Brush busting myths

Rivrdog takes me to task in comments over my choice of deer ammo, and in doing so brings up one of the myths that seem to perpetuate the shooting community. The myth of the brush busting caliber. To put it plainly, there ain't no such thing. This is no condemnation of Rivrdog. He is entitled to his opinion.

PawPaw remembers as a mere lad, at a range at Fort Knox, KY, we were zeroing the M16A1 rifle. Pawpaw was standing in a foxhole with two sandbags supporting the weapon, firing at a target 25 meters away. And not hitting anything. Nada. No holes in the target. My Drill Sergeant looked downrange and noticed a piece of grass swaying each time I pulled the trigger. The grass was about halfway between me and the target. During a cease-fire, he walked out and harvested that piece of grass. He told me he though my bullets were grazing that piece of grass, and I should try again. I did, and I zero'd the weapon.

Sometime thereafter, Jack O'Connor took the same perception and thorougly debunked it with a series of tests. I wish I had kept the article, but that was thirty years ago. However, Jim Carmichael says in an article in Field and Stream,

When I hear hunters talking about brush-busting calibers, I often wonder what it is they’re shooting at. It seems to me that the whole point is to miss brush and similar obstructions rather than hit them. I’m simplifying, of course, but not by much, because we don’t hear about timber-busting calibers as much as we used to. One reason is that the myths about thumb-size bullets bulldozing their way through timber have pretty much been demolished.

Yet the myth persists. For myself, I don't shoot at a deer when there is anything between me and the deer. I might shoot between trees, over brush, under brush, or whatever, but I don't take the shot if there is anything I can see between me and the target. I don't shoot through brush because the deer deserves better than that.

The simple fact is that there is more than one way to skin a cat. There is also more than one way to kill a deer. Or a hog, or anything else that needs killing. Cast bullets work. They work differently than jacketed, but they work just fine. I wouldn't try to shoot a deer across a bean field with my old .30-30. There are better rifles for that sort of shooting. However, I like still hunting. Taking a rifle and watching an area that deer are known to frequent. Moving slowly through the woods, stopping frequently to watch and listen and learn.

The last three deer I killed were killed like that. All three were killed with cast bullets. None of them moved more than ten yards after being shot. It's a different style of hunting. Don't ask me how many shots I passed up because there was something between me and the deer. It doesn't matter.