I recently finished reading a book about street gang warfare in the slums of Rio de Janeiro in the early 70s.
Question 1:
In this book, the gang members brandish just about every type of common handgun available at the time: 38, 32, 45 and so on.
There are several references to a “765 pistol”. What could this be?
Question 2:
There are several places where the gang members are said to have placed their bullets behind the refrigerator in order to warm them by the coils. In one place a girlfriend was displeased with the criminal lifestyle that involved, among other things, warming bullets over a hotplate for her fellow.
Why would street gang members warm their bullets? We’re talking Rio de Janeiro, where even the coldest winter day rarely dips below sixty. Any ideas?
For those who have patiently responded to other queries I posted as I have slogged through this book (in Portuguese) – Yes, I finally finished the damned thing. Actually, it was a really good book.
Um, I think there might be a little literary liscense going on here.
I’ve never heard of a “765 pistol”. I’ve heard of 7.62mm rounds for rifles, but never for a pistol. Are you sure they weren’t referring to a model number or such?
Warming bullets? Given that most, if not all rounds are full metal jacketed lead slugs, maybe warming the lead makes it more “elastic” and thus it’s more likely to mushroom out when it hits it’s target. In a case like this, maybe they wanted to ensure that overpenetration didn’t occur?
Needless to say, warming bullets is a fairly stupid idea. Kids, don’t try this at home.
I’ll take a wild guess and say that the “765 pistol” was one chambered for 7.65 mm - probably a Luger or Mauser. I have no idea why anyone would “warm up” ammunition - unless it was very old ammo that someone thought was unreliable due to the gunpowder somehow becoming deficient and that warming it up would somehow rejuvenate it. Holy smoke, what a sentence!
radar ralf, you raise a good point about warming the ammo. But I would only say that the book takes place in the 70s, when smokeless gunpowder was well established. At that point, you shouldn’t have had to warm your gunpowder.
But I’ve never heard of that legend. When did that take place (the ‘becoming deficient’ part?)?
I pretty confident that the bullet warming thing is not too technical. They all said it as if it were common knowledge among gang members to keep your bullets warm. On top of that, these guys weren’t well educated: In one gang, there was only one guy who knows how to read, and the boss maked him read all of the headlines aloud so that he can hear if his gang made the news.
In one of the sentences that mentions the 765 pistol, they also mention an INA submachine gun. What’s that?
(“estava com uma metralhadora INA e uma pistola 765”).
Tripler, it’s Cidade de Deus (City of God) – the basis for this movie. I’ve been pestering the Brazilian dopers for weeks in a thread about all of the opaque Brazilian slang the author uses.
Tripler - Yessir, you are right about not needing to warm the ammo; but notice I said “…very old ammo that someone thought was unreliable due to the gunpowder somehow becoming deficient…” I was trying to point out that this was an erroneous belief.
WAG - keeping it warm is to keep it dry. Poor quality ammo may be more prone to corrosion in a humid climate. Bad crimping of the casing around the bullet may allow moisture to contaminate the powder.
There’s more than one kind of 7.65mm pistol round, but I suspect it to be a 7.65mm Parabellum, because pistols firing that round were made in South America, including an Argentinian Luger clone. INA sounds like one of the submachine guns manufactured by Brazil’s native arms industry, basically reliable stamped metal weapons on the order of the Sten and the MP40.
As for heating bullets, you might as well just bless them. Unless, as adirondack_mike pointed out, they were just keeping it dry.
Geez… It just looked at my last post and saw about five stupid typos. Oh well.
I think adirondack_mike might be on to something, with a dose of what radar was talking about too.
The story starts in '65, and they had very shoddy guns and probably shoddy ammo too. Could have been some of that “deficient” stuff.
On preview I see Trucido has probably found the answer to #1. Thanks!
“Is that hot ammo in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?” I think the INA is a sub-gun made in Brazil, but IIRC, it is chambered for the .45 ACP.
Hey, true, but I given at the point of my post we weren’t sure if the weapon in question was a handgun or not, I’ll still put a dollar on the fact that a majority of the rounds sold on the market are FMJ. Sure you can get wadcutters or hollowpoints, but they make a specialty minority compared to the “plinking” rounds.
But Trucido has me corrected. I’ve never heard of a 7.65mm Parabellum pistol. Wow!
Hey Trucido, got a picture or such for me?
Tripler
I’ve got a few guns, but none nowhere near as rare. . .
Usually the slug is very warm, mainly due to all that gun power burning behind it. If a person actually did that, I would suspect it was based on someone simply making up a story and people believing it.