Experts & Bullets

Ballistics Experts

Just because a guy gleaned information from lots of sources and wrote a book doesn’t mean the book contains all fact. Remember, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf.

We used to have what was called the R.I.I. chart. This Relative Incapacitation Index was about a theoretical man hit by theoretical bullets and then theoretically stopped according to a scale of stopping power.

This in theory worked unless a real man with a real knife in his hand hadn’t read the scale before he went down the hallway at the officer.

Platt in the infamous Miami F.B.I shooting was hit numerous times. Of course the naysayers jump in now with, “Well if he would have been hit with X, Y, or Z, he woulda dropped in his tracks.” Maybe. Since Platt wasn’t hit with X, Y, or Z, it mattered little to the agents in the gunfight right at that time. You know, on that day, at that time, Platt may not of stopped from a hit by a German 88.

All bullets have worked and all have failed. And bullets don’t always do what you think they will regardless of how many times you read about it in a chatroom forum.

As a non-expert, I thought I would share something with you, the reader. Although I am not proud of it, I will relate a story. A few years back I owned a weird dog that would always run around the immediate area where I was shooting about say 40 yards to the left of the point of impact and 30 yards behind the point of impact. Well, on this day, I shot a round and the dog yikes and runs to me. I look at the dog and lo and behold there is a hole in the dog’s hide and she’s bleeding. So you know, the impact area was a soft dirt berm. So then, 120 feet away to the left and 90 feet to the rear the fired round ricocheted and hit the dog. Of course now the experts will say tie the dog, beat the dog, leave the dog at home, you shouldn’t shoot then and the dog is in the wrong place. Of course she was. Zee was wrong and so was I.

But I do admit I have never seen anything like it before or after while shooting over the last 30 years.