Teen found dead in Atlanta park shot with 'exploding bullets'

[Eleanors38]

7. Dum-dum and dummer. Stuff like this has been around since the 1800s...

CBS sets the usual tone:

" Guns flooding the street
Nightmare
Is anyone safe?
Send a terrifying message
Too gruesome to imagine"

Sheesh. Talk about "Living In Fear™. Gun and ammo cranks have farted around with stuff like this forever, yet LEOs and civilians for some peculiar reason stay with ye old hollowpoints, generation after generation.

Early descriptons for expanding bullets included Dum Dums, for the Dum Dum Arsenal in India, which supplied ammunition for the British military over a century ago. While there were several designs, the chief characteristic of these rounds was the use of soft lead, sometimes thinly sheathed, with a hole drilled down the lead core from its tip, or by merely removing the sheath from the tip area. The result was to allow the now-weakened lead structure to "mushroom" upon impact, thus making a larger wound channel (when compared with a full metal jacket's non-expanding characteristics), and to impart more of the bullet's energy into the body. Hydrostatic shock (a body is mostly fluid) can thereby "stop" an attack, or cause a large game animal to drop on the spot. The "bleed out" from a wide wound would cause unconsciousness in a short time. This is highly desireable for hunting as animal recovery is greatly assisted, and the round, if even it exits, is greatly deminished in terms of striking power. LEOs use the round for much the same reasons, o significant concern in highly-populated areas. The objective is to cause an attacker to "Stop," not kill the attacker, although this sometimes occurs if a vital srea is damaged, or bleeding cannot be stopped.

Note: Some rounds used for shooting ground-hugging varmints, are so frangible, the projectile shatters upon impact with the body (or anything else) so as to eliminate theproblem of an intact bullet's careening around the countryside. But in no instance does the round "explode" like a charged artllery shell or naval gun shell.

I remember reading a text about deer hunting in which true "exploding" rounds were tested. The author thought them unreliable and ineffective for hunting. The book was written in 1882. Today, many ranges won't allow full metal, non-expanding ammo. They want the round to stop quickly.