Home Forums Reloading Big Game Rifles Another Berger VLD failure !

Both elk took 3 bullets to bring them down?

This is a beautiful picture. What camera did you use to capture the moments?
Nice animal too...
Not trying to steal the thread....

The use of target bullets for hunting debate will never end. Any website on the Net is filled with pros and cons and stories of wonderful performance and abject failure. It has actually supplanted the Barnes haters as the most popular subject for otherwise adult males to get into namecalling, threats and other gradeschool playground behavior.

Fact is the great Mr. Bell always used SOLIDS on his 7x57 to kill everything that walked in Africa. "never polluted my rifle with a softpoint."

The question I have posed several times, never to be answered, is "why?". Any hunter (not sniperwannabe) should be able to get within 300 yards of a big game animal. At that range a plain old 180 gr roundnose 30-06 softpoint will do the job...thus "Why?"

Guess there is still some failure to comprehend how VLD's differ from other target bullets--and how they differ from any other expanding bullet made. They do NOT expand until they get inside the animal, which is different from any other expanding bullet ever designed. This was accidentally discovered, but happens nonetheless.

Apparently there is also the misconception that VLD's are only good for long-range shooting. This is far from the case. They perform in much the same any range from close up to far away.

I have only shot a handful of animals at over 300 yards with VLD's, and those were at less than 400. Unlike some other bullets, they do NOT "blow up" before getting into the clockwork.

In short, they offer the same degree of revolutionary performance as the Barnes X, except at the opposite end of the expanding-bullet spectrum. They get inside and really destroy the lungs and anything else inside the chest cavity. In the process they merely punch a knitting-needle-sized hole going in, damaging even LESS meat than a monolithic around the entrance hole.

This sort of performance has been fantasized about by some hunters since the beginning of expanding bullets.

The quote from WDMB has been over-used so much that it is a cliche. The fact is that when Bell started hunting big game expanding bullets were unreliable, the reason he chose solids. At the end of his life he was a big believer in masive tiisue destruction, and was shooting red stags with the .220 Swift.

If penetration were the only criteria for "killing power" on any sort of big game, then we'd still be using solids for pronghorns and whitetails. But we don't, because solids don't kill nearly as effectively as today's expanding bullets, whether the Barnes TSX or the Berger VLD.