armor (and screw up the person wearing it, even if they don’t) while a number of non-copper-jacketed “armor piercing” bullets will do nothing of the sort.
[QUOTE=ProjammerThere are some AP rounds that require a class 3 license to purchase or possess, most notably the teflon coated “cop killers”.[/QUOTE]
Nitpicks: The KTW round (which is what is usually referred to by the term “cop-killer bullet” was never sold commercially to civilians, has never been used to kill a cop, and is legal to possess without special permit by the ATFE, though manufacture is restricted. It is a sintered bronze bullet covered with a green Teflon coat, which does not help it penetrate ballistic armor. (I’ve heard various rationales to the purpose of the coating, from protecting rifling to helping it stick to a windshield on an oblique angle, but it peels off readily, so it can’t be too critical to the bullet’s function.) It will allegedly penetrate Type II body armor, but that’s nothing unique; hard cast .357 Magnum rounds and even .22 WMR rounds (at close range) will penetrate this, as will viritually any centerfire rifle round.
Next up is that “Glock 9” made of “porcelain” that is “undetectable” by airport screeners that Bruce Willis raves on about in Die Hard II.
Getting information about weapons, science, or sex from movies is like asking the Man On The Street for his opinion on world events; whatever you get might have a germ of truth, wrapped in layer after layer of misconception, fallacy, delusion, and manufactured fluff.
Stranger
Just an FYI… when it comes to a bullet’s ability to pierce body armor, the discussion is usually about *handgun * rounds. With the exception of level III and IV armor, just about *any * rifle round can pierce body armor.
I declare this thread officially hijacked.
While Stranger’s description of teflon bullets is accurate, teflon bullets are no more armor piercing than any other round of similar size and power, it’s the “man on the street” that reads the poorly researched and excessively hyped newspaper article and makes noises at their legislator who then jumps on the easy bandwagon to score easy points with voters.
Smokeless powder, used in all modern ammunition, burns fairly slowly unless constrained inside a high pressure enviroment (the action and barrel of a firearm). It does not in any way shape or form explode. Old fashioned black powder will go up with a flash, but is still technically rapid burning rather than a true explosion…no shock wave is produced. While this may seem to be splitting hairs, the fact is that unless loaded into an appropriate firearm, igniting the powder in a cartridge does not impart significant velocity to the projectile.
Occassionally a sporting goods store will catch fire. When that happens the ammunition stored there cooks off. Typically the bullets travel a few inches at most, and often less than an inch. The firefighters have more to fear from the disposable propane/butane cylinders and the gallon cans of white gas sold as lantern/stove fuel.
Running lead through an incenerator may pose a health hazard, but the gunpowder in a few shotgun shells is not a problem.
As for “high power”…the neighbor may have noticed that these were magnum shells, and explained that this means they are higher power. This is not particicularly significant from a regulatory standpoint, but not all shotguns are capable of handling magnum shells (which now come in to flavors) so it is not something to be ignored if one intends to use the ammunition for it’s intended purpose.
The hubbub over the “Cop Killer Bullet” deprived an old friend of mine of a patent. He had designed a very accurate target bullet (yes, the bullet, not the whole round.) He had the misfortune of taking it to a patent attorney when the raving over armor-piercing rounds was in the news. The patent attorney told him his chances of getting a patent for a new, pointy bullet had just vanished. :smack:
At this late date, I can tell you that my late friend’s bullet was machined, not cast. That way, the exact shape and size were precisely the same, bullet after bullet after bullet. In competition shooting, where millimeters on the target make a difference, his design would have been the one to have.
Not only will the exploding/burning rounds not damage the plant any, but in many of the power plants I work at they still use shotguns for deslagging the boilers. If they can repeatedly fire a 10-gauge into the side of the water walls as a routine bit of cleaning, a shell burning in the stoker grate isn’t going to do anything.
Don’t apologize. And I’m sorry you got some snarky responses in GQ nitpicking your questions. People should always be encouraged to ask honest questions here, without getting their asses jumped on.
My ignorance here has been fought. And I actually knew that smokeless powder burns rather than exploding, so you’d think I would have known better.
On the other hand, putting an acetylene tank through a C&D waste shredder does result in an impressive explosion. 
This may be true of plastic and paper shotgun shells where the casing is destroyed before the powder cooks off, it is decidedly untrue of pistol and rifle rounds where the shell and projectile are of solid metal construction.
Many years ago in a hospital I worked in there was a “case of the month” board hanging in the doctors lounge. Once when I was passing through there was an x-ray of a forearm hanging there with a .22 shell casing embedded in the muscle. The story was that a man was burning a pile of leaves and apparently there was a .22 bullet buried in it. The round cooked off and the case embedded itself three inches into the man’s arm. I’m sure the slug only traveled a short distance, but the much lighter casing was propelled to a potentially fatal velocity. Newton’s equal and opposite reaction and all.
This was not a friend of a friend story or something I read on the internet. I saw the x-ray with my very own Mk1 eyeball.
Ammunition + open fire = potential for death.
What was stopping your friend from lodging his Patent in somewhere like Canada, out of curiosity?
I never thought to ask him that. I know next to nothing about patent law. It’s too late for me to ask, now. Sorry.
I’ve tossed .22lr into fires for years, sounds like a bit of a fluke for one to have enough velocity to injure someone that bad (and the lead had to be freakin’ hot, ouch!)
A huge portion of a bullets speed is dependent on trapping the expanding gasses in a confined space (up to a certain point, of course). A .22 in a handgun won’t have the same muzzle velocity as one from a rifle, and one cooked off without a barrel at all doesn’t generally (Projammer’s exception noted) do more than make a little bang and bounce off the edge of the fire pit.
Don’t try this at home, and hitting cartridges with hammers is contraindicated. Just don’t, ok?
To be accurate, there are some double base powders that can detonate rather than deflagrate, but they have to be pretty tightly confined to do so. In a handgun or rifle cartridge there just isn’t enough constraint to cause detonation.
Without disputing your story (which I find plausible, though at the edge of likelyhood) the fact is that cases weigh much less and demonstrate far more drag than a bullet. It’s possible that someone standing very close to an “exploding” cartridge might be struck by a flying cartridge that could penetrate an inch or two into bare flesh, but it’s not going to punch through anything significant like walls or even thick fabric, and they won’t go more than a few feet before drag from the shape and spinning motion reduces their speed to a nuisance level. A common way of disposing of unreliable or corrosive ammunition is to dump rounds loosely, a box at a time, into a fire burning in a 55 gallon barrel. Even though most pistol and all centerfire rifle rounds will easily puncture the thin, low grade steel of such containers when fired through a barrel, when burned loose you just hear a loud popping sound as the primer and powder charge cook off and the bullet pops out of the cartridge. It wouldn’t be wise to stand over a box of ammunition with a blowtorch–if for no other reason than that the primers detonating will damage your hearing–but tales of the hazards of cooked-off ammunition, fed by Hollywood effects showing them exploding like fireworks, are vastly overstated.
I find this highly unlikely. Swaging (the multi-step process by which modern bullets are formed) will produce a finish and balance comperable to anything readily achiveable by standard lathe machining; to get a more accurate result you’d have to go the type of multi-axis milling machine used to manufacture high quality optics, and while such machines are now relatively inexpensive, in the early 'Eighties these started in the six figure range. Accuracy is more than just the shape and consistency of the bullet, too, as any hobbyist marksman will tell you; also involved is the quality and consistency of the case (rim deburring, crimp, shoulder dimension, wall thickness, primer pocket, chamber fit); getting the correct combination of twist, bullet weight, and powder type and charge; and barrel bedding and compensating for barrel vibe. Someone spending dollars a shot on bullets alone is wasting their money.
Stranger