Shooting a Grizzly bear with a 9mm or 45ACP round?

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!

H

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...

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...

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?

Your question is academic....no [knowledgeable] outdoors person in their right mind would go into bear country armed with any of the calibers you listed. Certainly not me. I have spent considerable time doing geologic field work in the Cook Inlet of Alaska and have been threatened by both black bears and Griz....all members of our party carried at least a 12 gauge with sabot slugs (and still undergunned) and on one trip carried .375's - decent stopping power.

What you heard about 9mm and .45 being useless is correct. Neither round will kill a bear before it has a chance to kill you. Wounding a bear is generally not deter an attack, but will only piss it off even more - you would NOT have time to fire more than 3-4 ACCURATE shots much less 12-15 shots before it was on you.

You're welcome to make bullets out of marshmallows if you want. There's no law against it. Bullets are chunks of metal. Armor-piercing bullets are simply made with a hard core. There's really no advantage in a revolver to fancy metals hitting bone compared to a hard lead alloy.

The reason pistols are a bad idea is that the weight and shape of the bullet is not right. They typically have lower weight and therefore lower sectional density than revolvers of similar caliber can handle, and sectional density equals penetration. Also, they have to have round noses or something close to it for reliable feeding. That leads to a smaller wound channel. If you look at rifles in Africa a century ago, you'll see that some pretty powerful rifles got their users killed because the bullet didn't follow a straight line after striking bone. That is, in addition to all the miracles you're already asking for, there's one more of at least as much importance that you've left out. And if you get a fatal shot but the bear kills you before it dies, you really aren't in any condition to brag about it. And this all assumes you can hit a grapefruit-sized target that's bounding up and down at an irregular pace as the bear charges at perhaps 50 fps from 100 feet away (2 seconds).

shooting grizzly bear 9mm 45acp

let me put this "question" in perspective....NO....Native Guards at pipeline camps in Alaska use 12 ga 3in slugs to protect the line camps from polar bear attacks....those guys know bears and can use anything they want..they pick the big 12's....if all you have is a dinky little 9 or some kind of 45 and you are being attacked by a griz or a big brown or a polar,then yes,shoot it as many times as you can before it eats you...at least make sure that the animal that killed you goes off somewhere and dies...but you do not want to carry one of those and count on it saving you...it wont....for close in lifesaving from a big bear,an auto 12,loaded with as many 3 in slugs as the thing will hold is your safest bet...remember those native guides...the companies will buy them whatever they want...they ALL carry 12's

Your best bet out of the cartridge's you listed would be 9mm +P+. The .45 definatly will not penetrate a bears skin even. But like H said the only thing i'd want to have in bear territory is a .500 S&W magnum. Very powerful handgun.

Some grizzly's have been killed with .22's on rare occasions but that definatly doesn't mean it'll kill it every time. If you have a small caliber and find yourself against a bear aim for the eye's. It Won't have to go through the skull then.