Overkill and Underkill
part I

by Chris Ryan M.D.

Guns don't kill animals: people (either knowledgeable ones or lucky ones or both) kill animals. Handguns, on the other hand, are supposed to be killers in a vacuum--so I can't figure out why animals I've shot with a handgun ever needed a second shot, or for that matter, why I even had to pull the trigger. It really is one of life's stranger mysteries.

But life is often unfair, and death is sometimes even worse. I've been around a fair amount of death in my life. Let me tell you: if pronouncing someone dead doesn't give you an eerie feeling, you aren't paying attention. I've come to believe, among other things, that there are lots worse ways to go than taking a well-placed bullet with a bunch of horsepower behind it. But I've also seen a lot of suffering and I have no interest in contributing to it. Maybe that's one of the reasons why I like the big boomers. Rather than it being just a macho trip (which it probably also is), wanting to use more than minimum power to do the job is my attempt to be "humane", whatever that is.

Now anyone reading this doesn't need a lecture from me about power, compared to bullet placement, compared to bullet performance, compared to planetary alignment, etc., etc. Rather, this is a story about how the best of intentions and "overkill"aren't enough, and how "just enough" can sometimes be The Terminator.

A couple of years back, the Milt-man (Milton Morrison of Qualite' Pistol and Revolver) and I went out to the Western Slope of the Colorado Rockies to terrorize wildlife, and prove to ourselves that we'd slipped the leash (you know, sniffing each other's butts and peeing on fire hydrants...). Milt took his "good enough" TC in the plain old 30-30, intending to take an exotic ram. I took my five-shooter .45 (Hamilton's Nimrod), to shoot a wild pig. My load was 25 grains of 296 behind a 330 grain LBT wide long nose bullet, which I remember clocked about 1250 fps. Yeah, overkill, sure enough. These pigs aren't big, that year going about 250 pounds. None of the shots were long.

My pig didn't hide very well. He went into a bunch of bushes and stayed--right up until I shot him. I hit him exactly where I aimed, halfway down the shoulder, straight broadside. Milt and another hunter were on the other side of the bush, well out of the line of fire. The range was short and there was never any doubt of who was where; there was no intervening brush. Milt later claimed, laughing, that the slug never slowed down, and he reckoned it was probably still going after zipping through the pig's front quarters unimpeded.

The earth shook, but the pig was unimpressed by my thunderer. Instead he bolted, and one of the dogs cornered him about 50 yards away, apparently none the worse for wear. One shot from above with the .45 slammed him to the ground for good: not even a twitch. We didn't do a detailed slice and dice, but we did enough to remind me that the vitals are in the lower 1/3 of the chest. The thorax was penetrated (ya could eat the bullet hole--and we did) above the heart, lungs and big vessels. Yup, it was plenty of gun, but, as J. D. Jones likes to say, 10,000 foot pounds of energy in the ass isn't worth near as much as a knife in the heart.

Later that same day, Milt's ordinary old 30-30 TC snuck up to within 100 yards of a Hawaiian ram, standing above us on the side of a 40% grade. The gun pulled its own trigger, of course, and the ram was dead before it hit the ground, right now. I don't know what the load was, but knowing Milt, it probably wasn't anything unusual; it didn't need to be. Shot through the heart, the little ram slipped through the crack between the worlds.

And finally, as we were headed back to the bunkhouse, we met another hunter, proudly sporting a rifle in 270 Weatherby and in search of a little ram like Milt's. Talk about enough gun! These little guys might go 100 pounds after a heavy rain storm. Well, he lost the first ram-ette, apparently wounding him, shooting from a tree stand. All five of us in our hunting party spent the rest of the afternoon looking for the wounded animal. We hunters generally say that we searched, but had no luck finding our quarry. I'll guess that it was the ram, not us, who wasn't lucky. Nevertheless, this hombre wasn't to be denied. Later that evening, what was left of another ram was brought back to the camp; it should have had a body bag. Just let your imagination go wild, and you'll get to the neighborhood of what happened. All those 130 grain Hornady's were explosive.

So, what have you learned, Dorothy? That's the part of the lecture I'll spare you. My experience with hunters and gun people is that we don't have any trouble coming up with explanations for things that don't make sense. The Shootists is the only group with a lot of people who think and know things about guns and shooting that humble me regularly. All that I can think is that I will continue to keep myself open and my mouth mostly shut. I will do my best not to shoot for the wrong part of the animal. I will never again suggest that I, or any of my friends, sniff other people's butts. Go with God and Shoot Straight.

WRITE DR. CHRIS

Chris Ryan in His Own Words:

I grew up in Wyoming, the oldest son of parents born in Manhattan (NYC). I caught a love of guns and hunting, as well a compulsion for saying what was on my mind, from the father of one of my closest friends. This man, a grizzled old Texan, was old before his time due to several severe injuries he suffered working as a lineman. I remember him as kind of a cross between Marshall Dillon and Yoda from Star Wars.

I went to college and went to college and went to college, earning a degree in cocktail party trivia, and graduating from Yale suma cum Budweiser. I returned to Wyoming to take the only job for which I was truly qualified: Repo Man. Somehow, after another three years of college, I got into Medical School, where I began to develop contempt for doctors (well, only most of them).

I spent another four years in specialty training in California, and practiced in Oregon for two years, before coming to Colorado. I'm currently in my own practice in Denver.

My interest in guns has consistently leaned very heavily toward revolvers and bolt action rifles, the bigger the better. Some might claim that I'm continuing to overcompensate for starting out as a skinny nerdy little kid, growing up in a harsh environment. I'm sure that's a bunch of crap.

Chris is not joking about his preference     for big rifles.  Here is Glenn Latham just     after touching off a round with Chris's     bolt-action 600 Nitro Express.