OK, I’m going to risk the wrath of the traditional bullet folks and talk about Extreme Shock. Yes, the advertising campaign is different. So is the ammo. Extreme Shock loads the projectile jacket with a compressed pellet of tungsten powder. The powder has been treated so it does not sinter-weld in the jacket and thus does not form a homogenous projectile. When it hits a target, the jacket breaks up and the tungsten powder pellet then creates a storm cloud of hundreds of small wound channels.

If you are firmly of the belief that the FBI 12-inch penetration protocol is not just correct but graven in stone, you’re probably sputtering at this point. To see what it was about, I

took a trip to Extreme Shock (extremeshockusa.com) and spent a day with Jeff Mullins and his crew. The plant is large (for a custom bullet/ammo maker) clean, well-lit and has modern loading machines as well as the testing instruments you would expect for a metal-working shop.

I also shot and watched shot a bunch of blocks of a waxy substance to see what happens. I later shot ballistic gel to test the various bullets, and not surprisingly the bullets perform as described.

But they do not work as we expect traditional bullets to, so I’m still trying to get a handle on the dynamics and physics of it. Extreme Shock controls the rate of bullet disintegration by changing a number of bullet features. Obviously, jacket thickness controls bullet breakup, as does velocity; thinner jackets and higher velocities are going to create faster/sooner breakup.

Also, some of the Extreme Shock bullets have plastic tips in them. The tip material controls the rate of breakup as well. A harder plastic is going to set back faster, compressing the tungsten and bursting the jacket sooner. A softer composition is going to delay breakup, and the plastic compresses more before transferring the load to the tungsten core and thus to the jacket.

Still, there are some matters of simple Newtonian physics that simply cannot be gotten around, which I confirmed in my own testing. First of all, for this approach to work you need velocity. Slow things down enough and you decrease or eliminate the effect of the cartridge design.

Yes, I managed to make the rounds fail. It was not easy, but I managed it. The solution was to take the slowest round of the toughest design and shoot it in a firearm that decreased velocity even more. You also have to decrease resistance. Wax, ballistic gel, water-soaked paper, all offer more resistance than plain old water. So I shot into water, trying to make the bullets fail.