Because of the great assortment of styles and weights of handgun bullets, a wide variety of handgun cartridges can be used effectively for hunting North American game.

If you've been hunting with a rifle and want to take up handgun hunting, a look at kinetic energy figures for your chosen handgun cartridge might give you pause. You might even wonder whether your handgun has the power necessary to get the job done.

This year, suppose that instead of using your favorite .30-06 elk rifle you decide to add a challenge to the hunt by going after one of the big boys with a .44 Magnum revolver. You know that people take elk with the .44 Magnum, but you're wondering how the stubby round stacks up with your .30-06, so you look at energy figures.

The Speer reloading manual reveals the .30-06 rifle produces 2670 foot-pounds (ft-lbs) of energy when firing a 165-grain bullet at 2700 fps. Turning to the .44 Magnum figures, you find that a 240-grain bullet going 1400 fps turns up only 1044 ft-lbs of energy--at the muzzle!

In some states to be legal for deer a rifle cartridge must turn up a minimum of 1000 ft-lbs of kinetic energy at 100 yards. Further, riflemen often consider 1500 ft-lbs of impact energy to be recommended for elk. So how can the .44 Magnum be considered at least adequate for elk when the .30-06 is considered not overly powerful?

I first got a hint to the answer to this question 30 years ago when I was testing bullets from .300 Winchester Magnum and .375 H&H Magnum rifles and a .44 Magnum revolver. While recovering bullets fired into wet newsprint I was surprised to find that hard-cast lead semiwadcutter bullets from the .44 Magnum penetrated deeper than the expanding rifle bullets. I mean, after all, a .375 H&H is considered to be adequate for bigger and tougher game than we even have in North America--and the little .44 Magnum revolver bullet out-penetrated it! I later found that even an expanding 240-grain bullet from a .44 Magnum would often shoot completely through a deer broadside.

Kinetic Energy Isn't Everything
Obviously, kinetic energy isn't everything, and there are other factors at work. A basic physics text tells us that kinetic energy is the energy of motion. Any object in motion has kinetic energy. Further, the kinetic energy of an object (bullet) is directly proportional to the square of its speed (velocity). For a twofold increase in speed, kinetic energy increases by a factor of four. For a threefold increase in speed, kinetic energy increases by a factor of nine and for a fourfold increase in speed, kinetic energy increases by a factor of 16. The basic formula for kinetic energy is KE equals 1/2 times mass times velocity squared, or KE=1/2 x MV2. Clearly, velocity is a more significant component of kinetic energy than is mass or bullet weight.

Another hint about the effectiveness of big bullets at low velocity came along about the same time that I was testing bullets in wet newsprint in the early 1970s. I was preparing for a deer and elk hunt with a .50-caliber Thompson/Center Hawken muzzleloader and was chronographing loads. I was a little discouraged by the low velocity turned up by a 370-grain T/C Maxi slug. It just did not compare with the velocity from my favorite .300 Winchester Magnum that I had used on so many elk. Muzzleloader sabots were not available back then.

I relayed my concern about the slow-moving slugs to John Wootters, the very knowledgeable gun writer. John told me that kinetic did not provide an accurate picture of the killing potential of large, slow-moving projectiles. He said that momentum was probably a better indicator in this class of projectiles.