Shooting a Grizzly bear with a 9mm or 45ACP round?
For the animal lover: this is just hypothetical.
So here are the question: Would the following FMJ rounds penetrate an adult Grizzly's skull if shot from a hand gun: 9mm 9mm +P 9mm +P+ 45ACP 45ACP +P 9mm armor piercing rounds (I'm sure it will but is it legal to carry in handguns in the USA and Canada? I think it's illegal to sell or and definitely illegal to manufacture, but I've heard it's not illegal to buy or posess?????? Not sure how that works either, any pointers?)
Personally I believe a dozen of any caliber fired at a bear's face would deter it/stop it from continuing it's attack assuming that at least one round hits an eye.
I'm not a bear expert, but I've always heard that a 9mm and 45 hand gun is useless to carry against a bear.
I do agree that body shots would probably not do anything to the bear (except for armor piercing rounds to the heart I believe). And that shots to the head assuming they don't penetrate the skull or hit an eye will only piss
2008-02-14T01:40:14Z
the bear off more. But of a whole 12 to 17 round clip fired at the skull, I'm sure one round will penetrate. I mean how hard can a bears skull be?
Ofcourse this is assuming one is fast enough, sharp enough and lucky enough to hit the head area with every shot.
What are your opinions?
And about armor piercing hand gun ammo, they are illegal right? Or am I wrong?
H2008-02-14T03:23:09Z
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Any one of those rounds 'could' penetrate a Grizzly's skull but none of those are hunting rounds or calibers. They are defensive pistol rounds. Hunting rounds begin with the .357 Magnum and proper ammo and go on up to the 10mm (if you want an auto-loader), to the .500 S&W Magnum.
To put things into perspective. At the turn of the last Century a Grizzly was killed in the Wyoming Territory. The Territorial Government posted a $10,000 in gold reward for this bear. It terrozied the countryside for twenty years before the reward was claimed. When it was finally brought in, it was learned that: It had over a hundred rifle bullets in its body. Besides the kill shot (a .30-40 Krag slug between the ears) it had five different medium and large bore pistol bullets lodged in the brain. None of them had killed it. All five had been fired into the brain from the bottom of its head. Those hunters never came back. I'll leave their possible fate to your imagination.
So yeah, go after a Grizzly with a nine or a .45 acp. Good luck!
RE: Shooting a Grizzly bear with a 9mm or 45ACP round? For the animal lover: this is just hypothetical.
So here are the question: Would the following FMJ rounds penetrate an adult Grizzly's skull if shot from a hand gun: 9mm 9mm +P 9mm +P+ 45ACP 45ACP +P 9mm armor piercing rounds (I'm sure it will but is it legal to carry in handguns...
Any of these rounds 'could' penetrate a grizzly bears skull. You can penetrate a bear's skull with a 22 and it will 'possibly' die. It is illegal to buy armor piercing pistol rounds in both the US and Canada. You won't need them to kill a Grizzly bear anyway so it doesn't matter.
9mm and 45ACP aren't necessarily useless against bears, but it is like taking down a human with a .177. They are useless for hunting, but could still work in self-defense if you blast away. Once again you do not need armor piercing rounds to penetrate a bear in any area. I'm pretty sure a 9mm +P+ would whiz right through a bear. Unfortunately that doesn't mean you have killed it. A 45ACP would do a little more damage.
If you are looking to defend yourself from Grizz you want the most stopping power possible. Penetration isn't the only factor. You want something larger than a 45ACP if possible, but if a 45 is all you have that is better than nothing I guess.
I'm no expert but in my opinion, if a bear is coming at you, he is not strolling along, he will be running full out. Under those conditions, you will be very lucky if you could put more than one round out of a whole clip into his head. If that were the case, you had better have something with more punch than either a 9mm or a .45 acp. If it were me, I'd want either a .454 Casul or a S & W .500 mag.
To the best of my knowlege, aromor piercing ammo is illegal to have so you would be very unlikely to have a clip full of it to shoot at the bear.
When in bear country, take all precautions to avoid any encounters or to defuse any encounters. When that fails, you had best not be undergunned. If you don't have a gun that will stop an enraged bear, you will soon have a new, albeit short, career as a bear turd.
No you can not have armor piercing handgun ammo in the USA. No you can not have a handgun in Canada. People have shot brown bear with the 500 S&W and it didn’t even flinch; http://www.biggamehunt.net/sections/Alaska/Handgun_Hunting_the_Alaskan_Brown_Bear_02050401.html
If you look at the foot ponds of energy by those handguns you listed; you will see that they are under 500 ft pounds of energy. Bears need to be hit with at least 800 ft lbs of energy and preferably over 1000 ft lbs.
Another tidbit. Bears just don’t sit there and let you shoot them repeatedly. A bear’s brain is about the size of a big grapefruit. Now try hitting a grapefruit bouncing up and down coming at you at 35 mph. A bears skull is sloping at an angle so little 9mm bullets could literally glance off its skull. As for the .45; bears have been shot in the skull with that round and it just lodged in the skull.
The best way to stop a bear charge is to disable it first by shooting it in the spine or shoulders. Then you can get a better shot for the heart, lungs etc.
Here are some footage to give you an idea of how tough bears are; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVKmHaNSTTs&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZnsL7-UdGc
Let me put it to you this way; shooting bears with Any 9mm or .45 can get you killed! I have tried over and over again to explain this to people who come up here (Alaska) and think those puny rounds will save them from a bear. I could take them to people I know who were mauled by Brown bears and Grizzlies and HAD guns but the bear still was able to chew them up horribly. So if you can get mauled after shooting a big bear with an 06’, .44 magnum, .357 magnum would you want to try that little 9mm?