If you ever wanted to know how many 2-liter bottles full of water it takes to stop a Federal Hydra-Shok 9mm round, the answer is four. Mike, Ty, and I went shooting on Saturday, and I really wanted to recover a bullet that had been shot, so I lined up some 2-liter bottles and fired Ty’s gun at them. I only lined up four bottles, which was barely enough to stop the bullet. It’s probably not a good method to properly measure penetration, expansion, and fragmentation, but it’s just sorta fun to see what a little water will do to a 9mm round. It didn’t mushroom as much as I thought it would, but it looked pretty cool. Next time, I’ll try my Winchester FMJs, but I doubt they’ll look as interesting as a JHP.
Ty and I brought our shotguns, but I forgot to bring my box of clay pigeons. Luckily, Ty had a bunch of old CDs in his car, so we shot them instead. A CD-R is really cool to shoot, because when the disc shatters, the media flakes into hundreds of little metallic pieces that float down slowly to the ground. They’re a lot harder to throw than clay pigeons, and even harder to hit.