Does anyone actually use Rock Salt?

[bigalexe]

It seems to me that rock salt would be rather stupid to load into a shell given that it is corrosive, and most likely will kill someone considering that you are filling their wounds with Salt.

However the idea gets perpetuated via hollywood and so im wondering if anyone ever does it, or if anyone has seen the real world results of what getting hit with salt does.

 

[pps]

From a physics standpoint, salt isn't nearly as dense as lead and therefore shouldn't penetrate far, and should disperse more quickly than lead. From a biology standpoint, a little salt in ones ass isn't likely to be fatal.

 

[bigalexe]

I just figured that ingesting rock salt (road salt, the stuff you throw on your porch) would be the opposite of healthy.

 

[bowman1962]

Tried it on my neighbors dog getting in my garbage, Salt turned into powder but the wad whizzing by him and the bang literally made him turn inside out. Me and the neighbor laughed till we cried.
P.S. You couldn't melt that dog and pour him anywhere near a garbage can after that.

 

[hammerklavier]

You would still be charged with assault with a deadly weapon, attempted murder, etc if you used it just to "warn" someone.

 

[JamisJockey]

http://www.theboxotruth.com/docs/bot33.htm

Take it for what it's worth. I always figured it was southern urban myth BS.

 

[oneounceload]

I use rock salt - to coat a standing rib roast at Christmas time when I put it in the oven

 

[JWF III]

I also tried it out of curiosity. Like bowman, I found that most of the "rocks" turned to grains or powder.

Another thing that would deminish the effectiveness is the shape of any "rocks" that stayed intact. The flat facated sides would open any pattern up faster than a rifled choke with shot. Kind of like a bunch of curve balls going every which way.

I used them to scare off the neighbors unleashed dogs.

Wyman

 

[w_houle]

Either you intend to do harm and bodily damage or not: If you intend bodily injury, then I would suggest using a more appropriate shell. If not, then I would suggest learning how to hand feed your shotgun and use blanks. I can understand how there could be situations where a show of force doesn't necessarily need to be lethal, but enough to send a message. meh, ymmv.

 

[ccsniper]

my grandpa always said that he had been shot with some salt. He had a neighbor that very much disliked him when he was a 12 year old boy in 1943. He lived in Mississippi on a leased farm. Him and his brother asked the man if they could fish the pond the guy had, the guy said no. So they took his horse carriage and rolled it into the creak. He caught them doing it and shot at them with a shotgun. My grandpa said it felt like a hornet sting right up his @$$. My grandpa was definetly a trouble maker in his youth, and quite an exaggerater so it might not be true, take it for what its worth.

 

[Bud Tugly]

When I was a kid there was an old guy down the road who kept a half-dozen milk cows in a small fenced-in field. Once in a while we'd jump the fence and ride the cows like they were horses.

He'd come out and yell at us and we'd run. It was rumored that he kept a shotgun loaded with rock salt ready to chase us off, but we never found out for sure.

 

[Mike U.]

I have one incidence with rock salt. My younger brother (now deceased) had a load in his SxS and showed me what it could do. He stood up a big piece of cardboard and touched one off. It dented the hell outta that cardboard and only one, maybe two pieces actually penetrated the cardboard, IIRC. I was quite underwhelmed at the time, but, I imagine it would sting like crazy when it connected with skin. I didn't volunteer to stand in front of a load of it.

 

[JamisJockey]

Again, The Box of truth link I posted. Proof is in the pudding. At close range, it looks like the thing that will sting you in the ass is the shotgun wad.

 

[oneounceload]

Not to mention that salt is VERY corrosive to steel. A major cleaning would be in order

 

[Vonderek]

Tried it on my neighbors dog getting in my garbage,...Me and the neighbor laughed till we cried.

I guess you had to be there. Some people have no business being pet owners.

 

[RSVP2RIP]

Shooting a gun in someones direction, no matter the projectile, constitutes the use of deadly force. If I were going to justifiably use deadly force, I want it to be deadly force.

 

[tunnug]

Years ago we were at work talking about rock salt in shotguns, one of my coworkers turns around and lifts his shirt to show the right shoulder, it was all scarred up, he said when he was a teen he was stealing stuff from a junkyard when the owner came out yelling at him, as he was going over the fence a blast caught him on the shoulder, didn't say how far the shooter was from him.

 

[atblis]

If you were to take the shot out of a shell, and replace its volume with an equivalent volume of salt, you'd have a projectile of approximately 1/5 the mass.

Smokeless powder does not burn the same with a light projectile. For example, ever fired a shell with no shot in it? The wad often doesn't even make it out of the barrel and most of the powder doesn't even burn.

So basically the box of truth's tests are not necessarily valid. The velocity is possibly dramatically reduced. They should have chronographed the load.