I am putting the deer rifles away for the year. Yes, my tail is still dragging, but I figure coming away with a zip is better than it could be. A day spent at Deer Camp is usually going to be better spent anywhere else. My mind still wanders back there, and I am forever working things through my head. I got to thinking about Overkill yesterday, and I thought I would share my thoughts.

I see the idea of Overkill show up in a lot of threads out there in forums.  I see it here on the search strings that folks use to get to my site.  What is it?  I am going to define “Overkill” in relation to whitetail deer hunting as a firearm or chambering that puts too much power down range, adversely affecting the killing of the deer, the condition of the resulting venison, the experience of the hunter or a combination of the three.

Way too much Overpenetration

What in the name of John M. Browning does that mean?  Look,  I know what y’all are thinking.  There must be something that’s TOO much.  Look at your next deer.  How wide is it at the ribs?  Certainly under 24 inches.  Any properly fired centerfire rifle, at an appropriate range, with an appropriate bullet is going to be able penetrate 24 inches  of  Jello (the mean density of most mammals)  and keep going on its way without much of a problem.  A 30-30 at 100 yards can do it.  A 30-06 at 300 yards.   Nearly every shot I have made on a deer has produced a hole going in and a hole going out.  If the deer had been standing just right, I could have probably gone on to kill a couple more with the same bullet.   Exactly what is Overpenetration?  Somebody let me know.

A 180 grain .308″  Remington Corelokt SPCL will travel very nicely through a deer lengthwise at 10 yards.  I did it once.  I did not mean to, but it happened that way.  Was that  “Overpenetrating?”  Should I have been using a 150 grain?  Help me out here. The deer dropped dead.

If making it out the other side of a broadside shot is the threshold of proper penetration, then everything north of the 22LR is probably too much.  No.   That makes no sense.  It is frankly nice to know that probably the bullet will go in, plow through some important stuff and then exit the deer.  If that is Overpenetration, that count me in for a big helping.

Bullet Failure

Look, if you find the deer, the bullet did not fail.  If the deer was never recovered, you cannot claim bullet failure.  If you shot at the deer and the deer ran 300 yards, you probably did not shoot them in the right place to begin with.  Claiming the bullet over-expanded, or blew up or pencilled — these are generally guesses. What it usually boils down to was bad bullet choice, or the bullet hit something on its way to the deer, or somebody just plain botched the shot.  Do not blame the bullet. Do not blame the chambering. This is not Overkill or Underkill. We are all adults here.  We all botch shots once in a while. I did, just a few weeks ago.  *A record number of people hit my weblog to find out I screwed up.  I got over it.

Too Much Meat Damage

I have shot deer in a bunch of places.  I generally try to stay away from the shoulders, just because it destroys a lot of bone.  I am a boiler room kind of guy.  Yes, I have created six-inch holes on the far side of a deer.  I have sent lungs flying out the exit hole.  I do not see ruining a  half a package of ribs as a bad thing.  If you do not like the meat damage done by a bullet contacting a shoulder bone, stay away from the shoulder bone.  When it is all properly done, a modern hunting bullet fired at a deer  and contacting bone is going to transfer a lot of force.  I mean A LOT of force.  This is what it is supposed to do.

I have seen a 30-06 150 grain Hornady fired from an M1 Garand completely  eviscerate a deer.  The shot was a little too far back, and it blew  up the abdomen.  Innards were  sent flying, but neither the stomach or intestines were perforated.  Go figure.

Recoil

If there is any “Overkill”  to be discussed it is how much damage that is inflicted on the hunter’s shoulder .   You know when you have too much recoil.  You are sore later.  You develop a flinch.  If there is any reason to keep a .416 Rigby  or 458 Win Mag home from the deer hunt, it is this.  The deer will be no deader than shooting them with a 44 Magnum. The difference will all happen in the dirt behind the deer and  in your shoulder.

A 30-06 with a normal deer load puts out about 20 ft/ lbs of recoil energy.  That is about the threshold.  A long time ago, they were messing with cartridges and somebody decided that amount of recoil was tolerable for the average American foot soldier.  They also designed the 30-06 to do a fair job of killing the average German foot soldier, and if you take your average German and measure him across the chest, you will see his dimensions are not all that far off from a whitetail deer.  What a wonderful coincidence, eh?

Now your average 270 WIN has a bit less recoil.  Your average 300 Win Mag has quite a bit more.  The 300 Savage, with a 150 grain bullet has about 15 ft/lbs of recoil energy.  I always use the 300 Savage as an example of what might be called the ideal deer cartridge—just the right amount of juice to put down the average deer at average ranges by the average hunter. Is the 30-06 Overkill? If your ’06 makes you flinch, then yes.  If it does not, that is fine.    If your are getting ready for safari, and you want to try out your 375 H&H, then no.  That is not overkill either.

I shoot a 12 GA 3″ Turkey Load at a gobbler.  The recoil is about the same as a .416 Rigby, a quintessential elephant gun .  This is  a 20 lb bird, and nowadays, a 3″ shell is considered rather pedestrian in turkey hunting circles.  Once  I took a shot at a gob in late April and was still feeling it in my shoulder on Labor Day, but somehow,  somebody out there thinks 30-06 is inherently  too much for deer.  Go figure.

All the Wrong Reasons

Then there is the reasons why folks go the other way and deliberately search out Overkill. I have heard all of them in the past 30 + years.  Somebody told me he was getting a 300 Win Mag, because he had not gotten out much over the summer to practice and he wanted to still kill the deer if his shot was a bit off.  Somebody else once said that they could not judge distance well and wanted to replace their 30-30, because if their judgement was a couple hundred yards off, they wanted to be sure to hit where they were aiming.

Overkill does not get you any of these.  It does not make deer deader.  It does not improve your aim. It does not guarantee a clean kill. It does not do anything.

Overkill Does Not Exist

Newton set down the basic laws of Physics  in the late 1600’s.  Force equals Mass times Acceleration. Nothing in the intervening years has changed.  Granted, there are some that think putting green or red plastic thingys on the ends of bullets changed things, but believe me, it did not.

There is only so much mass to a deer, only so much mass to a bullet and only so much acceleration you can put on the bullet.  A bullet transfers energy to the deer as it makes contact and as it travels through.  There is only so much force you can impart into this system before

a) You vaporize the bullet before it comes out of the barrel

b) You blow up the rifle’s chamber.

c) You pass the bullet through the far side of the deer, and it travels on its merry way, transmitting all its remaining force into the forest floor.

This is actually a fairly narrow window.  We argue about trivia, whether a 270 WIN is better than a 30-06 or whether a 150 grain bullet is better than 165 grain or if Spitzer is better than Round Nose. Somebody talks about a 100  fps difference in muzzle velocity, but in reality that only means the bullet stays in the deer .02 seconds longer or shorter.  With a .308 bullet, it might add something like 150 ft/lbs of force, but you need only about 8 ft/lbs to break a rib.

Exactly once in 30-some years, I managed to kill a deer and leave the bullet exactly on the inside of the hide on the far side.  It took that doe and rotated her 270 degrees through the air and dumped her lifeless  on the ground.  I shot her at 60 yards.  You figure that at 55 yards the bullet would have gone through her . The perfect shot, the one time in my life I did not commit “Overkill” on a deer.

Yeah, right.

*Yep, on  November 25, I had over 700 people hop on the site, just as I was publishing my story about blowing that shot at 200 yards on the doe.  It was well over twice the previous record, the day everyone went looking for “TURKEY PORN.”

Don’t.  Please Don’t.  Don’t go look for TURKEY PORN on my site.  I still have nightmares.

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