Posted on 03/19/2021 8:41:19 AM PDT by w1n1
With Lead-Free Projectiles here to stay, these are Eight Great All-Copper Bullets for Hunting, Shooting.
I might be dating myself, but I am old enough to remember when unleaded gas was an option over regular (leaded) gasoline. Lead often gets a bad rap, due to its toxicity to people when exposed to high levels. However, the malleability of lead makes it an excellent choice for projectiles, especially during the centuries when firearms underwent radical developments.
The simple muzzleloader, firing a patched round ball, could be well fed with a bullet mold and a healthy supply of lead. Our earliest projectiles for what we consider modern cartridges were either pure lead or some sort of lead alloy, hardened a bit to resist premature deformation. To this day, the majority of our rifle and handgun projectiles are comprised of a lead core surrounded by a jacket of copper, and lead shot remains a popular choice for most anything other than waterfowl. As I stated, lead can be toxic, and it was in the mid-1980s that lead shot was first banned for use on waterfowl.
Leaded gas, lead paint; right on down the line, lead gets more and more removed from our everyday lives. But it wasn’t always a bad thing. Lead’s beneficial use in handgun and rifle projectiles is undeniable, however it does have certain limitations. It can be too malleable – as John Nosler found out in the 1940s when his bullets came apart on the shoulder of a bull moose – and for decades, bullet manufacturers have been engineering different designs to come up with the best balance of expansion and penetration.
It was Randy Brooks, then-owner of Barnes Bullets, who had the idea of removing the lead core altogether and using just copper for his projectile to avoid jacket/core separation, all the way back in 1979. By 1986 his idea had come to fruition when he took the first head of big game with his lead-free X bullet.
That Alaskan brown bear fell to a 270-grain Barnes X from his .375 H&H Magnum, and began a whole new facet of the ammunition industry. Fast forward to 2013, and you’ll see California pass a bill prohibiting the use of all lead ammunition for hunting on public and private land, supposedly in an effort to remove the risk of condors and other scavengers being poisoned by lead bullet fragments or shot in gut piles. I’m not here to debate the validity of those studies or the merits of the subsequent laws, but to show the effects on the bullet industry, and that is to say that the lead-free projectiles are here to stay.
And, while Barnes remains a leader in the copper bullet industry, they are not the only player in the game. In fact, just about every major player in the bullet manufacturing industry has one sort of lead-free monometal bullet or another. Let’s take a look at some of the characteristics of the copper bullets, what makes them tick, and I’ll highlight a few of my favorite designs.
THE COPPER CONUNDRUM
Copper, by nature, is less dense than lead, so when comparing a lead-core bullet to a copper bullet – of the same shape, weight and diameter – the copper bullet will always be longer. This does a couple of different things: It changes the center of gravity and it usually requires the bullet to take up more space within the case. In those cases where the volume is already a bit compromised – like the .308 Winchester, 7mm-08 Remington and .350 Remington Magnum – the heavier copper bullet can pose an issue, as it will eat up a considerable amount of space. Read the rest of Barnes TTSX bullets here.
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CANCEL Culture is hitting
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or something or other
Per “The Reader” a
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Read the story.
When I was a lad and visiting relatives in Idaho, my cousin and I would compete to see who got the most lead pellets out of the duck or goose we were eating. We both have survived, so far.
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