Lets Talk About Buckshot

All of the advantages of Foster style slugs, longer range, greater stopping power, deeper penetration, penetration of intermediate barriers, pale in comparison to the advantages of the newer sabot slugs fired through a rifle barrel. I've popped quite a few deer with Foster slugs though both smooth bore and rifled barrels and also quite a few with sabot slugs through rifled barrels and the differences are huge.

I am always reminded of my friend who swore by Brenneke Magnum slugs. His "proof" of their superiority was that he once shot a buck at 75 yards and hit it in the ass and it was unable to run away and he was able to close the distance and deliver 2 finishers at 10 yards or so. He told me this while we were sitting on a field edge during a drive. It wasn't too long afterwards that 2 deer came out of the wood line opposite of us at about 150 yards. One was a nice buck and he was saying how if it got closer he was going to "open up" on it. I didn't give him the chance, I aimed at the center of the heart/lung area holding on the second crosshair and touched a shot off. The buck took off running and my buddy was saying "You missed, he was way out of range, you should have waited" and in the time it took for him to finish that the deer did a leaning crash into the corn stubble. He was in disbelief and questioned whether one of the drivers had shot it before it came out of the woods meaning it was wounded and I didn't actually hit it. When we got to it the shot had landed where aimed and had blown through the deer leaving a fist sized exit. The next hunting season he showed up with a new shotgun with a rifled barrel and a scope and carrying the same slugs I had been using.

Rifled barrels make buckshot patterns open up considerably though so remove the advantage of being able to use buckshot interchangeably, but if I had to face an armed person, I wouldn't feel at a disadvantage launching slugs at their vitals, even if they were behind "cover". Those sabot slugs will pass through a car door or windshield easily and make a mess out of what they find on the other side.

One year Dad switched to some type of Foster or Brenneke slug. I don’t see them any more- they were a saboted slug with a wasp waist and a trailing ‘skirt’ that was supposed to make them shoot flatter. I was shooting standard Winchester white box rifled slugs. They are frustratingly like lobbing a cannon ball. His slugs were clearly more accurate and a bit longer range.

He shot three deer. One went WAY further than it should have with such good placement, but he watched it go down across a huge corn field and we drove a mile down to the other edge of the section and it was dead in the ditch. One went into the woods and we trailed an almost invisible blood trail until someone who happened to see it told us where it went. It couldn’t get up, but needed its throat cut. The third was close to dark. We looked and looked with powerful lights until batteries went out (they weren’t as good in those days) and never found it. We didn’t have permission for the next day, so we lost that one. Next year he was shooting Winchester white box rifled slugs.

I'm not a deer hunter. All my buckshot is reserved for bad guys that want to harm me or my wife. I'm partial to #4 and #1 but 00 is cheaper and easier to find so that's what I have a metric shat ton of. From across my living room I don't think the bad guy will notice the difference between them. Or care.

Terry

One year Dad switched to some type of Foster or Brenneke slug. I don’t see them any more- they were a saboted slug with a wasp waist and a trailing ‘skirt’ that was supposed to make them shoot flatter. I was shooting standard Winchester white box rifled slugs. They are frustratingly like lobbing a cannon ball. His slugs were clearly more accurate and a bit longer range.

He shot three deer. One went WAY further than it should have with such good placement, but he watched it go down across a huge corn field and we drove a mile down to the other edge of the section and it was dead in the ditch. One went into the woods and we trailed an almost invisible blood trail until someone who happened to see it told us where it went. It couldn’t get up, but needed its throat cut. The third was close to dark. We looked and looked with powerful lights until batteries went out (they weren’t as good in those days) and never found it. We didn’t have permission for the next day, so we lost that one. Next year he was shooting Winchester white box rifled slugs.

The old BRI slugs were made with a really hard lead alloy. They had to use that alloy because the softer leads would separate at the waist. It was like shooting a hard cast pistol bullet, they penetrated forever but expansion was as close to zero as you could get. A buddy shot a bear with one at about 15 yards quartering away. It jumped and ran off. We looked for blood that night and found nothing in the direction it ran.

We went back in the morning and followed the most likely path it would have taken up a steep sided canyon. It could have gone up the sides but we couldn't without risking our lives. The plan was we would walk to the head of the canyon and when we got to the top we would split up and walk back along the canyon rim looking for sign. We got to where the canyon started to end and jumped it out of some brush. He got 2 more shots into it and I hit it in the neck with the 7mm and 175gr Partitions and it went down. We were about 3/4 mile from where he took the shot and hadn't seen a drop of blood. Even in the bed it was laying in when we jumped it there was no blood.

When we dressed it we could follow the wound track from the first shot. In behind the shoulder and out of the chest cavity into the shoulder on the far side with no exit from the shoulder. When we got back to camp and started skinning it we found all the entrance wounds from the finishing. His 2 shots hit in the rear hams, that was the only angle he had so he took the Texas heart shots. Both of those slugs penetrated the full length of the bear and came out in front of the shoulders. My 7mm shot hit the spine 2 vertebrae back from the skull and left a 2 inch exit. We only found 1/2 of the vertebrae inside the bear, the bullet apparently carried the rest of it out of the exit wound.

The first shot he took we tracked to where it hit the shoulder and then bounced down, we found it in the opposite side paw under the heel pad. There was no "mushrooming" but the slug was bent where it had hit the bones in the shoulder and gotten turned 90* to travel down the length of the leg. There was no apparent expansion of the other 2 slugs as they passed through the guts and there was very little damage, just a couple of little holes. Same with the lungs from the first shot, just ice pick sized holes going through both lungs. Very little bleeding into the chest cavity. Never shot a deer with one of those. By the time I got to Illinois and was required to use slugs, there were better designs of sabot slugs available. I sold a lot of the BRI loads and saw the results and they never did expand on deer that I could see.

The new sabot slugs from Remington and Winchester are completely different in the terminal effects. They expand like crazy and still penetrate deep enough to exit, even on the corn fed bruisers running around here.

Fortunately Iowa has gone from ‘shotgun slugs’ only to ‘straight wall’ to ‘rifle’ …so I no longer sling cannon balls out of a pheasant gun.

But as my son is setting up for home def for him and his wife, it’s all got me thinking. But I think I still prefer shot. Thus the 00, 000, #4 debate I’m having with myself.