Monday - July 13, 2009

A different, darker kind of gun porn

Watching Horatio and his Sunglasses Of Justice solve another amazing crime tonight on TV’s CSI Miami.

I’d like to give them a tougher case to solve.



A older man wearing tropical safari clothes is walking his dog by a lake in the calm early morning, a few joggers nearby. It’s in a park, and the nearest Miami high rises are over a quarter mile away. Suddenly he keels over, shot through the heart, dead. People rush to his aid, call 911, the police show up. All the witnesses saw him get shot and fall, but nobody heard the shot. Camera cuts to a color saturated pan & scan of several Miami babes comforting the poor doggy.

Forensics finds no casings at the scene. The bullet went straight through him, and at first they can’t even find that. Back at the morgue lab, they determine that it was a 9mm or .38 caliber bullet, but that’s it. No powder burns, no bullet fragments, nothing. Except his insides are blown to smithereens.

Through some amazing TV cop show technology, they use magic pond sonar and find the bullet in the lake. Woo hoo, problems solved, all they have to do is match the rifling striations to the universal bad guy’s gun database and they’ve got their killer.

Except this bullet has no rifling marks on it at all. And it turns out to be a .357” diameter Speer 180 grain Match TMJ silhouette bullet ... which leads them down the whole handloader / gun competition road ... and they find this bullet is sold by the millions, and that lead goes nowhere. And all the background checks on all the marksmen come up empty; there isn’t a guy amongst them with a criminal past more extensive than a speeding ticket.

Ha! says our gun-wise BMEWS readers. Obviously a sabot round. True, except that there aren’t any sabots made that take .38 pistol bullets.

It was literally a roll-your-own sabot. Back in the late 19th century, bullets were cast from lead. When you shoot soft lead bullets at higher pressures and velocities, the lead tends to smear off inside the barrel. This lowers accuracy and leaves you a mess to clean up. Modern bullets are clad in “gilding metal” which is a kind of brass. This keeps the lead from rubbing off in the barrel no matter how high the pressure or velocity is. But between raw lead and today’s “jacketed” bullets, there was a short era when the lead bullet was hand jacketed, with a wrap of lubricated paper. This was called a paper patch or a paper jacket. It worked then, and it works now. But it’s a very rare thing, as it takes a lot of work, a lot of practice, and some genuine skill to get it right.

Back in those days a paper patched bullet was seated over a charge of black powder. The patch kept the very soft lead from contacting the steel barrel, and also did a decent job of sweeping away the powder fouling. The slower pressure rise of the igniting black powder squeezed the bullet and its patch tightly against the rifling.

To make a paper patch, you cut a small strip of onionskin or cigarette paper, dampen it, and stretch it around the shank of the bullet exactly two wraps. When it dries, the paper shrinks to a very tight fit. When you fire the gun, the paper is engraved and cut by the rifling. It passes on the spin to the bullet, and the paper falls away in toasted shreds at the muzzle as the bullet leaves the gun.

But to be accurate, the bullet had to be a precise bit smaller than the bore diameter, about 0.002”. In a modern firearm using smokeless powder, the bullet doesn’t “bump up” under pressure, so beneath the paper patch it needs to be just a hair larger, equal to or 0.001” larger than bore diameter. This holds true whether that bullet is pure soft lead, any of the harder lead alloys, or even a gilding metal jacketed bullet.

Around 1905 the noted German firearms genius Wilhelm Brenneke designed a rifle cartridge called the 9.3x64. It was a very high performance “beltless magnum”, equal to the .375H&H that the English brought out a few years later, just like the “new" beltless magnums for sale today. [there is nothing really new in the gun world. Everything was actually invented 100 years ago] A 9.3mm bullet is .366” in diameter, but is fired in a rifle that has a .355” bore. This was a “medium” cartridge designed for African safaris. It fits in a standard 98 Mauser bolt action rifle.

50 or more years of use will wear away a thou or two from the bore of a rifle. So this very modern bullet would be a perfect old school paper patch fit in a old school rifle that had very modern performance. To commit an act that is nearly as old as humanity.

The 9.3x64 can push a 286 grain bullet to over 2600 feet per second. It would have no trouble at all pushing a 180 grain bullet to over 3200 feet per second [71gr H322 will do it nicely, with full load density and full combustion], and at that velocity, this particular bullet will have the same remaining velocity at 500 yards as it would if fired from a .357 Magnum pistol at 10 yards. The bullet itself is very tough - it’s designed to shoot iron targets actually - so it can withstand velocities quite a bit greater than other normal pistol bullets can.

Yes, it was his ex-wife. She offed him from her high rise on the other side of the park. He had it coming you know. She gave him the best 30 years of her life, and he dumped her for some Mandingo chippy back on in Africa. Nobody heard the shot from her building because she used a suppressor and waited to take the shot until a jet was coming in for a landing directly over their building. She was born in South Africa, raised on the Veldt [yeah yeah, and her husband was a total boer], no stranger to guns or long range shooting. While the 9.3x64 may have considerable recoil in a 7lb lightweight rifle, in a sturdy old time safari rifle of 9.5lbs the recoil is manageable by just about anyone, being just a couple pounds more than that delivered by a .30-06.

Good luck figuring this one out Horatio.




Maybe I should lay off the late night leftover Thai food. It’s not like I figure out the nearly perfect murder every night!

Posted by Drew458     on 07/13/2009 at 11:34 PM   
Filed Under: • Guns and Gun Control •  
• Comments (5) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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