Mike Irwin
Staff
You're mixing up your bullets.
Handgun bullets rarely tumble to any great degree, and it's almost impossible to engineer them so that they will tumble.
Rifle bullets, on the other can, can be engineered quite nicely so that they will tumble like mad once hitting the body.
The British 174-gr. .303 bullet, for example. It had a nose that was either hollow, or filled with a lightweight filler like cardboard or plant fiber.
By moving the center of gravity towards the rear of a bullet it becomes much more likely to tumble.
One of the reasons that DWM "Karamajo" Bell favored 6.5 and 7mm FMJ RN rounds for elephant hunting is because the design of these bullets gave them great resistance to tumbling. This, in turn, allowed for lots of penetration, even through the massive bones of an elephant's skull.
During the Russo-Japanese war the Japanese used their first generation 6.5mm Arisaka cartridge, which had a 160-gr. FMJRN bullet. There's at least one medical text from the period that notes that the Japanese bullets were much more likely than the Russian ones to simply give through and through wounds with very little tissue disruption.
Not long after the war the Japanese introduced a new bullet whose design made it more likely to tumble in the body.
Handgun bullets rarely tumble to any great degree, and it's almost impossible to engineer them so that they will tumble.
Rifle bullets, on the other can, can be engineered quite nicely so that they will tumble like mad once hitting the body.
The British 174-gr. .303 bullet, for example. It had a nose that was either hollow, or filled with a lightweight filler like cardboard or plant fiber.
By moving the center of gravity towards the rear of a bullet it becomes much more likely to tumble.
One of the reasons that DWM "Karamajo" Bell favored 6.5 and 7mm FMJ RN rounds for elephant hunting is because the design of these bullets gave them great resistance to tumbling. This, in turn, allowed for lots of penetration, even through the massive bones of an elephant's skull.
During the Russo-Japanese war the Japanese used their first generation 6.5mm Arisaka cartridge, which had a 160-gr. FMJRN bullet. There's at least one medical text from the period that notes that the Japanese bullets were much more likely than the Russian ones to simply give through and through wounds with very little tissue disruption.
Not long after the war the Japanese introduced a new bullet whose design made it more likely to tumble in the body.