Watch this video for a rather nauseating perspective on American gun culture. Whatever you do, though, don’t think about the fact that the dorks so earnestly firing their weapons in this video are showing you their “O” face, as I did — it just makes it even more icky.
So what sells this ammo is its viciousness? Sweet.
Of course, if you read the source I got it from, a military guy criticizing the dumb people who will buy this crap, you’ll also realize that its claims about the properties of their bullet are physically contradictory and obviously false. But that doesn’t matter if your market is gun-fondling idiots!
World’s worst Solid Snake impersonation.
It appears from the list of materials that animal viscera are not affected. Also, I love at the end how both the cops and the public will be better off with this.
Wait, I thought the point of law enforcement and self defense were to neutralize a threat, not necessarily to cause maximum damage. Isn’t that why Tasers and stun-guns are supposed to be a good thing? They neutralize a threat with minimal harm (not saying that this actually works)?
The impression I get from this video is not that they are marketing to people honestly concerned about self defense (i.e. “responsible” gun owners), but to sadistic fucks who fantasize about murder and pain. I mean, when are you likely to need to shoot through auto glass in self defense?
Assuming this shit works (which it probably doesn’t), I don’t think banning it would violate the spirit of the 2nd Amendment, since it seems to convey all the defensive advantage of a grenade.
Presumably the acronym is seen as a selling point?
Fuck.
I am so stealing that…
Aaaaand now I can’t get that image out of my head. Anybody got some extra strength ‘amnesiadox’ brand brain bleach to hand?
Yeah. If you use it, it’ll blow you up, thus becoming the last round you’ll ever need.
Or something.
The very fact that the capacity of this projectile to cause massive injuries (assuming that it actually works) is seen as such a selling point is worrying to me – it really is the fetishisation of death, injury and suffering.
If hollow point bullets are outlawed in most jurisdictions due to the terrible injuries they cause, how the heck can this thing be legal? Especially with its tendency to fragment seeming to produce increased risk of causing injury to bystanders even if the original shot was on target? What kind of sadistic arsehole even dreams up this stuff?
Ooooooh, oooooh. Don’t stop.
links to this article by the Bureau of Justice Statistics at bjs.gov:
“WASHINGTON – About 1.4 million firearms were stolen during household burglaries and other property crimes over the six-year period from 2005 through 2010, according to a report released today by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). This number represents an estimated average of 232,400 firearms stolen each year— about 172,000 stolen during burglaries and 60,300 stolen during other property crimes.”
Who says it’s legal? Nobody has sued yet, that’s all we know!
Reminds me of “God and Guns Radio” broadcast on a local pirate radio station. Truly awful stuff. Last time I heard some of it, they were discussing the finer points of killing people at 500 yards — what gun to use, ammo types, and scopes.
After a commercial break, the presenter reintroduced the segment saying “Before the break, we were talking about reaching out and touching someone…” which says it all.
They also believe that a woman’s place is in the home, and that it’s the woman’s fault if men are lusting after her. These people make Neanderthals look like the height of sophistication.
Many good comments at the source. Here’s one:
Where?
Does the RIP cost faav thaasend daalas?
@David Marjanović 11 –
Well according to wiki, that commenter is slightly off. The ban looks to be part of the Hauge Convention
I love that bit about “giving civilians and law enforcement an advantage they need” or some such.
Right so if civilians can get some of this why can’t “Criminals” again? Magic perhaps?
Guns are just a deterrent too. Just waving one around is plenty. That’s why you’d be fussing about exactly how much of hole the device blows in someone (and their car/house/body armour).
Anyway, that one is a bit pornographic but at least mr movie voice makes it a little funny.
The worst one I saw by far was for a round called the Varmit Grenade. It’s some sort of expanding dum-dum style thing too (and despite the name they talk up its ‘stopping power and anti-personnel potential’). There’s a version of the ad up there now that’s bad enough. Well it used to be even worse. I suspect they had to trim it down after complaints. It’s basically an animal snuff film. Just edit after edit of animals being brutally killed by this thing, with the occasional watermelon and slab of steak.
Truly vile.
Well, heck, it shoots through a water balloon.. it must be FANTASTIC! I’m sold.
Stupid on so many levels. While we’re discussing physics, as your source points out, F=MA. Not only is it shedding a good part of its mass on impact, it makes a big deal of the fact that it’s solid copper, no lead. Atomic mass of copper: 63.5. Atomic mass of lead: 207.2. There’s a reason bullets are made of lead with only a thin copper jacket. These people really are morons.
Morons who want to be more able to kill people.
Well, the gun fondlers are mostly satisfied by jerking off to news reports about school shootings, but they do like a bit of variety now and then. *retch*
I had to stop shortly through the video. When I saw the CGI bullet “bloom,” I raised my eyebrow. To me, that thing looks like it operates on cartoon or comic logic. Perversely, it makes me curious just how well the bullet actually performs. I did get to some of the dialogue about how powerful the bullet allegedly is. If this wasn’t a reflection on such a dangerous part of our community, I’d have been laughing.
I really don’t see the point in selling deadlier or more penetrating bullets to civilians when we’ve got a growing variety of non/less lethal weaponry that can do the job without killing anyone. Naturally, that doesn’t matter to the marketers or the target audience, since a lot of them are in this for the power trip, the gorn fantasies of shredding “bad guys,” the hipster element of being a bigger gun nut than the guy next door by having the least mainstream ammo, and, as always, the upcoming raid from the black helicopters and the race war, so they need the military grade equipment to feel safe from their delusions.
Weed Monkey @ 12;
I was under the impression that hollow point bullets were illegal in several US states, though if I am wrong about that then I apologise for any confusion caused. I know that it is illegal to possess such ammunition in the UK, but that is no surprise given the much tighter gun control laws over here.
Despite the fact they show it apparently being fired from Beretta 93r and Glock 18 machine pistols I have the suspicion this design with jam in a lot of guns. Note that I say “apparently” because we have no real proof they’re actually using it in those weapons.
Hollowpoints may not be legal under international law for military use, but they are commonly used by police forces and civilians in North America. In fact I’d guess that there isn’t a North American police force that isn’t using hollowpoints in their handguns at this point. One of the supposed benefits of hollowpoints is that they are less likely to go through a target and hit something else.
Hyping the supposed lethality of ammo is nothing new. Read the gun hobbyist magazines and books and you’ll see lot of discussion about one shot stops, an idea popularised by an author named Evan P. Marshall, along with more generalised discussions of supposed stopping power of various calibers and types of bullets. Americans especially tend to fetishize the supposedly superiority of the .45 ACP round, and the wonders of the Colt M1911 pistol and its copies that fire that round.
Thumbing through gun magazines it’s hard to not feel there’s a high level of fantasy involved in many aspects of gun culture. I’m only exaggerating slightly when I say that some of them regularly have headlines on their covers like “Menaced by muggers, a member of al Qaeda, and an Alaskan grizzly, your one shot solution!” And increasingly they’re trying to reach out to women, just like the rest of the gun biz. Of course they never bother to consider that “24/7 Carry Solutions for Women,” to quote the cover blurb from one issue currently on newsstands, likely won’t do women much good when their potential rapist is more likely to be someone she’s dating, her husband, or some other acquaintance, than Joe Random Rapist.
230.000 is not more than a quarter of a million, so obviously this guy can’t be trusted.
…who probably also has a gun.
that’s it.
According to the video, this bullet is good for multiple layers of denim. Forgive my ignorance but is denim known for it’s ability to stop bullets?
All kinds of things (including relativity!) modify the effects of this in real life, but even so:
Density of copper: 8.96 g/cm³.
Density of lead: 11.34 g/cm³.
Hollow points are not used in warfare (typically), but they’re very common as “defensive” rounds used by civilians & police (and federal agencies), there’s nothing illegal about them in the US (in other countries, hollow points are actually mandatory for hunting, because they’re more likely to kill an animal on the first shot).
Hollow points are also common on match grade target ammunition for aerodynamic reasons rather than what’s euphemistically referred to as “terminal ballistics”.
I can’t see this round being particularly effective as a defensive round though, it seems to be designed around the idea of causing the target/victim to bleed out quite slowly.
So, I was comprehensively wrong about the lagality of hollow point rounds in the US. The things certainly should be illegal, but then that goes for all weapons and ammunition types principally designed to kill people.
Back on topic, the insight into gun-fondler culture offered by things like the video referenced in the OP really gives one a sense of how eager some people are to start blazing away at the earliest opportunity. Pair that with all but ubiquitous racism and idiotic ‘stand your ground’ laws and the results are as tragic as they are predictable, and yet we still get pro-gun types trying to argue that the answer is somehow more guns, more lethal ammunition, and greater civilian access to fully automatic and even military grade weaponry. It is like arguing that the best way to put out a fire is to pour an accelerant onto it, and when that doesn’t work calling in the nearest petrol tanker.
Well, at least they took the lead out of it. Lead is dangerous…you know?
You’re supposed to avoid lead when hunting, because spraying lead all over the hunting grounds (particularly shotgun pellets in a marsh) leads to your future prey being lead-poisoned. But I’m used to hearing hunters switch to steel instead, not copper.
timgueguen @ 22;
Careful now – you are in serious danger of confusing the gun-fondlers with logic and references back to the reality of the situation, and you know they just hate that. These are afterall the kind of people who would probably try to fix a recession by shooting up the nearest stock exchange. And in any case, I imagine that (given the toxic masculinity and rightwing arsehattery strongly correlated with gun-fondling tendencies) most of them would argue that the only ‘legitimate’ type of rape would be that committed by Joe (probably Black) Random Rapist. Since only stranger rapes are ‘real’ rapes to these arseholes, then they see a gun toting woman as being safer despite the fact that escalating to the use of a firearm would almost certainly increase the liklihood of the victim being killed if she, for whatever reason, failed to kill the rapist first.
And lets not forget how this would be viewed by the courts – if a woman was armed with a gun, but was raped, then the defence would immediately ask how it was that she could have been raped when she had the ‘power’ to stop it? And doesn’t that mean that it actually wasn’t rape at all?
The idea that ownership of a gun is some ‘silver bullet’ (awful pun intended) solution to rape for women is a ridiculous fantasy completely at odds with reality, and could only ever find purchase amongst the most delusional of the gun obsessed.
gussnarp writes:
I’m not sure I am getting the point of the source. The round “sheds” most of its mass upon impact? That gives the impression that the mass disappears which it obviously doesn’t. This round seems to be a variation of a hollow point or fragmentation round and whatever you say about this round should, more or less, apply to those and, as another commenter points out, hollow points are widely used by law enforcement which makes me seriously doubt that they are ineffective (are police officers deluded fools with regard to the capabilities of hollow points?). I am guessing that the source’s comment regarding being stopped by heavy winter clothing is intended as hyperbole. The mass shedding “on impact” actually happens after penetration (at least if this round works as intended) and its intended effect is to broaden the effective diameter of the round (thus widening the path of injury) and it can actually maximize (rather than minimize) transfer of energy (if it prevents mass from exiting).
The valid point being made by the source is that they are claiming seemingly contradictory characteristics: penetrating power and the ability to fragment to maximize energy transfer and thus injury. From their website:
As you can see, their unique claim (which is worthy of skepticism) is that this round can penetrate certain materials without fragmenting even as fragmentation occurs following penetration in others. The claim is that it holds its shape when striking solid objects but fragments when traveling through liquids (and you and I are mostly liquids, as far as a bullet is concerned). While (if based solely on the claims of this company which is in the business of selling these rounds) there’s reason to be skeptical of this, such a claim no more violates the laws of physics than saying that a cast saw cuts through casts while not cutting skin. Whether these claims stand up to reality would be determined by independent testing by third parties not by looking at hype filled promotional videos.
As to copper versus lead, when it comes to engineering anything, all choices are compromises. Presumably (and not surprisingly), a projectile made entirely of lead would not have the requisite physical characteristic to be able to do what they claim this round can do. Atomic number is really completely irrelevant to this comparison (a bullet doesn’t care). A relevant characteristic to look at when looking at mass is density. The density of lead is 11.34 g/cubed centimeter vs. the density of copper which is 8.96 g/cubed centimeter for a ratio of 1.27 of lead to copper –which is very significant but not as ridiculous as the 3.3 ratio you would get from using the respective, irrelevant atomic numbers. The effect of a lighter bullet is higher muzzle velocity, less kinetic energy imparted to the bullet as it travels in the barrel (because by traveling faster it spends less time acquiring energy) and greater loss of kinetic energy to drag while traveling in the air. These may or may not be acceptable compromises (though, in the relatively short distances implied by handgun use in self defense scenarios, perhaps they are acceptable).
Disclaimer: I am not a gun nut (I don’t even own one) so my knowledge of this may be limited. However, some of this is basic physics.
gmacs writes:
You’d be right and you’d be very wrong. In the context of firearm use, neutralizing a threat and causing maximum damage are the same thing. You seem to be laboring under a fantasy notion of supercops aiming at the limbs one at a time and only then aiming for vital points. This is not how law enforcement personnel are trained and this is not how anyone would be trained for self defense. The, so called, non lethal options are meant to provide intermediate levels of escalation. A firearm is meant to be a nuclear option.
It is my understanding that firearms are very often sold to law enforcement and for self defense purposes based on a nebulous concept called “stopping power”. Stopping power is basically the ability to cause maximum damage at the bullet wound: basically, cause the largest area of tissue damage possible. It’s meant to be about the ability to immediately stop an attacker’s ability to continue an attack but in practice it reduces to the ability to cause massive injury.
There is no “winging” of suspects and there are no vital points. Law enforcement officers are trained to do one thing and one thing only: aim for center mass. In real life firefights at close quarters trained police officers miss their targets a ridiculous proportion of the time (something like half the time). Knowing this, it would be ridiculous to train officers to shoot at a leg or whatever. But the more important reason why they are trained this way is that use of a firearm should only be a last resort and this, ideally, should mean that they are only used when the suspect is an imminent threat to the officer or to others. In that situation the intent of the firearm is to neutralize the threat. Someone who is a present threat will not necessarily say, upon getting shot, “OK, you got me!” and then stop whatever it is that they are doing. This is where stopping power comes in.
Koshka wrote:
That does sound kind of funny. I was curious so I googled. It appears that this is, in fact, a standard test used with jacketed hollow point bullets. It is not meant to test the ability of the round to penetrate the denim. It is meant to test the round’s ability to expand. See http://www.firearmstactical.com/tacticalbriefs/2006/04/02/0604-02a.htm
Sili @ #23 beat me to this, but just to reiterate:
When I went to school, 230,000 x 4 = 920,000, and a quarter of a million was 250,000.
Damn this new maths!
The packaging of that shit looks almost identical to the packaging to your average first-person shooter computer game.
Acolyte of Sagan writes:
Have you accounted for inflation, though?
@Holms,
It looks similar to your standard modern military first-person shooter, but not like an actual good FPS games like Bioshock Infinite, for instance.
Yes, in other words, it greatly resembles the subgenre of FPS games that take military machoism far too seriously, and usually to the detriment of having something resembling a plot or message.
…seeing as copper is also poisonous.
Jesus, that is a vicious-looking projectile. It seems to be designed to fragment on impact, which is distinctly nasty.
So it “maximises the dissipation of energy” and “defeats every obstacle in it’s path” (i.e. has high penetrative power)? Um, assuming I remember my year 9 physics lessons correctly (that’s… er… I dunno, what grade are you in at 15 years old?), aren’t those two things kind of mutually exclusive?
Also, “R.I.P.”? The “Radically Invasive Projectile”? A ridiculously contrived and tangentially related name clearly made up just to fit the acronym which will appeal to childish wannabe -military gun fondlers. And the advert is composed almost entirely of tough-looking guys in paramilitary gear shooting guns. I hate this product already, and the people who made it and the advert have nothing but my contempt.
Thanks to those correcting me my use of the wrong measure to compare lead and copper, I admit to being in a hurry and just popping up the first comparison I could think of to get the point across. Nevertheless, it’s interesting that they tout the solid copper bullet, but never say why that would be a good thing. The density is the thing, of course, and lead delivers more mass, which appears to be what the manufacturer of almost every bullet ever has been after. They’d have to first explain why a lighter bullet is better when that’s basically in opposition to everything else. Isn’t higher density the whole reason for depleted uranium shells?
All of this, the mass shedding, the fragmentation, and the lower mass relate to the contradictory claims of penetration and dissipation of energy. I imagine they’re trying to claim that the unique design penetrates initially, then dissipates energy through the target once the center fills and spreading begins.
I’ve never seen a round that looks like it would lose this much mass to fragmentation so early in the process. That could make it more lethal, or less, depending. It also seems like the penetration claims are likely overblown and the materials penetrated specifically chosen to make the claims sound great, but nothing to do with how it would penetrate say, a person, its obvious intended target, or a person after a car window. I expect not so well. And who needs this? There are sophisticated versions of hollow points that do all of this. Bullets penetrate those materials. Bullets kill people. This is just to make gun fondlers feel like Dirty Harry, convinced they have the deadliest magic penis talisman in their holster. “Seeing as how this is a .44 magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world and would probably blow your head clean off, and it’s loaded with RIP cartridges that act like holesaws, penetrate many materials, and will tear your guts to shreds, there’s only one question you ought to be asking yourself. Do I feel lucky? Well do ya, punk?”
Meanwhile, a .32 hollowpoint at that range is every bit as lethal.
But I stopped being a gun nut decades ago, so I’m probably off on some other facts in here, too.
I’m not a physicist, but the design of the bullet does look to “maximize the dissipation of” shrapnel to bystanders whenever the bullet hits something solid that causes those “fins” to tear off. The thing looks like it was designed by amateurs to look “cool” without any understanding of why bullets were made from lead in the first place (i.e. density and pliability). And shooting through an automotive windshield is not that impressive — it’s designed to stop stones being thrown at ~250km/h from going through the windshield, not something as dense and as fast as a bullet. Hell, people have shot through windshields with potato cannons.
Never underestimate the market for gimmicky bullshit when it comes to firearms.
.. and, oh god, that promotional video, Jesus….
Yes.
gussnarp writes:
Clearly this would have been done for structural reasons. If they want a bullet which will hold it’s shape when hitting something under some circumstances, lead simply would not do the job. Full and partial copper jackets are used for maintaining structural integrity in other bullets (which is probably a good compromise because they still use a lead core to bump up mass).
^ Oh. Copper is quite a bit harder than lead (while still being much denser than iron). That makes sense.
Yes, this ammunition is about as useless as the so-called “cop-killer” ammunition from a few years back. That stuff couldn’t penetrate armor, and neither can this. Basically, it’s just hyped gunsurbation material, not actually useful ammunition. (By the way, if you want armor piercing ammunition, it needs to have a “penetrator” component made of something quite a bit harder than lead or copper, typically steel or tungsten.)
No there is a problem with this round…
If this round hits any one not in body armour it will effectively require an amputation. The penetration is not high but the damage to soft tissue is catastrophic. In effect this is like catching shotgun shells at point blank range. This increases fatality.
This is designed to kill you slowly. An abdomen would would effective require huge loss of viscera. A limb wound would effectively need amputation.
This is a needlessly stupid round designed to kill inhumanely. Someone’s going to be shot with it by accident and lose a leg.
@Avicenna
My thoughts exactly. Their claims of good penetration do not match up to the claims of “energy dissipation”, but that energy dissipation, in the form of bullet fragments going all through whatever soft tissue they hit, sounds like a very nasty way to kill someone or do incredibly serious damage.