One tough Alligator

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"There's time to be politically correct after the gator is cooked and served."

Be sure to toast with an American beer.

"I think a bang stick is a shotgun shell setoff by contact, triggering a Co2 cartridge that fires it. Same concept as nail gun if I remember right."

Older bang sticks use a 12 gauge shell and are set off by pushing them against the target. The noise underwater is horrendous.

Newer 'bang sticks' use a CO2 cartridge and a needle.
The cartridge is pierced and the gas injected into the target.
Useful under water a since it makes the fish rise to the surface (or at least damages its buoyancy control).
The big advantage is being able to hear for the next few hours.
 
Heck I passed a semi on a 2 lane in Orange county and there was about a 10 foot gator crossing the road. I ran it over in my Datsun p/u and the gator hauled but. He's probably still alive. This happened in 1976 or 77. Darn gators are everywhere now. They can be problematic, but a well placed shot from a .22mag rifle works just fine, no matter what the size.
 
I'm guessing they actually just missed. Even .45 ACP would punch through gator hide no problem. They aren't all that tough.
 
The 45 is my least favorite round for this application, to much surface and sloooow fps, compared to a 9mm or a 357. In the 125 grain area. FMJ is where it is at in the head for that fella.

I believe the 45 is a much preference round in +P in many applications, but not for this job. ;)
 
The correct caliber for alligators is .22lr. Seriously.

They've got about a ping-pong ball sized target in the center of the top of their head, right behind the eyes. You hit them there and you could be using an ice pick. You hit 'em anywhere else and they're gonna be really mad at you for a good long time :).

Alligators can and do shrug off a surprising amount of gunfire when you're just shooting them in the body.

I've seen a fair number of alligators killed in East Texas with valid permits (including a few up around 10-12'). A .22 in the ping pong ball puts 'em right out.
 
Not if they were hitting its back, they wouldn't. The skin is very thick and tough there and reinforced by bony plates.
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What do you think ribs are made of? If a bullet can't punch through thick hide and bones, it's going to have a hard time doing much against a clothed human, too.

Okay, now I have to find that "poor man's bullet proof vest" thread again, and suggest using alligator hide.
 
What do you think ribs are made of? If a bullet can't punch through thick hide and bones, it's going to have a hard time doing much against a clothed human, too.
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:confused: Are you talking about human ribs? If so, comparing a human ribcage to an alligators back is like comparing a Ford F-150 to....

bigtruck.gif

Gators have ribs too, and hard thick skin, and bony plates. Actually, some Indian tribes used to use alligator skin shields.
 
The gators around here are getting really bad. Used to be you were fairly safe in an F-150, even on the back roads, but now you need a Hummer at least and you'd better stick to the Interstate, middle lane. I mean, I'm running out of friends. Just last Tuesday, ole Bobby Two-Tone goes off to the 7-11 for a 12-pack of Diet Coke 'cause LulaJeen's pregnant again and she can't digest barbecue without it, and POOF! Gone. All we found was his Zippo and a toenail.

In my experience, the poster from Texas has it right. You absolutely have to hit them in the brain and nowhere else. And just to be clear, a bang stick is an aluminum pole tipped with what amounts to a pistol-caliber chamber spring-mounted over a firing pin. When you load it and jab it into the gator, the cartridge is driven back into the firing pin, and bang. The idea is to do this only UNDER the surface of the water, because otherwise things can get messy in terms of bullet fragments, bone chips, and other stuff that doesn't mix well with human flesh and boat hulls. I once bang-sticked a 13-foot gator twice with Remington JSP 240-grain .44 mags, and got it right, too -- straight into the back of the head, directly above the brain -- and all it did was stun him some. To make him truly nonthreatening we had to sever his spine with a hammer and chisel. The .44s hadn't even penetrated his armor plate. But yeah, .22s work fine on the little guys. One way or another, you just have to get to the brain.

Gators taste like whatever they've been eating, which is usually fish or, here in west-central Florida, insufficiently armored rednecks. Myself, I like 'em South Florida poodle-fed. Call me old-fashioned.
 
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Does "gator" meat taste like chicken
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Not at all, gator is own groovy sort of thing. It's not white meat, but it's not quite fish, it's.... well, gator.

And it's damn fine over rice and black beans with a nice roux.
 
When I was a young...ahem!... poacher :uhoh:, everyone understood that only a perfect hit in the brain stem would do a gator in. Your average .22LR will do the trick, only if your aim was perfect. You can hit a gator with a .50 bmg anywhere except the brain stem and you'll lose him. Gators are the toughest things out there.
 
This has gotta be the funniest thing I've seen in weeks. :D I have to say this goes back to the basic "Handguns are handguns, and rifles are rifles." Not much will die immediately from a non-CNS or heart hit from a handgun. Include any large fur covered or otherwise critter, including the two-legged ones. Rifles with their high velocity will pierce far more than any handgun caliber, and arguing the difference between the 800fps of .45 or the 1200fps of a 9mm is negligible compared to the energy in a 30.06 round flying at nearly 3000fps.
A side note, and similar story, a friend of mine witnessed a white-tail deer struck by a car. being the caring citizen, he pulled over to move the deer out of the road, and found it was not yet dead. Trying to put it out of it's misery, he fired two rounds out of his 9mm handgun at the deer's cranium. Both bounced off the hard head of the doe. A very different implement was used to finish the deer.
 
Think "brain stem" not the cranium. Think "shot placement" behind the ears and toward the head not between the eyes and from the front.

Reptilian brain, the brain in some of these animals is not very big, but the juncture of where it connects to the spine is where you want to be hitting it.
;)

A good firemans ax will do the job:neener:
 
speaking of big gators
tx-gator.jpg
 
A 22lr who uses a 22 to kill a gator that just pisses them off more if anything the proper way is with a shot gun or bang stick if you don't have that then something better then a 9mm. I would think a 45 would break the skin but then again I have shot a gator with a 30-30 and the gator didn't die shot him 2 times in the head.
 
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