Paper patching in movie "Shooter"

I will have to watch that part of Shooter again ---- I Think --- it was Hollywood BS.

Gotta just LOVE good old Levon Helms as he was talking to Wallberg about it !!!

Never saw the movie. Wasn't Marky-Mark in that one? Probably good enough reason for me to not see it.

If it was using a jacketed bullet as I'm getting out of the context of the previous posts, its pure hollyweird BS.

Paper patching is used as a form of 'jacketing' for lead slugs. With shooting lead bullets, there's a direct correlation between how hard a bullet if and how fast you can drive it (especially if you are talking about smokeless powder) without badly leading the barrel and damaging the bullet (putting discussion of using the correct lube aside). The downside to hard bullets is that they don't mushroom when they hit critters, they more shatter/spall/fragment which isn't very useful. You can drive a soft lead slug to higher velocities by casting it undersize to the bore and using paper patching as a 'jacket' to protect the slug which will still mushroom nicely. A modern jacketed bullet is the same thing- pure soft lead with a copper alloy jacket instead of paper. The modern jacketing has a lot of advantages over paper, not least of which, paper patching wears down the rifling much faster.
Which is why I'm calling the idea of using paper jacketed bullets to be complete BS.

That, and the whole thing assumes that the bad guys recovered a completely undamaged bullet that Mark Wahlberg had fired which they could then reload. I'm very new to guns, but I've never seen an undamaged round that'd been fired into anything. Maybe if he'd shot ballistic gel?

Is it even possible for a bullet to be completely undamaged after having been fired into anything at over 2800 ft/s?

Yeah, I also have a hard time seeing a bullet that has been fired into something being refired with any accuracy.

They where discussing a round from a 408. Cheytac from an M200. The shot was approximately 1800 yards and it was not the same bullet from his gun. They had recovered the bullet from a test firing at a can of soup the week earlier and used the metal as evidence. AS they stated the bullet was unmatchable they where however about get a metallurgical match from it (it was never actually refired) . Other than the paper patch part, which I think was more of a distraction to the plot anyway I don’t see how the rest of this would be impossible, as the movie was based on government corruption. And and yeah, I've watched the whole movie about 26 times.

The paper patching bit was from the book Point Of Impact by Steven Hunter. In the book, it was explained much more clearly, and, in fact, they did use a pre-fired bullet Bob Lee Swagger had fired a week or so before. Never seen the movie, but I would bet a fair bit of money that the book is far better, and more accurate. The amount of work a good author goes through to get his work plausible is simply incredible. Works of fiction especially, because you have to make them seem true enough that they are believeable.

So, read the book, and if that leaves any questions to ask...I can't think of a better place to get them answered than right here.

"I dont think you get it, those boy's killed my dog"

Mall Ninja, that's the best line in the movie!

shadow man, it's the only book in many years I have bothered to read more than once. And yes, it goes into a LOT more detail.

The thing that really left a bad taste in my mouth was that they used Wahlberg at all. He's an admitted felon, if not a convicted felon, he's VERY anti-gun, when he met Charleton Heston in filming the Planet of the Apes remake, he said; "It's very disturbing to meet you."

Darn pity to hear that about Walhberg, I thought he played the part well. Yes, the book was better (almost always is, though, isn't it?) but the movie wasn't too bad.

To think that I almost paid retail to get a copy. No way I'm putting $ into Walhberg's pocket. Guess I'll have to look for a used DVD.

In the original book, the hero leaves many projectiles in a long range target backstop because the bad guys con him into shooting at various target to prove what can be done.
One of the bullets is recovered intact and is later re-fired intact via paper patching from a tricked out 300 H&H M70s with a slightly over-sized bore. The point being to set up the hero when the rifling matches up to his rifle.
While it would work in theory, the chances of it being accurate enough to hit a body past 300 yards is a bit of a stretch.

Yeap nothing like an admitted racist, thief and thug to star as a military vet.

I have no doubt that an expert could successfully accomplish the shot using a previously fired round. Paper patching is in essence a form of Sabot. I think it would be best accomplished if the patched bullet was fired from a larger caliber weapon. This way, the paper would be able to engage the rifling and not mess up the grooves already on the used bullet. Just suppose you decided to use a sabot. Fire it out of a rifled bore and you could achieve acceptable accuracy.

If you want to learn about paper patching go to a black powder shoot. Another good source of information is Naramore's "Handloading Manual" 1939. He goes into a nice long discussion of the technique and the pro's and con's of paper patching. Naramore points out that they used to even have 4 different thicknesses of special paper for patching. He comments it was similar to the linen paper used in currency.


Also in the earliest Handloader issues, their was a back page section written by Donaldson and he commonly talked about paper patching and how it was used for schutzen (spelling?) shooting.

Suffice it to say, it was a technique used by expert shooters to wring the best accuracy out of the equipment they had at the time. While I am not sure of what could be done today, I would not dismiss it "out of hand" without some serious testing.

Paper patching actually wears a bore less than jacketed bullets. Its possible to push a patched bullet faster than a jacketed bullet given the same weight and cartridge. Patched bullet have a lower friction and thus a reduced pressure, allowing a little more powder before reaching maximum pressure.

The book stated that a sabot was used not a paper patch.

The rifle was a weatherby 'black king' in .338 winchester. The book reiterates several times that this was the '10th black king that had been missing for years'.


This is a 320gr patched bullet. The rifle is a CZ-550 is .375 H&H. The load was 65.0 gr of IMR 4064, good for just over 2500FPS. Group was shot at 50yds from the sitting position. The lower 2 holes were with the initial sight setting. The upper 3 holes were after dialing in some elevation to bring it to a calculated 150yds zero.

Many do not know that properly patched cast boolits can be driven at jacketed velocities with excellent accuracy.

Check out the patched boolit section on this forum: http://castboolits.gunloads.com/

Cast boolits for both handgun and rifles offer much more than some would think possible. I have been casting for decades and very seldom fire jacketed pills. With several hundred pounds of wheel weights and a selection of boolit molds, the cost of jacketed bullets does not enter into the equation.

Never seen the movie, but I would bet a fair bit of money that the book is far better, and more accurate.

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You have sure got that right! And a young Clint Eastwood starred in the book (at least in my head).

Paper patching actually wears a bore less than jacketed bullets. Its possible to push a patched bullet faster than a jacketed bullet given the same weight and cartridge. Patched bullet have a lower friction and thus a reduced pressure, allowing a little more powder before reaching maximum pressure.

The book stated that a sabot was used not a paper patch.

The rifle was a weatherby 'black king' in .338 winchester. The book reiterates several times that this was the '10th black king that had been missing for years'.

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Hate to nitpick, but it was a Winchester pre-64 Model 70 Target Grade in .300 H&H Magnum (I just checked my copy of the book). However, I cannot argue with the fact that paper patching and sabots are very fast, accurate loads. The author delved into the Kennedy assasination, with his theory of a shooter farther away than Oswald using a hotloaded round pushing three of Oswald's pre-fired bullets. That's the only part of the book that lost me, a good idea, but off-topic a bit.

sabots are generally considered very inaccurate in hand-held rifles.

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Really? I don't want to argue with you, but I seem to remember some M82A1's in .50BMG shooting sabots with far better accuracy then they could get out of the standard loads.

You have sure got that right! And a young Clint Eastwood starred in the book (at least in my head).

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I always got the impression that the story happened long after Viet Nam. I imagined either Tom Lee Jones or Sam Elliot.

I dont really know but it sounds like a good one for the mythbusters

Likely a Plausible but unlikely situation. I'll bet that you have to get into very non-standard territory for this to work. In the movie they were using a conventional rifle.........

svaz said:

I always got the impression that the story happened long after Viet Nam. I imagined either Tom Lee Jones or Sam Elliot.

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They got the casting wrong for the movie, it should have been someone older and a little rougher. Sam Elliot would have been great.