Posted on 07/31/2013 5:41:45 PM PDT by Kip Russell
Shot placement, shot placement, shot placement. Failing that caliber. Failing that lots of shots on target. To wit: “The hiker, who has not been identified by Alaska State Troopers, had set out from the Rainbow trail head at Milepost 108 of the highway Sunday morning, said Tom Crockett, a park ranger. He was near the first Turnagain Arm viewpoint, about a half-mile up the trail toward McHugh Creek, when he spotted the bear . . . The man called, “Hey, bear,” hoping not to startle the animal, he said. The bear turned and charged, the hiker later told rangers. The man fired the AK-74 he was carrying . . .
The bear stopped after the first volley of shots, and then charged again. The man fired once more. That time the bear folded into a ball, rolling and running downhill and thudding to a stop in a clump of birch trees about 100 yards from the trail.
newsminer.com reckons the hiker needed 13 shots to take down the 500 – 600 pound bear. Like I said.
I hardly ever have to clean mine. Less accurate than AR, but more reliable and easier to field strip in my opinion.
Yesterday someone ran over a black bear near here. He only weighed 225 and the game people said he was 4 years old.
In this area, black bears are not real common but they are here. My neighbor has seen one several times during his daily walks.
I know a .22lr would not be adequate for bear, especially from a 4 inch barrel. On the other hand I once watched my daddy kill a 550 lb. sow with a single shot from a .22 rifle. The cartridge was a .22 short. The sow dropped instantly.
Helen is gone and I will no longer coment on her. But if you want to strip paint off a car to repaint it, do not use a Hillary picture. Sure the paint falls off but the metal underneath looks like a washboard. I have given up on practical uses for those pictures. I was trying to use them for good. But alas it was not to be. I even tried using one to produce electricity by using it to repel the blades on an old hydro electric generator turbine. Run away rpms burned up the bearings and shattered the shaft. I am afraid to try space travel using one.
Teddy Roosevelt wrote from his experience in Cuba about the 7mm Mauser. He said that if the bullet hit a soldier in the brain, heart or spine the soldier would die, if hit anywhere else, he would recover surprisingly quickly.
The Wound Ballistics Review published Dr. Fackler’s ballistic gelatin sketches on most modern ammunition. He was the guy who related hundreds of human wounds to gelatin, and developed gelatin protocols to evaluate bullet performance. The M-16 5.56x45 is as good as any and better than most with either the Vietnam era 55 grain or the modern 62 grain variants. The key to its effectiveness is the cannelure, where the bullet breaks up at speeds higher than 2500 fps. For the 62 grain load you want to have a faster rifling, say one turn in 9 inches or better to hit, but that may lead to low initial yaw on impact reducing effect.
At impact speeds lower than 2500 fps the fragmentation effect is much reduced, so barrel length is a key parameter. The M-4 is much less lethal than the M-16. If you want lethality with a short length, you might consider a bullpup. Slow reloading and odd balance are the usual cause of limited bullpup acceptability for some
I killed a large mule deer doe while I lived in Western Kansas. Other than quail or turkey, that was the best tasting wild meat I have ever had.
It tasted just about the same as beef. It did not have the wild flavor at all. Possibly due to their eating a lot of corn, milo, and wheat. My hunting partner and I shared it 50-50. His wife prepared some loin for a meal and invited me to eat it with them. Boy she knew how to cook it. It was both tender and flavorful. My wife was deceased by then and I just took all of mine and left it with them, I asked if they would invite me to eat a few times if they would.
That is the best way to have it prepared. By someone who knows hos.
“Bear spray can be an effective deterrent.”
I doubt the author has any experience with bear spray.
I’ve had a little. Bear spray does not work if the bear is upwind - not on the bear anyway. It is pretty ineffective with a crosswind. The spray we had sprayed a cloud, not a stream, so it was ineffective at any distance - I’ve seen wasp and hornet spray with better distance capability.
The young bear we sprayed was not charging us, just pestering us for our fish, we got a direct hit in his eyes and nose from less than 10’ away - he paused, swiped at his eyes with his paw, and resumed his pursuit of our fish. That experience makes me believe that spitting at a charging bear can be just as effective.
That’s why for this year’s fishing trip I have replaced my bear spray with a Ruger Super Blackhawk .44 mag 7.5” barrel and a Ruger SR1911 .45 ACP for backup. I will be adding the Ruger Alaskan .44 mag on next year’s trip as well.
Full marks for you! The Finns have a sniper competition named after him.
Winter uniforms for both sides were identical. He used to ski down to Soviet soup kitchens, eat their food, then ski back into the woods and shoot them up. He eventually got shot in the face, but bore down and shot back, killing the man who shot him.
He survived the war(s).
We were told by the locals that if we killed a bear in self defense we had to skin and gut it, and the Forest Service would keep the hide and the meat. They said that’s why dead bears were found that hadn’t been reported - shoot and shut-up was the SOP.
I understand not letting the shooter keep the hide or meat - but if they at least helped the shooter with skinning and gutting, they’d have a lot more shooters willing to report their kills.
All soldiers tend to underestimate the effectiveness of their own weapons and tend to overestimate the effectiveness of enemy weapons. That is because they usually see the effect of enemy weapons on their buddies, and most enemy casualties get evacuated out of sight. In WWII, US soldiers were very impressed with German MG-42 machine gun, but German soldiers were very impressed with US M-2 .50 MG, which could put a German infantry company’s collective noses in the dirt for an afternoon.
Note that most soldiers are only about 6 to 8 inches thick, with most critical structures and blood vessels at the back. A bullet that yaws too quickly will miss damaging key structures. A bullet that yaws too slowly will not be effective against extremity hits. That helps explain why so very many US soldiers with torso body armor come back alive with extremity damage. Jihadis tend to not wear armor, and get their fondest wish: to be martyred. Of course recruiting martyrs can be challenging.
I really like the Nagant and I love the cartridge. I have acquired some more of them over the last few years when I found them on sale for around 100-120 dollars. The nicest one I have was a Century Arms refurbished. It is more accurate bench shooting than my buddy’s far more expensive sniper version. Made him kind of mad, but results were same for both of us - tighter groups with the refurbished one.
I am going to have the lever turned down on the bolt and I have a scope mount for it. Will experiment more with it this fall, but for the money these things are a bargain.
Fackler notes the temporary cavity doesn’t do much damage to anything except the liver, brain and spleen. The rest of the body is pretty flexible, except bones which are pretty rigid under hydrostatic loads insufficient to make a permanent cavity.
Did Crockett ‘grin’ the bear to death?
CVS has Dak canned hams 2 for $5.00 until Saturday.
The Germans never appreciated that the Soviets mass produced millions of sniper telescopes. You can get period correct ones even today.
German optics get the press, but Soviet ones were darned fine too.
I’ve posted this before and I’ll post it again.
In the early 1980’s the AK Dept of Fin and Fur found themselves with a freezer full of bear skulls in the Anchorage office on Raspberry Road (they sold the hides of defense of life and property killed bears at the Fur Rondy auction in February). Some nimrod had the brilliant idea to thaw the skulls, take them to the Rabbit Creek Range, and shoot them with a variety of weapons to see what would reliably penetrate the skull.
Handguns: .357 mag was iffy but larger calibers (.41 mag and up) were effective. This was pre-.454 Casull, .500 S&W, etc.
Rifles: any centerfire .30-30 or larger would reliably penetrate the skull.
Shotguns: this was interesting. It was common practice to alternate buckshot and slugs in a high cap 12 gauge. The tests showed the buckshot to be preactically useless - no matter the size it would not penetrate the skull. The common round nose slugs would skid off the skull about 50% of the time. They tested the then-new-to-the-US market Brenneke 12 ga. slug which has a sharp shoulder and a wadcutter profile. 100% penetration leaving a 12 ga. hole in the skull. Guess what every Alaska fish cop and local LEO carried after that?
Guess what I carried after that? You are correct - a .22LR pistol. My plan was to shoot my wife in the leg and run like hell!
OK, the first part of this post is true.
I once killed a charging black bear in the backyard of my home in Wasilla with a 7.62 x 51 Galil AR. First shot was just below the right eye. Necropsied the bear while skinning. The 150gr. Nosler soft point blew out the back of the skull, traveled down the neck, and I recovered the 30gr bullet base between the hide and the ribs on the right side after about 20” of penetration. That bullet did its job.
When I was hiking in bruin territory I carried a Marlin 1895 in .45/70 with “warm” handloads pushing a 400gr. Speer JSP. There are better bullets available now. I live in the grizzly country of N. Idaho and I still carry that rifle loaded the same way.
My absolute favorite bear attack survival story involved an Inupiat woman in the village of Pt. Hope at the extreme NW corner of Alaska who was walking to a friend’s house in the darkness of January during a blizzard. She was appropriately attired in a skin parka, mukluks, and big mittens. A polar bear jumped her from behind and rolled her over onto her back to kill her. As it opened its jaws she balled up her fist and jammed it into the bear’s gaping mouth. After she had her hand in deep she uncurled her fist and slid her hand out of the mitten leaving it lodged in the bruin’s airway. It choked to death and she lived to tell her tale. Now THAT is a survival story!
That gal’s going through a lot of ammo.
Quantity has a quality all its own, as a certain Soviet once said.
Judging from these pictures, that makes sense. It also looks like there is a layer of bone between the eyeball and the brain.
Grizzly Bear Skull
Black Bear Skull
Brown Bear Skull
I served with a mech infantry outfit fighting NVA on the DMZ. The Infantry school taught the 4 F,s Find em, fix them, fight, them and finish them. We strove to finish them all right, but not necessarily by fire and maneuver. We relied upon our usually excellent FO,s and FDC’s (now FISTS) for REAL close in arty and close air support. We had FOs who could bring 155 by sound to within 75 meters of the FEBA and 105s to 50 meters. Corp arty with 8” SP would be available for longer distances.
The NVA sought to negate this advantage by pulling it in real close and using their pocket artillery B40 and RPG-7 rockets, giving them a big explosive advantage in close at 40 meters or so (arming distance) over our 40MM grenade launchers. But being Mech infantry, we often had M48A3 tanks on hand firing 90MM canister, HE, beehive and flechette rounds point blank, along with the 50 cals and M60s on the ACAV 113 APCs.
It worked pretty good for the most part. Body count was often pretty HUGE. They wouldnt give up though despite all that. The remnants would go back across the LAOtian border rfit and return for another go.
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