If even that. The few KTW rounds I’ve handled (owned by LEO collectors) the coating was virtually peeling off.
The Olin/Winchester Black Talon (later essentially renamed to Ranger SXT or just SXT), the Remington Golden Saber, Hornaldy XTP, Federal HydraShok, and a few others bullets were designed with some kind of perforation in the jacket and lead core, combined with a variety of mechanisms that more strongly joined the jacket to the core so as to maximize expansion and prevent fragmentation or jacket separation that compromises penetration. The claim that it demonstrated some kind of buzzsaw effect in the body is clearly refuted by looking at the wound cavity in ballistic gelatin, where the bullet will rotate only about 2 times before coming to a stop. (I can’t find an image online in a 10 second Google Image search but no doubt someone has scaned in one of the multitude of pictures from gun porn rags of the era.)
These are certainly more effective rounds in terms of doing the kind of damage necessary to quickly stop a perpetrator, but then, if you’re dropping the hammer on another human being one has to assume that you’re not wishing him “Happy Birthday and many returns!” From a practical point of view, you’d rather stop an attacker with one or two rounds fired than five or six non-expanding rounds; that makes fewer wounds to patch up, less chance of overpenetrating or stray rounds hitting a bystander, and less chance of the perpetrator succeeding in an attack upon the firer or anyone else, which is presumably what initiated and justified the discharge of a firearm at another human being to begin with.
An exploding bullet would violate the Moscow Convention (of 1899?). Still such a thing could be cobbled together. My first bet would be mercury fulminate, but some Smart Person knows more about the shock-safety of explosives.
More to the point, I would suppose an assassin would be going for accuracy. Any homemade bullet would lack accuracy. Better to just put a regular bullet between the guy’s eyes.
John Hinckley reportedly used explosive .22 caliber rounds referred to by the press as “Devastators”–I don’t know what relation they have to the ammunition of that name referred to by Stranger On A Train above.
Of the six rounds Hinckley fired, none actually exploded.
ISTR a tactic reportedly used by assassins to make rounds extra frangible by drilling a cavity into what was otherwise an FMJ rifle bullet.
The cavity would be partly filled with glycerine, not nitroglycerine, then a lead plug fashioned to close the cavity & fill out the profile.
The idea was that on impact the bullet slows rapidly, the glycerine keeps going, and tears the front out of the bullet, producing a miniature shrapnel spray. IOW, the bullet “explodes”, but not pyrotechnically.
I wonder if the OP’s novelist was so clueless/illiterate as to confuse glycerine with nitroglycerine. Folks playing at home, please, PLEASE, don’t get those confused.
Zirconium is an incendiary fuel ingredient. It’s also used in “M” and “N” model Hellfire missiles to enhance blast. Burning metals are extremely difficult to extinguish. Effect is the same as the addition of aluminum powder to explosive mixes in aircraft bombs. Aluminum is also used in the “M, N” model warheads for the Hellfire.
Not really an improvement over a good JHP. The amount that fragments is very small, and as the pieces are also small they don’t travel very far. You can see similar effects from poor quality hollow points that break apart. You’re not really adding anything in handgun calibers.
As for mercury, I’ve read that it won’t work as mercury will dissolve lead. Apparently, it’s a method for cleaning rifle barrels long ago.
(Please excuse my ignorance if this is a total newbie question) I thought the point of the glycerin/mercury was so that a liquid spray would shoot out, instead it just having the bullet itself disintegrate like in a frangible round?
The bullets that I remember getting labeled as “cop-killer bullets” by gun control advocates were non-expanding, armor-piercing bullets that would create the same type of wound as a full metal jacket bullet.
A non-expanding bullet fired from a battle rifle, like a typical military bolt-action rifle, can make a real mess of someone’s head due to the large amount of kinetic energy that is transferred to the target.
HEAT works by using high explosive to form concentrated jet of high-pressure, high-temperature metal (usually copper) and gases which punch through armor.
Liquid bullet component would spread out over all possible area, would have less energy than the bullet as a whole (low density means low mass means low inertia) and would be very lousy in penetrating armor (or tissue).
I’d say they are rather opposites, with liquid filled bullet being more of poor-man equivalent of Glaser round.
Though mercury poisoning might be effective assassination tactic.
I’ve read of match shooters who always make their own rounds, so as to insure a level of consistency they feel might be lacking in a box of Federal (for example).
The one hand loaded I’ve known well enough to go shooting with was in the process of compiling some pretty extensive notes on performance on his various combinations, trying to tie down his best round.
There’s a difference between making your own cartridge (round), and making your own bullet. Competitive shooters will often reload their brass and tinker with powder charge, bullet seating depths, etc. to get the best performance possible. But they generally buy their bullets, not cast them. And trying to get repeatability when doing stuff like drilling a cavity in the bullet nose and filling it with various unpleasant substances would be a nightmare.
Ditto; swaged jacketed match grade rifle bullets are high precision products, dimensionally controlled to within a few thousandths of an inch in dimension. Drilling one out by hand and trying to pack it with glycerine or paraffin would most certainly ruin the balance of the bullet.
Target shooters will, as muldoonthief notes, very often reload their own rounds, both to obtain consistency not found in factory produced rounds and to tune the load to the particular rifle. Although there is something of an art to this (and the discipline to develop a consistent approach to optimizing the round) this isn’t some kind of esoteric activity; in fact, there is a large subculture among shooting enthusiasts that centers around reloading as an activity onto itself.
In any case, relatively few assassinations that I’ve read have been performed by a professional marksman using a rifle at long distance, and none involving high explosive rifle rounds. Most prominent assassinations have occurred at short, often near touching range, (see Anwar El Sadat, Mohandas Ghandi, James Garfield, Robert Kennedy), and were perpetrated by nearly blundering amateurs (John Kennedy, Ferdinand Franco, Abraham Lincoln). Even those that could be ascribed to some kind of professional talent (say, Indira Ghandi) hardly reflect the Hollywood vision of the lone killer for hire, and the few known professional assassination squads–such as those employed by the MOSSAD–tend to favor either close-up work with small arms or poison, or remote detonation of explosives.
Oh, and HEAT stands for High Explosive, Anti-Tank. Such rounds are usually in the 70mm class or larger shells, as they have to be large enough to contain the shaped charge that punches through armor plate. This is different from an HEAP/HEI round, and would be gross overkill for anti-personnel usage.
