What were charging bears shot with and stopped prior to 1985, the year the TSX was invented?
I guess they were using heavy soft points....things like WW Power Points(in 375 caliber these were actually made with bronze jackets I was told)which were nicely built and even though of C&C construction did a good job both here and in Africa. The WW load was a favorite of Finn Aagard in his 375.There were also heavyy Corelokts,and Hornady's, etc.
Or they scrounged Nosler Partitions,which for awhile were not made in heavy calibers when Nosler went from the screw machine design to impact extrusion.The nuttier among us bought and traded Bitterroots,which were as scarce as hens teeth and as expensive as high grade cocaine,but "worked" very well,and would be as good as anything in its class if made today.There was not much else,as the bullet scene was not what it is now.
I remember a couple of African pro's visiting the East Coast who almost fainted when they found out a friend and I had a stash of about 700 screw machine 270 and 300 gr Partitions in 375;offered us the equivilent of Vegas hookers for a portion of the stash
We used those bullets in Alaska for brown bear and some elk hunting;they worked splendidly.
This left a huge void in the market place for "premium"bullets and is what gave rise to things like the Bitterroots, the Aframe,Jack Carter's TBBC,and the X monos. There was a real need for all of them,as high velocity,bullet fragmentation and insufficient penetration had left a lot of hunters using high velocity cartridges "wanting".
I understand the need for expansion and penetration in a bullet to reliably kill soft skinned BG; but have never been much of a fan of excessive fragmentation and blowing innards to atoms as a way of killing them reliably on the spot(DRT's?).Nor do I believe in vague theories about "hydrostatic shock"...the term is far too vague and the results inconsistent.
Reason is IME, it doesn't always work. I have seen animals with innards blown to shreds into red goo from soft tissue hits stay on their feet and travel some distance before expiring. The most reliable means to DRT's involve simultaneously breaking bone essential to locomotion and damaging vital organs at the same time.I notice even John Burns is putting Bregers on bone to get the desired results at distance.
This sort of thing takes a bullet of good construction that also expands,yet has some means of retaining weight to maintain forward momentum under the stress of high velocity impact without disintegrating because a bullet that stays together has a much better chance of penetrating deeply than one that is being torn to shreds enroute. Not as important as distance increases but at high impact velocity I will put my money on something of tough construction.
I can understand how a Berger can be a very good long range bullet, because its retained velocity and fragile construction.
As kids, we understood things intuitively about elementary physics....we threw soft snowballs at friends during snowball fights, that shattered harmlessly and avoided chunks of ice for fear of actually hurting them..... If we wanted to bust windshields on abandoned cars at the junk yard, we did not pick up a handful of gravel...we grabbed a rock;sometimes a big rock...
and we threw it hard, knowing it was harder than the windshield,would not shatter,come apart, and had the momentum and structural integrity to penetrate through.
But somehw as adults and we grow "smarter"
,we forget these things when we pick up a BG rifle that slings projectiles at 2500-3200 fps and shoot them into animals...we substitute odd notions of "hydrostatic shock",and "energy transfer" that not even physicians and engineers can describe and agree on.
For most BG hunting,and especially incoming bears, I will take the "rocks" and save the thin jacketed stuff for real LR, where they start to behave more like "rocks"....
