Originally Posted by MILES58
Originally Posted by DakotaDeer
Originally Posted by JackstrawIII
In the past I've done all my hunting with traditional C&C bullets but I'd like to give some monos a try this year. I hunt up in NY, which means primarily Whitetail deer and I prefer to take lung shots.


Monos do not kill as quickly, in general, on lung shots, because they don't destroy as much tissue because they don't expand as violently.

For pure lung shots, you'd be hard-pressed to ever beat a C+C. Your best bet with a mono for quick lung shot kills will be the Cutting Edge bullets that blow their petals. If you're using a 30 caliber, the 135 grain Raptor comes highly recommended when driven at high speeds. We have not tried the 125 Maximus but that looks good also.

The other great results we have had (and are using currently due to accuracy and lower price) are the Barnes TTSX black tip 120 grain. This bullet is "softer" as it is designed for the 300 Blackout, but when driven at 308 velocities it still holds together but expands wider than the rest of their line. We like it for more mono destruction even on lung shots. We will probably stick with this bullet until something very different in technology comes along. The 110 black tip works the same but with a lower ballistic coefficient.


Having shot a maybe 3 dozen with Barnes/GMX/E-Tips in the lungs and found the vast majority of them reduced the lungs to red soup, I will stand up and say the above is BS pure plain and simple. You don't wreck lungs worse than that and what happens after is a result of the individual deer and MAYBE some difference in shock effect but that would be an exceedingly difficult thing to prove.


Certainly, your mileage might vary. But I've shot plenty of deer in the lungs with TTSX, and no they don't always (in fact rarely in my experience) truly reduce lungs to red soup. Sure, they cause bleeding, but they in no way tear up lungs quickly like a more-violent expanding bullet. In fact, I have had more than one lung shot deer not expire quickly when shot with TSX/TTSX due to the minimal amount of shrapnel being thrown around (both the 30 caliber 150 TSX and the 243 80 TTSX have left me with long tracking jobs on minimal blood trails).

For bone shooters, the monos make a caliber seem bigger than it is; for lung shooters, the monos make the caliber seem smaller.