Here you can see a .44 Magnum and a .308 Winchester round (as well as several other common pistol and rifle rounds). The .44 Magnum is intended to be a heavy pistol round fired from a 6-8 inch barrel primarily intended for hunting purposes (although it can also be found chambered in many lever action carbines and a few bolt action rifles); it moves quite fast for a pistol round, but still only about half the speed of a .380 Winchester (or the essentially identical 7.62x51mm NATO round that was derived from it). As energy is 1/2massvelocity^2, you can see that having twice the velocity would give four times the energy for the same mass. The .308 bullet is generally about 150 to 175 grains, while bullets for the .44 Magnum range from 200 gr to 340 gr, so on the balance the .308 is typically somewhat more than twice to three times the energy of a .44 Magnum.
The top row is rifle calibers, the lower row is handgun calibers. There are some rounds that will work in both.
While the diameter of a .44 caliber handgun round is slightly larger than a .308, the cartridge is much smaller, and holds less gunpowder.
Bullet energy is all about mass and velocity. The rifle cartridge holds more powder, which sends a 150 grain bullet about 2,800 feet per second.
A .44 Magnum however, sends a 340 grain bullet about 1,500 fps.
A rifle cartridge holds more powder, and the longer barrel helps boost velocity to many multiples of handgun bullets.
To be more specific, kinetic energy equals one-half mass times velocity squared. So increasing the velocity of a projectile will impart far more energy than increasing the mass.
That said, there is some debate about this when it comes to terminal velocity and “stopping power.” The mathematics tell us that a small, fast projectile will be more powerful, and it is. But anecdotal evidence indicates that such projectiles can pass straight through a human body without (immediately) incapacitating the combatant. Its a debate that has raged for centuries and will not be resolved in the near future.
Anecdotal data point, FWIW. I did a trial once where a man from inside his house shot his neighbour who was marching menacingly up and down outside the shooter’s fence, hurling abuse. The weapon used was a .303 rifle (broadly comparabe to the .308).
The shot went directly into the left eyeball of the deceased, from the front. It exited out the back of the skull. IIRC, a rough exit wound about 4x4 inches was created in which very little skull remained. From the front, you couldn’t tell he’d been hit unless you were told what to look for. The back was a different story.
The horror of it was that the deceased’s 13 year old daughter had come to bring him home and stop him from behaving like an idiot. She was about 20 feet from him and looking directly at him from side on when she saw her dad’s head destroyed.
I went to a suicide call in which the guy blew his brains out with a .308 under the chin. I mean “blew his brains out” literally. His entire brain was ejected out of the top of his skull and was laying on the ground about 5 feet away. So to answer the OP, that’s what its like.
Oh, yeah. I was at the standoff at the Russian White House in October 1993. The rebels opened up at about 12:40 pm, firing from rooftops up the street, and everyone turned to look in that direction. Then snipers started firing at the crowd and everybody hit the pavement. You can tell when someone is shooting at you because it sounds different from ordinary gunfire.
When I was growing up, I spent summers in West Virginia with my dad. We would go out into the hills and target shoot with military rifles. When I was nine or ten, I fired a .303 Enfield at a piece of scrap metal in a mudpit. The recoil knocked me back three feet, and the bullet made a hole in the mud that was big enough to swallow a watermelon!
The thought of being shot with one of those things is not pleasant! I remember one episode of Rat Patrol where a German shot Hitch in the shoulder with a Mauser (after repeated close-ups in which the SFX blood patch was clearly visible under his uniform). Of course, he just needed a field dressing and a week in hospital before he was back in his Jeep. IRL, he’d’ve lost his freakin’ arm, assuming he survived the blood loss before they could get him to an aid station.
The “FIIIZZZZZZZZZ” or “WHIIIZZZZZZZZZZZ” sound a bullet (deliberately fired or ricocheting) makes as it flies by one’s head is both incredibly disconcerting, to say the least.
Never pulled target butts in the pits, but from talking to those who have, the “Crack!” of a Highpower bullet going overhead is about as loud as a .22 LR muzzle blast. I don’t have data to confirm that assertion, but I’ve been told that you definitely want to be wearing ear protection.
EDIT: Haven’t opened ducati’s link, since I’m on my tablet and it’s cranky, but “Heartbreak Ridge” is a great guilty pleasure, isn’t it?
The bullets that went over my head (fired from an AK-47, I would imagine) make a kind of sucking sound: * SSSSSSSSSHHHHHHOOOOOOP! SSSSSSSSSHHHHHHOOOOOOP!* It was like you could hear the spinning imparted by the AK’s rifling.
A ricochet passed close to me when I was watching from a shelter, and I actually heard the BEEEEEEEOW! sound you hear in all the time in movies. Scary, now that I think about it, but it was exciting at the time!
I once met a man who behaved in a rather strange way. He told me that when he was about 21 he shot himself in the head with a .22 rifle. I asked him several times in several different ways why he did that. But he was never forthcoming with any kind of answer that made sense. He did give me several answers but none of them made any sense.
He exhibited many symptoms - one of which was that he didn’t seem to be able to refuse to answer any question. There were some other people present and some of them asked him some questions that were a clear attempt to make fun of him. He just answered their questions. Sometimes his answer was related to the question and sometimes it wasn’t. But the interesting thing to me was that he never seemed to be able to say, “I don’t want to answer that question.”
So, what’s my point? It is that you can never really predict what the effect of a gunshot wound will be. In many cases, it may kill the victim. But in other cases, the damage can range anywhere from slight to extreme. For anyone contemplating shooting themselves or someone else, I want to strongly advise against doing that.
In most jurisdictions, there is a legal maxim that goes something like this, “You take the victim as you find them”.
What that means is, suppose you walk up to some stranger and punch them in the head for no reason (there is actually some game that young people are currently playing where they do this sort of thing). You have no way of knowing if that person is in excellent health or has some kind of a brain tumor or any other kind of pre-existing injury. Suppose punching a healthy individual might just cause some slight damage but punching another individual in exactly the same way (with a pre-existing injury) might cause some extreme injury or death. The law will punish you for whatever injury results - regardless of what kind of injury you might have expected and regardless of the current health of your victim.
So, if you shoot someone and they have some kind of pre-existing injury that causes an effect far more serious that you would have expected the same kind of gunshot to cause to an average person, it is your tough luck. You will suffer the legal consequences for whatever kind of damgage results.
I realize this thread is asking about the damage that will likely be caused by a .308 gunshot. I want to take the opportunity to advise just how dangerous and how foolish it is to shoot anyone with a .308 or any other kind of weapon.
