Am reading a novel where an assassin uses a nitroglycerin-tipped slug in a rifle to blow the head off his victim. I Googled this and did not find anything to substantiate it, but it sounds totally absurd to me.
It seems to me that the force of the powder to propel the bullet would explode it long before it reached the target, likely in the breech or the rifle barrel. .
Is there really such a thing? If so, how does it work?
Good thing he didn’t shoot the guy in the heart. It just would have made his angina go away…
I’ll say no, for two reasons:
Nitroglycerin’s pretty unstable. The initial shock of “launch” would be enough to set it off in the container.
The shock and force of launch are used to arm actual ordnance and fuses, which include steps to break certain pieces. Unless it was pretty thick-walled glass or metal, I don’t see the container surviving the launch. And even then, there’s a fair chance the container would survive the impact, negating the nitro-boom making it all for naught.
I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I’m gonna say highly unlikely.
Tripler
My $0.02: A fanciful fabrication for a fictional plot.
The explosive bullets used in the civil war contained black powder, or mercury fulminate, cite.
The use of any explosive projectile of less weight than 400 grams was banned by the St. Petersburg Declaration of 1868.
I have seen dudes (Note, I do NOT suggest this!!!) bore out a big slow bullet like a 45/70, then place a .22 blank in there backwards with the rim facing the target. When the bullet strikes a hard surface, it explodes.
This is likely illegal and certainly can be dangerous. But they claim the blank is not set off by the firing, just by the impact.
What’s the point?
A shot into the head from any kind of gun, even a small caliber .22, is fatal in most cases. For assassination purposes, once the victim is dead, what does it matter how badly the head was damaged?
Also, there are regular bullets available already that will do this, or nearly so. The ‘cop-killer’ bullets expand on impact, and will blow away most of the back side of the head.
Many bullets do a fine job tearing a larger exit wound than entrance, no super duper hydrashok/blacktalon/whatever needed.
Mercury fulminate is stable enough to be used as initiating explosives in ordnance, which is used to fire a booster (which later fires the main charge). I’ve seen the pubs covering Civil War ordnance, and it’s amazing what we were thinking up even back then. Heck, people are still getting hurt trying to inert Civil War ordnance themselves.
Tripler
But nitroglycerin in liquid form? A little too unstable for that kind of stuff.
Not nitroglycerin. Presented for your amusement.
.50BMG armor piercing, explosive, incendiary round.
“A shot into the head from any kind of gun, even a small caliber .22, is fatal in most cases.”
The point would presumably to make it into ‘the large majority’ rather than ‘most’ or the like, ie even a graze might be enough to do it instead of needing a more direct hit.
As I understand it, the main reason we dont use said explosive bullets is because they’re banned in small arms as cited above, rather than being totally impractical. In practise presumably the advantage is fairly tiny or impractical due to expense or storage etc otherwise said treaty would probably have been ignored Im guessing.
Dynamite basically is nitroglycerin soaked in clay, so rounds with ‘nitroglycerin’ in them could exist in theory, the main reason they wouldnt be is because its less efficient than alternatives so in practise they dont exist, in modern times anyhow.
Obviously the writer was just showing their ignorance though.
Otara
Even the more stable dynamite, when used as a projectile was fired from compressed air dynamite guns. I can’t see nitroglycerin doing anything but blowing up the gun you fire it out of.
They are called ‘hollow points,’ and they are not ‘cop-killer’ bullets, any more than flip open knives are ‘cop killer’ knives.
As I recall, the actual reason for the ban was that they just made wounds nastier and less likely to heal cleanly, without actually being usefully more lethal.
I always heard Teflon coated or other bullets designed to pierce a bulletproof vest called that, not hollowpoints.
Black Talon was never banned, it was taken off the market, changed a little, and came back out under a different name. The benefit of black talon ammo was that the expansion was more uniform and maybe did a better job after passing through something that would plug up a normal hollowpoint (down jacket, etc). The idea that the bullet makes a nastier wound because of the sharp bits is wrong. Bullet wounds do weird things. This guy, while a little gung ho, has a pretty good page with diagrams showing what happens when a bullet wounds someone.
The other big mistake is when people talk about cop killer bullets are worrying about “teflon” bullets etc to cut through armor vests. Lubricated bullets lubricate the barrel, and dont affect armor penetration. Bullets that actually have armor penetrating capabilities tend to be hard and don’t expand as well, causing smaller wound cavities. There’s no such thing as a “cop killer” bullet on the market that substantially outperforms “normal” ammo against kevlar. Except maybe a 12Ga slug.
All Teflon does is reduce the wear on the barrel. It doesn’t effect the ballistics in the least (or penetration).
And this is the first I’ve ever heard about it changing the expansion pattern of the bullet, do you happen to have a reference or something for that, ivn1188?
Oh, if all you wan to do is penetrate a police officer’s vest, there are all kinds of bullets available that can do that…
Let’s not mix fact with baseless innuendo, please. “Cop-killer bullets” is most typically applied to pistol rounds designed to pierce body armor, and in particular the KTW round that was produced in the 'Seventies and early 'Eightes, despite the fact that this ammunition was available to sale only to law enforcement and was never involved in any reported officer shooting.
Another use of the term “cop-killer bullets” has been applied to the Devastator round, which despite its unpolitic name, is actually a lightweight bullet with a large cavity (similar to a wadcutter round loaded backwards) primarily intended for use against varmits. (A similar round, scored for frangibility was at one time considered for use by the Air Marshall’s service as an alternative to the Glaser Safety Slug.) It has been reported that some individuals placed pistol primers within in the large cavity to produce an explosive effect upon impact, though the anecdotes I’ve heard of experiments with this type of round is that it is counterproductive, resulting in very shallow penetration. There are real explosive rounds (usually using PETN or RDX as the primary explosive agent) as runner pat notes, but these are large bore high explosive incendiary (HEI) or high explosive armor piercing (HEAP) rounds designed for lightly armored anti-vehicle use, not anti-personnel use, as just being struck by a .50 BMG round would virtually guarantee death for the recipient.
Hollowpoint rounds, which is what t-bonham@scc.net appears to be referring to, are in no way designed be especially lethal to police officers, and in fact every major police department in the United States requires officers to carry such rounds in duty pistols; not because they are especially lethal, but because they are more effective at stopping a perpetrator with fewer shots, and pose less of a threat to the public at large from overpenetration. Such rounds–even in Magnum calibers–are ineffective at penetrating modern Class IIa body armor, and thus, less effective against police officers wearing body armor than FMJ or steel-core bullets.
As for the question posed by the o.p., pure nitroglycerine would make a poor explosive agent for this application; it is shock, spark, and heat sensitive at room temperature, and thus ill-suited to be used in or around a firearm. When combined with a binder it can be insensitive to any normal environmental shock, but then would not detonate reliably on impact without a primary charge to set it off. (Real explosive rounds use a stable plastique or rigid binder explosive with a primary detonating charge.) Nor would it be especially useful; any round large enough to carry a significant charge of explosive would, upon firm contact with the head, do catastrophically traumatic damage to the cranium and neural processing hardware within, rendering any pyrotechnics only useful in the additional cascade of gore they might produce.
This is just another case of an ill-informed, ill-researched, and ill-vetted fictionist perpetuating some crime-related myth likely overheard from some buddy who “usta be a Delta Force sniper” or somesuch. The wealth of ignorance in this regard is virtually limitless.
Stranger
They’re called…
rifle bullets.
Yep, even the plainest, weakest, 100 year old WW I surplus bolt action rifle bullets will not experience much more than an afterthought going through armour such as worn by patrol officers.
Vests worn by patrol officers are some variation of a level 2 vest, which will stop handgun bullets. Rifle bullets can only be stopped by level 3 vests, and only if they hit the (heavy) ceramic trauma plate.
Also, one of the major reasons for using hollow-point bullets is not to make a massive exit wound, but rather to avoid making one at all. Ordinary golden coloured bullets like the military uses are much more likely to zip right through a body and hit the 12 yr old girl across the street. Hollow points (when they expand) are more likely to dump all their energy in the target, and stay inside. Yes it does inflict a bigger wound, but only a bit. A .45: bullet may expand to 0.60" or so. You still have to hit the target in the middle of the chest or abdomen (or middle of the head) to incapacitate him/her quickly.
Hope that helps.
(sorry about the double post. Some obscure keystroke combination made me post before I was done)
The infamous ‘Teflon coated bullet’, or KTW bullet, wasn’t designed to penetrate body armor. They were produced to offer better penetration against hard targets such as windshields and car bodies. The Teflon was added as an exterior coating to prevent the bullet (which is made of brass) from wearing out the barrel’s rifling. The Teflon does not assist with penetration, but does help reduce ricochet potential.
You can find more info here for starters.
Sure, pictures are better than words:
Comparison
The pic of the SXT (nee Black Talon) shows a slightly more regular expansion pattern. The cuts in the bullet guide the expansion to be a little more regular and repeatable; but it’s doubful the bullets are any more than 1-5% more effective. Most modern designed hollowpoints perform about the same.
I probably didn’t write my first post as clearly as I should have, the IDEA was that the bullets expand more reliably than other hollowpoints, but whether they do so in real life is an open question. Either way, the idea that they are some sort of uber-lethal round is just an urban legend.
BTW, the joke is that SXT stands for Same eXact Thing, but it is actually a slightly more advanced round than the original Black Talon, and they took off the black lubalox coating – I don’t remember what the new lube is.
Edit: busy thread; the KTW was the other “cop-killer”. There was an office shooting involving the Black Talon that led to the bad press, and it often gets confused with the KTW because they both had coatings.