They quote velocity figures ad nauseam and are constantly searching for lighter bullets and ways to drive them even faster. Who do you think buys all that moly coating?

Try quoting wind-drift and retained-energy figures to those guys, and their eyes glaze over.

"What do you mean my hypervelocity super magnum retains less energy and drifts farther in the wind than that slowpoke of yours?" they might ask.

And don't even try to talk to them about the importance of bullet design when hunting deer or big game. After all, they'll only counter with something like, "A bullet is a bullet." Don't bother arguing because, sadly, it will take a few lost animals and some hideous entrance wounds to make those guys see the light.

Lately, especially in African hunting circles, a lot of guys have gone too far the other way. Now a handful of bwanas in their khaki Daisy Duke shorts are trying to get us to shoot 350-grain slugs from our .375s and 200-grain--or even 220-grain--bullets from our .30-06s.

I understand why Africans like heavy bullets. Before the widespread availability of partitioned, bonded, and expanding mono-metal bullets, all too many professional hunters experienced monumental bullet failures that resulted in some pretty nasty maulings, stompings, and gorings by irate beasties unimpressed with the performance of those early cup-and-core projectiles.

Today's hunters are blessed with many great bullets from which to choose. Now you can actually get deeper penetration and better terminal performance with the right balance of bullet weight and velocity.

A recent safari in Namibia proved to my companions and me what I've thought all along: You need a certain amount of velocity to make bullets perform as their designers intended. Too much velocity, and bullets will open up too quickly and penetration will suffer. Drive a heavy bullet too slow, and it won't upset as much or penetrate as deeply as it should, which is what we saw in Namibia.

The first morning of the hunt, I climbed a granite kopje to glass for gemsbok or wildebeest, both of which we were tasked with culling from the property. A thousand yards off, a small herd of blue wildebeest fed. My professional hunter did a fantastic job of leading us through head-high brush to within 150 yards of the herd. I put the gun on the sticks, settled the reticle just behind the lead bull's shoulder, and touched the trigger. At the shot, the bull bolted.

We ran to where the bull had stood at the shot and started tracking. Though it was a very shallow quartering shot and the wildebeest was a youngish bull, the lack of blood told me there was no exit wound. Five hundred yards down the trail, we still hadn't found a drop, but we did see the bull standing in the shade of a tree. I shouldered my rifle and shot the bull neatly in the neck.

A postmortem revealed that my intentions were good and that the first 200-grain .30-06 bullet had hit exactly where I intended it to go; it just ran out of gas before it made it to the off shoulder. In fact, the bullet barely made it to the second lung, which is where we found the perfectly mushroomed slug. The heavy projectile had found its mark, but it didn't have enough oomph to drive through to the off shoulder.

That night, a fellow writer lamented losing a big gemsbok bull. He had shot it at about the same angle as I had shot my wildebeest, and once again, there was no exit wound. Without the carcass to examine, it's hard to say for sure if he hit it well, but I've hunted with him enough to know he usually hits where he aims. He called the shot good, so I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt based on my wildebeest experience.