Dum-dum ball
The dum-dum bullet is a highly injurious projectile used as firearm ammunition since the end of the 19th century.
It takes its name from Dum Dum, a suburb of Calcutta where there was an arms factory.
History
The dum-dum bullet is created due to insufficient effect of small caliber ammunition to stop an enemy charge. With the advent of high performance detonators (smokeless powder) firearm performance, range and accuracy could be maintained and improved while reducing the caliber used, which had practical advantages. However the English, during confrontations with "savage tribes", find that the result of the shot is less dissuasive because the impacts, although with more speed, are in fact less directly incapacitating.
We decide to draw a bullet that would lose as much energy as possible on contact with its target, in order to maximize the damage. It is a lead bullet covered with a thin layer of nickel streaked with small slits. The impact on a body bursts the jacket of the bullet which deforms according to the streaks and sometimes even bursts. This behavior allows the bullet to carve a larger diameter cavity in the tissues and burst the bones rather than sliding against them. In the event of a burst, tissue damage is much greater.
It was used by the English in India. Subsequently, during the First Hague Conference in 1899, bullets that fragmented or flattened on impact were prohibited.
Yet the modern military 5.56×45mm NATO ammunition known as M193, the warhead of which is 3.5g or 55 grains in weight using US measurements, using the nominal barrel rifling pitch at 14 inches or 12 inches, is likely to behave similarly by one or more reversals of the warhead on impact, without however being expansive as with the dum-dum bullet, because the M193 ammunition is an armored warhead ( "full metal jacket") or lined with a copper alloy. In 1969, NATO changed to 5.56 × 45 mm ammunition. It adopts the SS109 ammunition of the Belgian Minimi machine gun, whose warhead weight is 62 grains or 4 g, using a rifling pitch of 7 inches or 8 inches. This ammunition would not flip on impact. Many ammunition used for police or intervention operations, called expanding bullets, are designed to deform on impact, in order to optimize the return of kinetic energy and avoid hitting a third party behind a target.
There is also an artisanal way to make a so-called "dum-dum" or expansive bullet, or with a hollow point by cross-sawing the bullet head then filing and precise deburring. (process very popular with our hairy people in 14-18) ndw
Fragmentation warheads
Ammunition manufacturers manufacturing expansive warheads intended for hunting, and therefore for the immediate killing of game, seek to optimize the kinetic energy potential of warheads, taking care to limit the fragmentation of the warhead in the body of the animal. Fragmentation of a warhead by scattering goes against the shock effect, it goes against the lethal potential of the shock.
Fragmentation warheads are not expansive, their point is not hollow and cannot be associated with dum-dum bullets. The fragmentation warheads of small caliber firearms are intended either for training or for use in confined spaces in order to limit the collateral damage due to the perforation capacities of the armored warheads, jacketed type "full metal jacket" . The piercing capabilities of expanding or even dum-dum warheads remain potentially dangerous for additional reasons. The distribution of this type of ammunition is therefore quite restricted and specialized.
Uses
The elephants Castor and Pollux were shot in 1870 by dum-dum bullets at a distance of 10 m.
The Norwegian killer Anders Behring Breivik, also a hunter and therefore having easy access to expansive or hollow point hunting ammunition, used this type of bullet to kill his victims