kgpcr,
There are two ways to get experience in life.
You can make all the mistakes yourself, or you can learn from the experiences of other people.
It's a lot less painful to do the latter, believe me. I assure you there are PLENTY of knowledgeable and experienced people here who will not hesitate to politely push the BS button on anything that comes up that reeks of bovine excrement.
Take a little time to learn the ins and outs of this place, and remember that it isn't your sole individual responsibility to ride herd on it just yet. Trail boss Dave McC is perfectly willing and able to do that, and he most assuredly will.
It would be a shame to see a promising new member like you get blasted into digital goo against the "cantina wall", after all. Dave doesn't often issue warnings. It would be extremely prudent to pay attention to the one above. See
http://www.thehighroad.org/code-of-conduct.html if you haven't been there already.
I can assure you from my own limited personal experience that bullets- especially round nosed bullets at moderate velocities- will most assuredly perform exactly as described if the strike a human being on the forehead above the brow ridge. That's the thickest part of the skull, it works a bit like a helmet, and I have seen the same thing happen with a different caliber in the field while working as an EMT.
In our case the patient had a bullet hole in the front of the head and a bullet hole in the back of the head, but was conscious and VERY alert. Turned out the projectile (a .22LR) had skated under his scalp and exited at the back of his head. Freaked us out big time, we stayed at the hospital long enough to see his Xrays.
Take a few classes from instructors who supervise students in the process of firing hundreds of thousands or millions of rounds in a year and you might learn some of the odd things that happen after projectiles leave bores. Like the baseball cap bill on a 3-D target that turned a shotgun slug away from its indended point of impact and made it miss clean, told to me in class by one of if not the premier scattergun guru in the world. The object lesson there was to be prepared to shoot again, no matter what. Louis never once had to tell me "Run the bolt, Fred" during the three days of that class, either.
You hang around long enough and you learn things that you might not learn otherwise. Because nobody lives long enough to see it all themselves. Here on THR you might see some joshing or leg pulling among old friends, or you might see things like someone sliiiiightly exaggerate stories about their new gun or their old bird dog. That's it though.
NO ONE here is going to spin BS yarns that are not appropriately challenged, believe me. It isn't going to happen, and you don't have to worry about it. The things that have been related on this thread ring absolutely true, and that is precisely why no moderator or senior member (or a whole gaggle of the above) has dropped rocks on this thread or the OP.
All of us here WANT this place to be the sort of venue where people are willing to tell stories like these for the benefit of ALL of us. We are proud to number among our membership some names that are well known in the firearms field, who are willing to post here precisely BECAUSE of the atmosphere that has been established and cultivated here. There are lots of well known writers and others who have given up on various internet fora simply because they get treated so rudely. And so they don't participate on the open forums any more- they set up their own forums that are private, and the larger community is therefore deprived of their commentary.
That isn't the case here. We intend to keep it that way. And if it means newbies get blown out of the water from time to time for breaking the rules, that's a price that might have to be paid.
Stay safe,
lpl/nc (most certainly not a famous personage even tho I do use a pen name)
