Hollowpoint History

[DMK]

When did hollow points first become popular with U.S. civilians (including Law Enforcement) and with what caliber(s)?

[Lone Star]

The first I know about was the Mk. III .455 load of about 1897. This was the so-called "manstopper" round developed to clobber wild-eyed Afghan tribesmen and their Pathan counterparts along the NW frontier of what was then British-ruled India.

Elmer Keith mentioned HP's being available in some US ammo in the 1930's, but wasn;'t too impressed. The jackets were probably too thick, and the hollow points too small.

Lone Star

[DMK]

That is interesting Lone Star about the Brits using them in .455s. I should have clarified though:

What was the first common use of them by U.S. civilians (I'm thinking self defense, and Law Enforcement)?

[Jeff Timm]

DMK asked, "That is interesting Lone Star about the Brits using them in .455s. I should have clarified though:

What was the first common use of them by U.S. civilians (including Law Enforcement)?"

When Super Vel went into production in the late 1960's. However, reliability of some firearms was a problem.

Other manufacturers began producing HP rounds after Super Vel and Super Vel went out of business.

Remington .45 9mm and .380 hollow points had a good reputation for feeding, but expansion was a hit or miss probability.

Geoff
Who just had to say that.

:uhoh:

[Jim Watson]

The first well distributed "modern" handgun hollowpoints were Super Vel in the 1960s. Fellow name of Harvey made effective hollowponts in the 1950s but they were not widely accepted in spite of some war stories from hunters and police.
In those days I also had some Norma .45 ACP hollowpoints made like the Winchester HSP with a small hollow in an exposed lead nose. Didn't feed in my WW I 1911 so I carried one in the chamber and ball in the magazine.

[Hypnogator]

A number of years ago, one of the presentations at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences was a reconstruction of the shooting of Huey "Kingfish" Long, and the subsequent gunning down of his assassin. One of Long's bodyguards (known as "skullcrackers") carried a 1911 Colt in .38 Super, and was using jacketed hollow point ammo. This was in the early '30s.

One interesting feature of the study was that they exhumed the body of Long's assassin and did a forensic analysis on his skeletal remains. Several bullets were found in the coffin, including one of the .38 Super HPs. It had not expanded, and still contained fragments of blue serge cloth (from the assassin's suit) in its hollow point. The photo of the bullet was compared with a photo of a live round from that era, which was stated to be a very rare collector's cartridge, as not many were produced, and they were not popular back then.

[mete]

Super Vel was the start of the modern hp. Most hps in those days wouldn't expand .The Speer 200gr .45 started out as a soft nose then went to the same configuration with a small hp, 1/16" ,neither would expand unless they hit a rock !! Then they came out with the large hp, close to 1/4" dia with a jacket with 12 cuts, which would not exit a woodchuck if hit in the shoulder/spine area ! Then the cuts on the jacket were removed which gave more penetration. ..Finally the Miami FBI shoot out resulted in establishing criteria for performance so now we have hps that will feed and perform well.

[Lone Star]

Hypnogator-

That was fascinating about Long's assasin and the .38 Super round! Evidently, the effect was what Keith referred to in, "Sixguns", but his experience with the Super was on game animals.

mete-

I see you've edited your question to clarify that civilian US use was foremost in your mind. The responses have been good, but the Norma .45ACP round referred to by one poster didn't arrive until the 1960's. I tried it after Col. Cooper plugged it, and it fed "iffy" in one Colt; okay in another. I doubt it would expand much unless it hit bone.

Maybe ten years ago, a South African cop (off duty) went into a bank to cash a check. Several terrorists burst in, waving AK-47's. The cop drew his Star PD (a privately owned piece) loaded with Speer's famed "flying ashtray" 200 grain JHP's. He killed all four of the thugs, and that spoke very well of the PD, his skills, and PROBABLY of the ammo! The account I saw was in a Johannesburg newspaper, and didn't go into detail about bullet expansion. A local shooter told me about the ammo, which a police friend mentioned to him.

I think we reached a milestone with Winchester's introduction of the .38 lead HP in 1971 or 1972. I know one dealer stocked it, but would only sell it to cops and people he knew well. Today, even many civilians who aren't really "into" guns know about hollowpoints and ask for them. But I doubt if most know much about different brands, or their respective strengths and weaknesses. Remember, a round like Hornady's may expand a little slowly to be ideal on slender humans, but is just what's wanted for larger animals.

I, for one, am delighted with modern options. For what it's worth, I usually favor Federal's Hydra-Shok and Speer/CCI's Gold Dot. But if feeding in an auto might be questionable, I believe that Remington HP has the best reputation. Massad Ayoob has written that it will feed in any gun that will feed "hardball", and the hexagonal hollow point on their 9mm JHP's impresses me, although my CZ-75 eats everything happily.

Lone Star

[DMK]

This has been an interesting discussion. Thanks to all that replied.

So what I'm getting from this is it looks like FMJ or solid lead bullets were the only option for self defense until the mid sixties or early seventies and then it wasn't until the early to mid eighties that we had any reliable expansion in HPs.

[Paul "Fitz" Jones]

As a Pistol grip company for decades I had contact with all types of law enforcement agents and officers. In the 70's a couple of highway patrolmen were executed in the desert and as my department reloader I thought of having a hide out .380 under the uniform in an armpit with snap buttons in the uniform shirt. A secret service grip customer gave me some light weight hollow points that were not on the market and I made up some super hot .380 loads with WW231 and gave them to interested officers.

When testing them in their pistols my Sgt had his pistol slide take a hunk of meat off a thumb and my LT dropped his pistol as the firing created a ball of flame about 10 inches in diameter on our dim indoor range. I have never owned a .380 so still have some ammo left since I am long retired.

[saltydog452]

Before hollowpoints were the so called 'Dum-Dum' bullets.

[Jim Watson]

Real British Dum-Dums included a variety of improvised and experimental bullets, INCLUDING hollow points. First version was just .303 ball with the jacket ground off the nose. Then they drilled some hollowpoints, then they went to purpose made expanding bullets of several designs. One report of the day said that the softpoint hunting bullets the army tested were very destructive but were not sufficiently accurate at long range.

[Paul "Fitz" Jones]

Some of the first British Dum Dums were crosses cut in the noses of their bullets and it happened at a place called Dum Dum is what I heard.

The British 303 was really effective anyway with horrendous wounds because when they hit they were designed to tumble in the flesh. Something to do with the long nose design.

Fitz

[jc2]

The British 303 was really effective anyway with horrendous wounds because when they hit they were designed to tumble in the flesh. Something to do with the long nose design.
Actually, that didn't happen until after it was determined the use of dum-dums and/or hollowpoint bullets was not proper against "civilized" opponents. The Brits answer was to develope a solid point bullet with an aluminum (or even wood during WWI) nose under the jacket. The lightweight nose did indeed cause the bullet to tumble and do some really nasty things when it struck flesh--and was actually considerablyl more devastating than the dum-dum/hollowpoint version used against "savages."

[Jim Watson]

As far as I know, the cross-cut dumdum was a product of the US mobster era.

The REAL British Dum-Dum designed by Maj Bertie Clay at Dum Dum Arsenal, India, was originally a FMJ with the nose jacket ground clear through, and in some cases drilled with a hollowpoint. The jacket was too thick at the nose for such modifications to give much expansion so they went to a series of marks of purpose made expanding bullets.

At one time in the early Hague talks the British assured everybody that they could maintain separate inventories of expanding bullets for shooting Afghans, Africans, etc. and "solids" for wars with "civilized" nations.

Roundnose bullets like early .303, .30 Army (Krag), .30-03, Balle M, 7x57, and 7.9x57J are great stable penetrators. Good enough to brain an elephant, if you are. The "tumbling" effect was not seen until 7.92x57JS, Balle D, .303 Mk VII, and .30-06 brought in spitzer bullets.

[Archie]

I started reading about handguns, handgun ammo and what made it effective in the early '60s. I've had all my old magazines and books thrown out a couple times by my mother and assorted wives (don't ask, you don't have enough time or enough beer), so this is all off the top of my head.

Hollow points were just not functional in handguns. All the old revolver calibers like .45 Colt, .38 Special, .44 Russian and Special, .41 Colt used plain lead bullets; typically with a somewhat blunt round nose. .45 Colt had a somewhat flatter front, and the .44 Special was kind of pointy, for a round nose. But they were all non-expanding bullets.

.44-40 had a flat fronted bullet, and some jacketed rounds were available, but .44-40 was a rifle round. So was .32-20.

Bullets for semi-autos were typically fully jacketed. .38 Auto (and later Super .38 Auto), 9mm Parabellum, the various ACP rounds of .25/.32/.380 and the .45 ACP were all jacketed for two reasons. FMJ ammo worked better in auto pistols, and penetration was perceived as a good thing.

Some handgun experimenters from the time of the early 20th century made bullets that were more effective in shape. This was the beginning of the wadcutter and semi-wadcutter shaped bullets. Wadcutters cut clean holes in paper targets, and it didn't take long to figure out they might cut cleaner holes in game animals, too. They did, by the way. Some experimenters made hollowpoint bullets. However, at handgun velocities (some still loading black powder) hollowpoints didn't expand much.

Some experimentation was done with jacketed hollowpoints. The technology wasn't up to the task; jackets were too thick and velocity too low. Somewhere in here, the .357 Magnum was introduced and changed things, to some degree. A soft point 158 grain bullet at 1500 fps will expand a bit if it encounters something sturdy enough to offer resistance. A deer's shoulder would, a human torso not always. And the jacketed pistol bullet was expensive in relative terms.

So, the semi-wadcutter emerged as the all around bullet type. One could cast them and size and lube them at home. They worked well at low velocities and high velocities (okay, one had to change bullet lubes from time to time); they were accurate enough for deer and black bear or 50 yard bullseye targets. They functioned as good as anything for defending the home and family honor. In a .44 Magnum, they would take any game animal in the Americas, and most everything everywhere else.

Still there was a "need". The .38 Special round was the mainstay of American police, but was developing a reputation of being 'weak'. Part of this was due to the nature of police work. In the '20s and '30s, if a cop on duty shot someone five or six times, the general opinion was that the late lamented needed shooting. But times and public opinion was changing. Badguys should only need shooting once or maybe twice. Cops could not fire in self-defense with the same tolerance as they did in the old days. And, some cops were bothered with needed to shoot a villian more than four times to make said villain calm down.

Then, Norma started rumors of a .45 bullet that would expand at normal velocities. (Too dang expensive for me, by the way.) Lee Jurras and Super-Vel came out in the very late '60s with hollowpoint bullets for most everything from .380 ACP up. The design was such the bullets fed in most guns, and the ones that didn't work were easily modified (ramping and polishing). They would even expand some of the time.

Then Jurras sold Super-Vel and started making Auto-Mags. (He should have stuck to ammo.)

In 1971 I bought a S&W Combat Masterpiece in .38 Special and started reloading for it. At a local gunshop I found some .38 (.357") bullets that weighed 90 grains and were described by their maker, Sierra, as being the "... new jacketed hollow cavity design..." They looked neat as heck. I don't know if they expanded much, as I only fired them into the backstop at the local range. They cost about three times as much as lead bullets, so I went back to lead.

Somewhere in the '70s, most of the ammo makers started lines of handgun ammo with hollow point bullets. They didn't have special names in those days, even. About 1980 I owned a Super .38 and shot a good number of Remington .38 Super 115 grain hollow points through it. (They were not "Golden Sabre" yet.) Then Winchester Western announced Silver Tip ammo.

Now, WW had had Silver Tip ammo in rifle calibers for some years. The ST was actually a compromise between a soft point and an FMJ. It was for use on larger, dangerous animals like grizzly and moose and such.

In the pistol calibers, it was seemingly an aluminum jacketed ammo. It fed in all my pistols (.380, Super .38, 9x19 and .45 ACP) and seemed to have adequate recoil and blast to be powerful enough to actually expand. All the magazines said it did, and all my personal sources said it did. And shooting it into milk jugs filled with water confirmed it.

The market has just improved since then.

To sum up: The first handgun hollow point ammo came out in the '30s or so. The first functional HP ammo was about 1973 or so. And oddly, the manufacturers have always chased the experiments in the development field.

At least, that's how this old abused brain remembers it. Yeah, this has been long winded and probably more than you wanted to know, but it's been fun for me to dredge all this up and share it.

[deputy tom]

My first exposure to HP's was in the early '70's with Super-Vels.I destroyed a S&W model 49 with those.tom.

[Caliburn]

Did that old gangster trick of filing crosses into the tip of the bullet work? Every now and then you see it in a movie or something. It doesn't make a lot of sense since the cuts go with the direction of "travel" - I don't see how that would make the lead open up.

As a matter of fact, I remember a book where they filed crosses in the bullet tips and then rubbed garlic powder (?) into the bullets to make them poisonous or something. That seemed really far fatched. Did anyone really do that? I can't imagine it working.

Or maybe the bullets with crosses and garlic were to shoot vampires!
:D

[Jim Watson]

Not much.
Not much.
Not much.

A shallow cross cut as shown in the movies does not do much for expansion, especially not on a FMJ.

It was once a popular experiment to put a piece of tough paper through the nose section of a bullet mold and cast a bullet with a split nose. There was kind of a narrow range of split sizes and bullet velocities that there would be expansion of the nose halves. Too much cut and/or too much speed and they break off, too little and nothing happens.

There was an old British express rifle mold made to cast a deep cross cut into a bullet, which was then swaged into a round nose. The picture showed it opened up like a modern Barnes X-bullet... in a tub of putty. No game recovery.

[Caliburn]

I must have really wanted to know if I asked it three times!

Thanks for the info. That's about what I figured.

[grendelbane]

The concept of hollow point and soft point handgun bullets dates back to the late 19th century. Young Winston Churchill loaded his Broomhandle Mauser with soft points. As mentioned previously, these early attempts were not very successful.

Wheelgunners could cast hollow point bullets for the 38-40 and 44-40. These molds were intended to cast bullets to be fired from rifles.

Somewhere I have a photograph of several .32 ACP bullets which had the X filed in the nose. These had been recovered from the victim, and could have been loaded and fired again. No deformation at all.

Mickey Spillane, and other writers, thought that you could cut the nose of a .45 ACP and make it much more devastating. Or at least his character Mike Hammer thought that you could.

In the early '80s Winchester produced a .38 Super cartridge which was loaded with a 125 grain JHP revolver bullet. No, it didn't feed too well in my Gov't model. It was quickly replaced by the Silvertip.

I still remember a lot of old-timers telling me that it was illegal to use hollow point bullets.:p

[Newton]

If you live in New Jersey, it still is.



Newton

[Texas Bob]

I remember "old" Guns&Ammo adds featuring a tool that could be bought to "hollow point" a 158gr round nose lead bullet. This was about 1969, at the same time some gunrags suggested loading a 148gr WC backwards over 3.5 grains of bullseye for use out of short bbl revolvers.

[STW]

the use of dum-dums and/or hollowpoint bullets was not proper against "civilized" opponents

The ultimate proposal along these lines was a concept automatic type weapon that used square bullets against non-Christians and round bullets against Christians. It didn't get very far and left it to Gatling pioneer in a more practical way.

[grendelbane]

square bullets against non-Christians and round bullets against Christians. It didn't get very far

This was the Puckle Gun. Though a few samples were built, (and at least one survives in the Tower of London), it was not a roaring success. It inspired this cute poem.

Be not frightened of this terrible machine

They are only wounded who have shares therein



Only round bullet models were actuallly manufactured. Some of the surviving cartridges are loaded with buckshot.

[BluesBear]

Don't forget that Hollow Point ammunmition has been availabe in .22 rimfire for a long, long time.

I had some .35S&W auto ammo from the 1930 that had a jacketed soft point.

I have seen Winchester hollow point .357 ammo from the 1960s.

I have seen 1950 era Lyman moulds for .358" hollow point bullets.



Norma .45 Ammo turned heads when it was introduced.
Sometimes if expanded and sometimes it didn't.
http://www.thehighroad.org/attachment.php?s=&postid=1010068
Since it wqas 230 gr it would be no worse than hardball in a target.


When Lee Jurras came out with Super-Vel the world really took notice.
http://www.thehighroad.org/attachment.php?s=&postid=911102
It works very well! :evil: