Dum dum bullets were invented at the Dum Dum arsenal in India. Hollowpoints are modern. Other than people getting upset when they hear the term “dum dum”, is there any difference?
Screaming at a wall is certainly futile.
It can also be very satisfying, particularly if it involves a lot of profanity.
I always thought that dum-dum bullets were made by cutting an “X” into the top of the slug, thereby allowing the bullet to fragment fairly early when penetrating the target. Hollowpoints are drilled down the center of the slug to allow for more of a “mushroom” effect when entering the target. I’m pretty sure that hollowpoints don’t fragment as much as dum-dums, but they are pretty nasty all the same.
Just my WAG. I’ve shot guns and I’ve owned a few as well, but I’m no expert by any stretch. Somebody else chime in to let me know if I’m right. If I’m wrong, tell me what the answer is. I’m curious too…
“It’s only common sense,
There are no accidents 'round here.”
The DumDum was designed with the (copper?) jacket open at the nose of the bullet to expose the soft lead interior to the impact site.
Hollowpoints go one step further, actually including a depression at the nose of the bullet to facilitate the mushrooming effect.
DumDum’s were outlawed for warfare in the 1899 Hague onvention and I assume that hollowpoints are still illegal under the same convention.
One reason they are favored by police (beyond their stopping power) is that they are far less likely to pass through walls near a gunfight that a "full metal jacket"ed round will. A military round can go through a number of obstacles and injure people a long way off. A hollowpoint usually stops at the first obstruction.
Tom~
Tom, as usual, is right on target. Here’s a little bit of additional historical information.
The dum-dum was a British military bullet developed in Indiaþs Dum-Dum Arsenal and used on India’s North West Frontier and in the Sudan in 1897 and 1898. It was originally a jacketed .303 cal. British bullet with the nose of the jacket left open to expose the lead core in the hope of increasing effectiveness and fragmentation. Improvement was not pursued, for the Hague Convention of 1899 outlawed such bullets for warfare (as Tom has said).
Dum-Dum is often misused as a term for any soft-nosed or hollow-pointed hunting bullet. Hollow-points are designed to expand upon impact, not fragment.
I want you to know that I waited on this one just for you, Uncle.
The Hauge convention is not specific about banned bullet types. I think the wording says that arms will not be designed to cause undue suffering or something like that. That’s usually taken to mean no expanding bullets but even that isn’t completely followed. Snipers typically use match ammunition with hollow point bullets. Those bullets don’t have exposed lead as a hollow point bullet designed specifically for expansion would but it expands more than a full metal jacket round would.
Thanks, Manny. It appears I was a bit late on the draw anyway. Ah well, grab yourself a couple Phædybucks out of petty cash. I think I’m gonna have to put a shortcut to the shotgun gauge data on my desktop for quicker access.
By the way, I saw you posted something over at Snopes regarding the FCC Daily Digest. I’m on that distribution list also. We use it to target potential clients for our telecom engineering services. Do you get the telecom reports from GeckoNews.net also?
Interesting topic…I have always believed that a dum-dum round was made by putting an “X” in the nose of older lead bullets, as mentioned above. There may be a few misconceptions about hollowpoint bullets, here, however. In bullets used in handgun ammunition, the hollow point is there for one purpose only: expansion. Ideally, the HP bullet will expand and release all its energy in the target, and will not penetrate all the way through the target. Modern hunting handgun ammunition (in all its various and sundry forms) is therefore a compromise between penetration and expansion. Because of parameters too arcane for this discussion, ammo manufacturers attempt to achieve optimum performance for different needs by using different bullet configurations, velocities, materials, etc. Bullets designed for rifles are an altogether different story. Since the velocity of rifle bullets is high, some care must be taken in the bullet design and construction material. For superior accuracy, a hollow point bullet with a boat-tail (HPBT) is utilized in target shooting and limited use by law enforcement marksmen. The hollow point tends to keep the nose of the bullet rotating around its axis and the boat-tail breaks up the turbulence caused by a flat base, which could make the bullet yaw in flight. HPBT bullets are allowed in military shooting matches, and some types of HPBT bullets that have an abbreviated cavity (not really a hollow point style) may be allowed for restricted military use. At high velocities, bullets that are not designed correctly can actually come apart before they reach a target. Padeye, I believe you are right about the Hague Convention as applies to metallic bullets, but I think there is some mention in there about banning the use of wooden bullets.
Oops. I forgot to mention that all the stuff I posted above does not apply to handgun target bullets. There are folks who still believe in handgun hunting using the old DEWC (double ended wadcutter), but not many. Target bullets for handguns are a completely different breed, of course. They are intended solely to make nice round holes in paper targets.
There was a movie where a vigilante drilled out the heads of lead bullets, poured liquid mercury into the head, then resealed them with solder.
Mercury, d 13.534, is only slightly more dense thant lead, d 11.34. Therefore it seams that enhancing the impact energy is not really the point.
Liquid mercury also kind of sucks as a poison. Why use a very long acting, nowhere near lethal dose posion when you are shooting them with a .357 magnum, anyway. If you are afraid that they live through the first blast, “bust a cap in their ass” again.
A friend mentioned that the mercury squirting into the body cavity would have a pretty decent kinetic energy, perhaps leading to a much greater wound size. But it is still a liquid, though a very dense liquid. “Splash Damage” sounds kind of like a lame excuse to go through the trouble of preparing special bullets.
Unless mercury does to pimps what silver does to werewolves . . . .
Has anybody heard of this technique of bullet modification, and do you know why it is done?
Well Xeno wasn’t Mercury used in the 19th Century to treat venerial disease? Maybe that is why its dreaded by pimps?
Thanks, particularly to Uncle B. The fragmentation-not-expansion aspect was the one I was really looking for. It sounds to me like dum-dums are best described as “primitive frangible ammo” rather than “primitive hollowpoint” or “primitive softpoint”.
Padeye You’re right that the Hague Convention (1907?) is really vague about banned forms of ammunition, but the Hague Declaration (1899, but I might have those years reveresed) is quite specific. It bans ammo whose hard jackets are opened at the tip. I’m gonna try to find the site/cite I found on the Hague Declaration. This came up in a usenet argument over shotgun ammo, in which lots of people were frustrated trying to find references to all-lead projectiles in the Geneva Convention, of all places
Xenopus I think you’re right that mercury would be no good as a projectile filler. Mercury poisonings usually happen from compounds of mercury, not elemental mercury. It’s probably just something a scriptwrite thought would be cool (I liked the idea of substituting mercury for silver when hunting pimps!) Anyway, I just wanted to point out that increasing bullet weight isn’t going to increase muzzle energy. It may increase power far downrange, by increasing sectional density and thus cutting through air friction better, but at most ranges, this small bullet weight increase wouldn’t matter significantly.
From Anarchy Today:
“Now what this does is when the bullet is shot the mercury heats up and
expands, and rips apart the victim, and if it doesn’t kill him with the first
shot the mercury gets into his blood and poisons him. This one is a sure
fire lethal shot!”
Yeah, right. The author has most likely soaked up a bit too much mercury while making these things. I’ve heard of these for years, but never heard of them actually being used.
As mentioned by both the psycho above and Guy Incog. (hey, nothin’ personal) homemade dum-dums just have their noses scored. Joseph Heller has one of the characters in “Catch-22” doing this to his .45 slugs for late-night rat destruction.
I lead a boring life of relative unimportance. Really.
Then what’s a “tumbling” bullet? I read about them used as small-caliber/high velocity rounds in the M-16, with the implication that “if we can’t use bullets that blow apart inside you, we can make them skitter all around in your guts.” Please clarify.
First, let me chime in by saying that I think the cheeseball vigilante movie with the mercury bullets to which are all referring was ‘The Exterminator’ with Robert Ginty (yes, it sucked)
Second, to get a bit off topic regarding this Hague Convention thing…who the hell enforces that? As if there’s some kind of referee that comes out in the middle of the gunfight and blows a whistle, inspects each side’s bullets, and penalizes the side that’s using them. Even in a war crimes trial/ post war scenario, how do they match up the bullets with any given shooter or faction that may or may not have had these bullets? At that point, I’m sure whether you used these bullets to kill someone or not is the LEAST of your worries.
Not to turn this into a great debate, but who is the moron that suddenly decided certain bullets were “too violent” or caused “too much suffering” at the end of the 1800s? Pardon me for noticing, but if you and I are trying to kill each other, and by making/ getting these ‘illegal’ bullets, I have a better chance at making you die in a more horrible/ painful way that disuades your side from fighting, or makes you die from a lesser wound that only slightly injures me, isn’t that the whole idea of the war to begin with?
Please note: this is NOT meant to be a troll! I am just curious why anyone trying to win a war would follow such a ridiculous rule.
Sorry, forgot about this little hijack. No. On the news front, I’m pretty much on info overload at this point. I get the Digest mostly for auction schedules and the like.
I still feel bad for Stacey, though. The second I saw it, I was thinking, “Ohh, that’s gotta hurt.”
InutilisVisEst:
No offense taken.
Good info, guys. I always wondered what a dum-dum bullet really was but I was far too lazy to do any fact finding.
This’ll make for great table talk at Easter dinner…
“It’s only common sense,
There are no accidents 'round here.”
“Tumbling Bullets” - what is that, a circus act? Like the “Flying Wallendas”? Seriously, folks, bullets don’t tumble in flight unless they hit something in their path; at least they’re not supposed to tumble - accuracy would be very poor with tumbling because bullets depend on gyroscopic action (along with bullet design) to achieve optimum accuracy. As I have said in other threads dealing with this topic, try to locate and watch a video titled “Deadly Weapons” - a production primarily intended as an informational tool for the law enforcement community, but great for anyone who is interested in real-life examples of firearm characteristics.
Typical military rifle bullets are actually aerodynamically unstable, the center of pressure is behind the center of gravity, and only fly straight because of gyroscopic spin. It doesn’t take much to make the blunt end swap positions with the pointy end, particularly with a small light bullet (about 1/7 oz.) as the M-16 fires. The newest M-16 bullet is also fragile as jacketed bullets go and easily fragments on impact.
“I must leave this planet, if only for an hour.” – Antoine de St. Exupéry
Are you a turtle?