X marks the spot

[DevLcL]

At one point in the movie 'Taxi Driver' starring Robert Dinero, the main character sits down with some flat nose ammo of some sort. He takes a knife (if i remember correctly) and places it on the tip of the bullet then hammers it to make a mark. He does it again to make an X... or a cross, either way, what do you think this means? I don't think it really meant to make the bullet fragment on impact or anything like that but I'm not sure. I've wondered about that for a while and just now remembered it.

-Dev

 

[JohnKSa]

Supposed to make the bullet expand or fragment more readily. It probably does, to one extent or another...

 

[Sunray]

"...what do you think this means?..." It means it looks cool in a movie. In the real world it does nothing.

 

[RecoilRob]

Yea, pounding an X into the bullet tip does NO good.

If you want REAL effectiveness, you need to rub the bullet tips with GARLIC! I saw that in a movie and read somewhere that the old gangsters used to do it, supposedly to make the bullets infect their victims....if they didn't outright kill them.

 

[Biker]

Not too far off topic I hope, but in a novel I read long ago, the BGs filled the tips of their hollowpoints with human feces in hopes that anyone who survived the bullet wound would become quickly infected.
Is this just another urban myth or is it possible to infect a wound this way?
Biker

 

[tegemu]

In times past, before the explosion of relatively high tech ammo such as assorted hollow points, this technique was used to achieve some degree of the same effect as hollow points. They were usually referred to as "Dum Dum bullets." One of the international agreements, I think it was the Geneva Convention, outlawed the use of them in warfare.

 

[gfen]

As a related aside, upon reading a Louis L'Amour book recently, the villian was cutting the tips off his .32 caliber bullets to make them more deadly than the usual round nose varieties in use. Early SWC technology.

 

[EghtySx]

They were to make Dum-Dums they were called. Supposedly the idea was for the slug to tumble and do more damage when it entered it's target. From the stories 25 years ago I always heard that the bullet could enter and spin off in some wild direction. People would say that you could get hit with one in the lower abdomen for example, and the bullet might come out your neck or something like that. I always chalked it up to being an urban myth, something for mall ninjas to talk about.