I was wondering if there was such a thing?

I remeber seeing in the movie "Jaws" on of the characters loaded the tip of hollow points with mercery.  Was it to poison the shark?

I am asking for educational purposes only.

I don't know if this has anything to do with what you are looking for, but the Afghanis used to call the Soviet 5.45MM round the "poison bullet" due to the severe wounds it produced.

I [b]believe[/b] that's mostly an urban legend, kind of like the ice bullets.

I have also heard such about the 5.45.

The KGB used a tiny pellet filled with rycin (spelling?) shot out of a airgun/umbrella to kill a guy in London in the 60's or 70's.

Don't all bullets deliver poison?

Kinetic energy poison.

Not that I've ever attempted such a thing, but I have heard discussion about stuffing a hollowpoint slug with nicotine sulfate, and some wax/hot glue to seal it.

This way, even an non-immediately fatal wound, such as an arm/leg hit would poison the target. It won't do alot to make the target stop in his tracks, as it were, but it would make sure that he is out of the picture permanently.

In a civilized society setting, of course, such things would be frowned upon, and get you jail time even for a justified shoot. Post- SHTF, it could be done.

One little glitch though.  A friendly fire incident, or if you were to accidentally shoot yourself, won't be so survivable if you poison the slugs. :(

LOL, I was going to say lead poisoning.

Read the same thing, can't remember the source, but I understand the british army cracked down on that hard.

Its "High Speed Lead Poisoning" -- get it right. [:D]

Actually, my Dad cut an X into a shotgun slug, and it did break up into 4 pieces in the deer he shot.  As for DumDum bullets, they were real.  The DumDum arsenal in the British colony of India near the turn of the century was producing expanding bullets, I think they were soft point configuration.  They were outlawed by the Hague Conventions of 1902(?).    

I have a vague recollection of a radical group shooting someone with a cyanide-tipped bullet.  This took place in California 15 or 20 years ago, about the same time Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army.  

I seem to remember the SLA shot a school board president, but my feeble mind does not recall anything else, and quick Google search was negative.    

I think in the 80's movie "The Exterminator" he used the old 'drill out the tip of the bullet and pour some mercury in then seal it' trick in a .44 magnum.  Worked okay on some little boy loving politician in the movie, sounds like a good idea for Micheal Jackson.

The bullet is subject to so much heat I would think there would be a tendency for many compounds to break down.  As an example, mercury would probably evaporate under the heat stress of firing, [b]I believe[/b] there would be little to nothing left of the mercury when it impacted.

True enough, though after Dumdum started with the soft tips, the next step was wicked-nasty hollowpoints which created HORRIFIC wounds.   I think that was MkII ammo, but I may be full of shit there.  Still, one wonders how much worse it could have been when compared to a .45 Boxer Henry solid lead slug. By WW1, the brits were using a FMJ, but one with a lightweight tip under the jacket.  It was normally jacketing material IIRC, but during supply shortages, they were known to use wood pulp.  Funny thing was, wood pulp was less cost effective, due to the cost (in time) of sterilizing the pulp.  Funny that they'd worry about the infection hazard!  If anyone's seriously interested, I maybe can dig up a source or two.

To add to the mercury tipped bullet myth, I always heard that mercury was placed inside the bullet and then when the bullet hit the target, the added inertia of the mercury would cause the front of the bullet to burst open.

I heard a while ago on a histor chanel special about spys that the KGB assasinated a few people with HP bullets that had the HP filled with cynide(SP?).

There were a few spies killed in Berlin using pellets filled with ricin.  Apparently the poison would go unnoticed unless specifically tested for, and the pellets were meant to dissolve, but one of the targets realized he had been popped, reported it, and they checked (after he died). There's a lot of good data on that and a few other poison-related assasinations in "A Higher Form of Killing", author unknown, a book on CBW primarily concerned with the UK's programs at Porton Down. Good read all around, lots of good info.

I've seen that report on the spies killed, they used a small metal pellet filled with ricin, the pellet was hollow and held a very small amount, but it doesn't take much ricin.  The ricin in the pellet dissolved but the pellet itself is intact, they used an umbrella to fire the pellet, nasty business.

As previously stated the ricin doesn't show up in a normal autopsy, they have to test for it specifically.

Here's the story:

[url]http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/europe/01/07/terror.poison.bulgarian/[/url]

Seems to me a poison 22LR bullet would be perfect for clandestine operations for the military.   It would have a long range, and could kill even with a flesh wound.  It is my understanding that a 22LR can be easily silenced.

Seems to me a Ruger 10/22 with a silencer, poison bullets, and long range scope would be an ideal sniper rifle.  The trooper could carry 10x more ammo have a lighter rifle.

I wonder if you used poison bullets, if you could poison yourself while cleaning the rifle.

Again all this is pure speculation and only for conversation.

Between the lead exposure, and some of the solvents out there, you can poison yourself without using poison bullets.

The idea of putting mercery was not to poison but the mercury would cause a small explosion on impact.

Yep. I believe it is called fulminative mercury or something like that.

Fulmanate is a different thing. The idea is that when you seal mercury in the nose of a projectile, the force of impact would cause the round to catastrophically fragment. Since mercury is a dense liquid and cannot be compressed any further than the current state it's in, and the lead can, theoretically it would be forced rearward into the lead, causing the projectile to break apart.
(mercury has no "give" to it, so the round must take the beating)
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Even my wife has an AR [X]

When I was a kid I would put Drain-o in my pellets (pellet gun).  If it would not kill the bird or squrel then the Drain-o would.  

The poison .22 dosent work too well. Remember that a$$h*le Hinkley? He shot Ronnie with a winchester/exterminator I believe. To the best of my recollection it was a factory produced .22lr with arsenic in it for killing rodents/varmints.

He used a Devestator explosive bullet that didn't, not a poison bullet that wasn't.

ok,ok. I stand corrected.......hinckley is still an a$$h*le though.[nana]

Funny this came up.  I was thinking about a murcury filled bullet just the other night, and it occured to me that you'd need a significant amount of mercury to do any kinetic damage, so the majority of the inside of the bullet casing would have to be the fluid metal.  

This is where you'd have problems.


First, rifle bullets spin at extremely high RPM's... some minor math shows that a 1:12 twist barrel shooting a bullet at 3000 feet per second gives you about 180,000 RPM, and if you went to a faster twist barrel and a faster round, like a newer 1:7 twist 20" AR shooting 55 grain ammo to about 3200 fps, you get RPM's up to 329,000!   The centrifugal forces at work are massive, and unlike solid metals that have stronger molecular bonds to resist this force, mercury would simply flow to the weakest point of the jacket and rupture it, essentially vaporizing the whole round shortly after it left the barrel.  


Secondly, and this is dependent on overcoming the first problem, since mercury acts like a fluid, it would resist the continued spin of the bullet once it left the barrel, causing  rapid destablization and erratic flight.


The only solutions to these problems I could come up with off the top of my head would be to make a very hard steel bullet casing (which would play hell on your barrel!), and you'd also have to put a segmented baffle in the mercury, so that instead of itself rotating, it would revolve around the axis of the bullets spin.  This would have to be a pretty big bullet, and I can't imagine this would be very cost effective.

Mercury amalgamates with lead.  You would have a very brittle bullet which would frag like a sumbitch.

Side note, anyone know where ricin comes from???
Ricinus Communis...........common name - Castor Bean plant.  Castor Oil is an EXTREMELY EXTREMELY toxic substance.   UNTIL you cook it.  The poison is heat labile.  That means heat breaks it down.  

I always knew I didn't want anything to do with Castor oil.

Doc

Castor Oil is [b]not[/b] toxic, heated or unheated.  The oil is obtained by pressing the beans.  Ricin is left behind in the fibrous residue.  See U.S. Patent 3,060,165.
 

Ricin is an alumin or protein toxin that is not soluble in the oil extracted from the castor bean.  It must be solvent extracted from the ground, de-oiled bean pulp as described in the patent referenced above.  What makes ricin so effective is that it doesn't take much to be lethal because its effects are catalytic in nature.  

Cyanide (either an alkali metal salt or hydrogen cyanide - AKA prussic acid) is a lethat poison that works quickly, but a would be bullet poisoner would need a significant quantity of it in the bullet to be worthwhile.  

Bullets containing mercury do not cause mercury poisoning.  Mercury metal, contrary to popular belief, is not toxic if ingested "so they say."
Its detrimental effects to humans come with cumulative doses from inhaling mercury fumes (it has a very high vapor pressure).

The purpose of loading a handgun bullet with mercury was correctly noted above, to increase the expansive effect of the round, but accuracy would suffer.  

Some good rounds are the Glaser Safety Slug and Mag Safe round, which are copper jackets containing lead shot.  The jacket fragments on impact and disperses the shot.

It should be pointed out that the use of home-made rounds containing poisons, explosives or other exotic additives for self defense would be frowned upon during the criminal trial.  If the purpose is one-shot fast takedown, a "poison" bullet would not be desireable, as anything that would work fast enough to be effective on the target would be vaporized on impact and perhaps even rendered aerosol where you could be exposed to it.  It would have to be something really nasty, an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor like Sarin or Tabun.  The danger factor for merely manufacturing such a round would be astonishing.  The time and expense equally astonishing, and no doubt better spent practicing.  The deadliest bullet, as we all know, is the one that hits the target in the proper area.  

"Poisin Bullets" are a ridiculous idea. The whole purpose of using that crazy umbrella gun (which used compressed air, IIRC) was to be extremely quiet and not let anybody notice. They popped some guy in the leg with the little dart, and the ricin killed him.

If you are going to SHOOT someone with a GUN, you do it in such a way that the copper-plated lead rock you are hurling at them at speeds in excess of that of sound hits them in a place likely to kill them. Even using suppressed subsonics, poison is a useless extra hazard to the shooter.

For the silenced poison .22LR, why not just take a suppressed .223 or other cartridge? Instead of compensating for poor aim by poisoning the guy, shoot him in the face or the heart.

The "ice bullet," while a myth, is similarly useless. The purpose is apparently to avoid tracing the round to the weapon. So if you are some KGB assassin, WHO CARES if they know the guy got shot with a .308 or 7.62x54R? Just use all your crazy spy fieldcraft zaniness and destroy the barrel of the gun or the gun in its entirety!

Anyway, that's my rant for today.

~AbM

Nah, the murcury would be forced FORWARD much like your head in a car accident.   The car stops, you tend to stay in motion, ergo: your head whips forward.   Same thing with the murcury.   The bullet is the car, the murcury is your head, when it slows down from hitting a body/ anything denser than air, the murcury will slam forward, disrupting the FRONT of the bullet.   unless the murcury was placed in the rear of the bullet, then it would disrupt the whole bullet, i guess.  but i thought we were talking about murcury being placed in the hollowpoint.

but i think murcury would amalgamate like someone said above, and just leave you with some very brittle lead alloy

Hence, "Mad as a Hatter" because hat makers used to use mercury to shape felt hats but did nothing to protect themselves. Long term mercury exposure causes severe mental problems.

Sorry had to get my trivia on.

~AbM

The Mythbusters on the discovery channel tested the Ice bullet and the Meat bullet. The Ice bullet was fake and didnt surive the mold. I figured it would melt in the gun. The meat bullet worked but it was only strong enough to break the skin and stick. When a normal round was fired much more damage was sustained.

The SLA assasinated an Oakland, CA school official with 380 pistols back in the 1970s (before the kidnapped Patty Hearst).  The bullets had been drilled & stuffed with rat poisen - not sure the poison matter.

Lead poisoning?

Hoppy