......... on Cape Buffalo ... I have never seen a failure. the few failures I have seen have always been on plainsgame, deer and elk..I told this to Barnes one time and he didn't seem to interested. It has always seemed to me when a Barnes bullet works it is the best, but when it fails it fails miserably..
I also have to say that I have many friends that are very experienced shooters and hunters and they swear by Barnes bullets.
Guess that's what makes a horse race.....:)
Ray, my exact thoughts (and expressions/results). The X-type bullet is so easy to be enamored with when they work right....like they do most of the time. But when they don't, then you have what JJHACK was like before he became enamored of them; he disliked them to the point that he actually wrote on one of the hunting bulletin boards that he had seen an X do a 180 and bounce back out basically the same way it went it. (I can tell you, something's changed, and it hasn't been a drastic design change. But the constant and significant tweaking does tell one something about the fact that an essential problem must exist, otherwise why address "perfection"?)
You keep and X-type well into the 2Ks and shoot something with some resistance to high speed impacts and these bullets will work. (Perhaps that's why the reports from Africa come back so positive.) But do a softer animal - caribou come to mind- out at closer to a quarter mile give or take and then see what the numbers give you in terms of terminal results. And I've mostly had good results even then. But as anyone who's whacked game - even lethally- with
spitzer FMJs can tell you, though there will eventually be an animal lying dead where the tracks end, finding the end of that trail - and how far- are questions that often aren't fun to learn the answers to.
