From: gmk@falstaff.MAE.CWRU.Edu (Geoff Kotzar)
Subject: Black Talon Info (was Re: Pain and shock tolerance)
Organization: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, USA

In article <9403140231.aa00768@SMOKEY.ARL.ARMY.MIL>, gwyn@arl.army.mil (Doug Gwyn (ACISD/MCSB) <gwyn>) writes:
|> In article <2lrjsd$c9d@xring.cs.umd.edu> fcrary@benji.Colorado.EDU (Frank Crary) writes:
|> #The sharp edges on Black Talon ammunition were designed to avoid
|> #deflection from elastic parts like major blood vessels.
|>
|> I doubt that, partly because soft tissues aren't going to deflect
|> a bullet very much anyway, and also because Winchester's descriptions
|> of BT explained that thejacket design is for controlled expansion
|> at deeper relative amount of penetration.  The points are a side
|> effect and don't span a very large fraction of the total expanded
|> cross sectional area (but the mushrooming core does).
>

I found the following information in the International Wound Ballistic
Association Journal Vol 1, No 3. In it there is an article by Martin
Fackler that was originally published in Law & Order Magazine. The
article talked about the Black Talon in part.

The "talons" are in fact designed to "rip your guts out", as much as
it pains me to admit that Moynihan might not be full of shit. In
San Diego, there was a shooting where the bad guy was hit with Winchester's
9mm OSM round. This round predates the Black Talons. The coroner found
that the jacket grom the OSM round actually sliced, rather than tore,
through a blood vessel. According to Fackler, Alan Corezine (sp),
recognized the significance of that and optimized the BT design to include
that wounding mechanism. Fackler reported running a test by firing a number
of the new BT designs into the abdominal cavity of a freshly killed pig. He
found that the petals, characteristic of the BT's, had produced four cuts
in the intestines. These were damages that would not have occurred had
the more common HP's been used. With the earlier generations of HP's such
structures were usually pushed aside and left undamaged. With the BT's
the wounds created now require additional surgical intervention to repair
the damage.

If Frank Crary's statement is reworded slightly to read "to avoid deflecting
the large elastic parts..." it would be consistent with what Fackler reported.


geoff kotzar

From: "Douglas A. Gwyn" <gwyn@arl.army.mil>
Newsgroups: rec.guns
Subject: Re: Black Talon?
Date: 23 Jan 2001 20:30:42 -0500

Cayce Roach wrote:
# I recently read a little about the Winchester Black Talon HP. I was
# wondering if anyone has any information on what they were and why they were
# banned.

Black Talon ammo has not been banned in most US jurisdictions.
The anti-gun crowd were raising a stick about it several years
ago, and in response Winchester voluntarily ceased civilian
sales until the anti-gunners forgot about it, then introduced
a very similar design with a different name.  The original
design has been available to law enforcement all along.

All Black Talon really is is an expanding jacketed hollow-point
design with tapered jacket thickness to reduce fragmentation.
The original design produced fairly sharp points on the ends
of the expanded "petals", whereas the revised design has
blunter points.  (One anti-gunner claim was that the sharp
points posed excessive risk to ER staff.)

Black Talon was the best performer of all the .40S&W handgun
ammo I tested a few years ago.  PMC/El Dorado StarFire is
fairly similar.  Golden Saber expands differently but is also
very good.