How is it that the game warden shoots 100 deer with a .38 Special? Did those 158 LRN exit?
Deer that are injured by cars, dogs and fences. Some of them are immobile and can be shot in the head. Others are still able to move and you take the shot that is presented. I remember one deer that had both rear legs broken in a fence. It could still run on the stumps of its legs faster than I could run. It was a pitiful thing to see. I took a shot at it and made a lucky hit and dropped it from about 40 yards...with a .38.
I did carry a .357 for about 4 years before we got semiautos and it definitely hit them with more authority, and the .40 worked about as well as the .357.
Please don't misunderstand me. When I said that a .38 is capable of taking a deer as humanely as a bow, I did not say that it kills identically to an arrow. My definition of "humanely" is that the deer does not suffer unduly and is recovered within a reasonable distance. The .38 with the 158 gr. RNL was not known as a fight stopper, but a lot of those people who were not "stopped" were dead within a minute or so after being shot.
The most important factor in killing is where the projectile hits, followed by penetration. All of the other details about the characteristics of the projectile are down the list from there.
And, yes, most of the .38 slugs, both RNL and JHP, did exit.
