Experts & Bullets

Experts

A few folks seem to have no sense of humor or common sense. Too bad, they often miss the big picture.

This is a term used loosely in the writing industry are far as I can tell. Each content source wants to have experts write under the premise that you — the reader — want to have an expert’s opinion on what gun, how to fight, what to wear, what to buy and so on. As far as I can tell you came here for that reason. Funny thing, many readers write the editor to complain that the expert’s opinion or experiences are not what they think, and the theoretical expert writing the article is wrong.

To set the record straight, I have never in private or public declared myself to be an expert, period. And you can’t find anybody
who has ever heard me say that. I have in fact been declared as an expert witness in court, but remember that was
court-by-court, people. Enough said. Some folks probably are truly experts, some may not be.

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.

Bullets don’t do what you think and experts aren’t always right.

In the mist of the past, self-declared or magazine-promoted experts have shot bystanders in adjoining rooms. They have shot people in the back and later called it gunfights. They have shot people who didn’t have guns and yet later on, one or several were found in the “area.” I even know an expert who mashed on the trigger and killed a marauding cow he was intending to frighten off his property with a “warning shot.”

Gunfights of the 1880s were not the same as ones of the 1960s or 2004.

How they are described in a book is not the always the way things happened. Many experts have made mistakes and being a non-expert, I have made mistakes, but at least what I write about as a non-expert is based on what I did — not something I read in a chat room forum.

If you think the .357 is the optimum gun/caliber, carry it. If you like a .44 caliber 260-grain Keith at 900 fps, go for it. Bullets don’t always do what you think they will. Experts sometimes aren’t.

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