Advice on grizzly bear gun?

[EnochGale]

Red Label, you need to practice some dynamic situations if you think you are going to empty a magazine into someone's head when everyone is moving and fighting.

No way.

[Don S]

I personally don't think any handgun is a good choice for large bears, at least in terms of
stopping power.

I don't completely reject them though, because as has been pointed out they can be more
practical to carry in some limited situations.
With that said though, you are just kidding yourself if you think any non- magnum handgun
is going to make you safer. A .45 acp (and I own several) is NOT a bear gun and probably
will just piss a bear off enough to finish you off instead of mauling you into submission and
moving on.

The bear that got me was shot twice with a .300 mag w/ 180 grain Barnes X's. It was still
alive a week later when it attacked some people loading deer into a skiff on a beach near
there.
Almost exactly a year later another deer hunter was mauled to death in almost precisely the
same spot I was mauled, and given the odds, most likely by the same bear - he managed to
shoot it twice with a .270 before it killed him. It's still out there presumably.

The last bear I saw killed was hit 5 times with a .375 before it expired. The first was a
heart/lung shot that did nothing, the second shot took out it's shoulders and broke it down,
but it took 3 more insurance shots to shut it up and kill it.

This is what you're up against. A .44 mag or .45 Colt with HEAVY cast bullets MIGHT stop a
bear with a perfect brain shot. Anything else is ... you're kidding yourself.

I'll tell you all one other thing I learned underneath that bear. When a bear gets you down,
it's not like high school wrestling, it's more like a dog shaking a rat to death - and that is
NOT an exaggeration. You MIGHT get a handgun out and use it, but if it's a thumbcocker or
has some kind of safety to manipulate, it ain't happening! A mauling is too violent for any of
that. The .454 Casull disappeared from my wish list after the mauling.
If you decide to carry a handgun, get a short barreled double action .44 magnum (or .45
Colt). That advice comes from someone who has been there, so take it or leave it.

I'm sticking with a Marlin Guide Gun and pepper spray. If a "deal" on the right handgun comes
along I'll consider it, but the handgun will likely stay at home 99% of the time.

The stories you relate suggest that hits with high powered rifles don't work well if they are not properly placed. No flame intended, but that is well known.

The .45 ACP actually penetrates soft tissue pretty damn well, when using 230 ball ammo. Not that I'd recommend it as a good choice, but it can actually outpenetrait .44 Mag/240 grain lead loads. So a .45 ACP likely could work.

What one has to understand is that you need sufficient penetration along with proper placement. If either of those two things aren't there, you can forget it, no matter how much your belted magnum kicks.

In bear country, I damn well want a handgun (as well as something like a .45-70 or .450 Guide Gun). My first choice would be a Bowen in .500 with a 4 or 5 inch barrel. Something easy to carry, fast into action, and that makes a large diameter hole very, very deep. And no matter how good my set up is, it won't do me any good if I don't use it well.

[Red Label]

EnochGale - your reputation precedes you. I've been here a week or so, and I am not surprised by your post. Anyways... You are correct about any self-defense situation being anything but a motionless, sterile vacuum. My point was actually that THE ABILITY TO PLACE ACCURATE SHOTS is probably (in my opinion) THE most important factor in this, once one has selected a caliber fit for the job. And that's the question that this thread has been dealing with -- what caliber is best for the job, considering my criteria? I figure that unless I do some serious preparation, in the short time it will take a grizzly to charge me and knock me down -- I won't even know what the hell is going on. I am not now prepared for such an event. But I intend to do what I can to be so. The same goes for an encounter with a dangerous human. I have a long ways to go. But I don't care whether someone shoots a .44 mag or a .22 short, if they can't place accurate shots (under pressure) than it won't matter what caliber they selected unless they are using a sawed-off 12 gauge with 00.

Don S. -- I thank you for the different opinion. I think that there are so many factors in a situation like this that get forgotten in favor of the "bigger is better" philosophy. My trip to the range yesterday put things in better prospective for me when I watched my friend's wife miss target after target entirely with his new Glock .45 ACP, but nail it everytime with my S&W .22 LR. I came away realizing that if she were to have to protect herself right now -- the lowly .22 would be the only way to go. It's bad enough to be afraid of the target, without being afraid of the weapon also.

All of this has resolved me totally to use a firearm only as a backup against a griz. Pepper spray is more likely to save the day...

[Red Label]

Just got back from a local dealer. Didn't get a .44 mag, didn't get a .41 mag, didn't get a 45/70, and didn't get a .454. But I DID get a Winchester 1300 Defender and a couple boxes of 3" magnum 00 and rifled slugs. Also got several big (and cheap) boxes of 6 shot to practice with.

Had to choose between the Remington 870 Home Defender and the Winchester. Tough choice indeed. Love the 870 series. Had the Wingmaster when I was a kid and it was my favorite gun ever. Better looking gun for sure, and it is THE standard in pump shotguns. But went with the 1300 because it had a longer shell magazine, wich allows 2 more shells I believe, a fiber optic sight, and strap studs built in. Same price ($270), so the features of the Winchester won me out. May eventually also get the 870 if I'm feeling like a nut...

So to put this thread to rest, I DID select an appropriate caliber in the end. Nothing bigger than a 12 ga. slug. Won't be takin it to the top of any peaks, so the pepper spray will have to do on those trips...

[Bill357]

My question is which gun to buy:

1) S&W Mountain Gun in 44 mag, 4" barrel

or

2) S&W Classis 629 44 mag, 5" barrel

I would like to get some options on this, I am leaning towards the Classic with the 5" barrel. I don't think
that one inch will matter that much and it is only marginally heaver. The 5" Classic will recoil alittle less too making it easier to shoot. What do you think?

Thanks.

[handgun357]

I heard the "Raging Bull" is coming out in .480cal.
That might be a little "stopping power".
I wonder how the recoil is.

[J. Parker]

BillMD; If you're not a cranola crunchin' backpacker who hikes for miles and miles I think the S&W 629 5" would be alot more enjoyable to shoot over the long haul. All the comments on the 629 Classic that I've heard have been nothing but positive. Not as punishing during recoil, a little bit better sight radius, and possibly points better because of the heavier barrel. I've got a S&W 657 41 magnum with a 6" barrel and I thought about having the barrel cut down to 4" but I've decided to leave it the way it is. The S&W 629 Mountain Gun has the advantage weight wise but if that's not a factor for you I'd go with the Classic. Just my thoughts, J. Parker

[Keith Rogan]

Don,

Yes of course shot placement is everything but you're thinking in terms of a heart/lung shot which in this case will fail utterly. Also, I believe that the standard "ball" ammo, no matter how heavy, is a poor design for this work - more on that in a moment.
By definition, a bear attack happens when the animal is already adrenalized and focused on killing you. A chest shot may kill the animal an hour later but that will do you little good. If a handgun is a relatively poor "stopper" on a 150 pound human, how effective can it be on a 500 or even a 1500 pound bear? If you want to stop him, you'd better make mush of his brain.
When I recommend a .44 I always add the caveat "with heavy cast flat nosed bullets" - ie: 300 or 325 grain semi wadcutter or truncated cone designs. The reason for that is that this style with it's sharp edges will cut through bone much better than any ball or hollowpoint which will often be deflected on a frontal head shot.
ANY centerfire can take out a bear with a perfect shot straight through the nose - there are some pictures of bear skulls on my page which illustrate this. The nasal passages are an area with only thin sheets of bone. But if you think about it, how often are you going get that perfect shot on a charging bear?
I don't think most bullet designs will reliably penetrate the heavier bone around the skull in a glancing shot. Look at the picture on the page and think about the amount of bone that round nosed fmj is going to have to penetrate with a glancing shot along the jaw or the edge of the nose.
Perhaps someone more astute than I can paste those two photo's into the thread here?

And I don't mean to shortchange other heavy calibers - I guess anything from a .41 mag on up would probably serve if you use the heaviest bullets of the correct design. I don't trust the bullet weights in lighter calibers like a .357, though it may serve on smaller bears.

The thing about the double action is that once he gets you down you'll never get a shot off with anything requiring you thumbcock it or flip a thumb safety. The big bears literally pick you up in their jaws and shake you. They throw you down and jump on you with their front paws to crush you, they grab your head and toss you around to break you neck or pop your skull. This is not a time to be fooling with a gun that has any complexities at all.

I'm not a big fan of the Raging Bull because it's just too freaking heavy for my tastes - a cinder block feels about as natural in my hand as that behemoth. But that's me, I'm 5'8" with small hands. Whatever gun that handles well in your hands is the right gun, if a handgun is ever the right gun.

[CoyDog]

Red Label: Don't mean to prolong this thread any more (it's like the Energizer Bunny!), but I wanted to pass on something about shotgun slugs I recently discovered.

Winchester has come out with a new Supreme Sabot Slug that fires a 385 grain Partition Gold bullet at 1900 fps (advertised). This translates to 3000 foot pounds, and that's a tremendous whallop from a shotgun slug.

The Partition Gold is based on the Nosler Partition bullet, but it has the addition of a steel cap over the back section to enhance penetration.

I just got back from a range test with my Benelli. These slugs kick like a pissed-off mule, but accuracy was decent, even with a cylinder bore. I'd bet a rifled choke tube would help.

I did some penetration tests into a cardboard box tightly packed with gun magazines and they penetrated 5" (standard rifled slugs barely penetrated 2" and flattened out). The rear section of the Partition bullet was intact and scarcely deformed on all shots fired. The round also knocked the entire box backwards two feet on impact. I think I've just found my 12 gauge bear load.
Good Shooting,
CoyDog

[Keith Rogan]

>>>>>>I did some penetration tests into a cardboard box tightly packed with gun magazines and they penetrated 5" (standard rifled slugs barely penetrated 2" and flattened out). <<<<<<

That's a TERRIBLE thing to do a gun magazine! We should all contact HCI and PETA through their websites to collect pamphlets to use for penetration tests.

[Red Label]

I will have to check into those slugs CoyDog. Thanks for the tip! Haven't shot a 12 ga. since I was a teen. Looking forward to this weekend. Will start out with the cheap 2 3/4 skeet loads and end it with the 3" slugs, if my shoulder doesn't give in first. Would have gone today, but it was snowing and very cold. Gettin too old (at the ripe old age of 33) to have much fun when I can't feel my fingers...

Keith -- I prefer to shoot old TV's tuned into the Rosie O'Donnel show! LOL...

[www.topglock.com]

As a previous post said, I would advocate a Glock 20 in 10mm. 15 rounds of powerfull 10mm ammunition. Light weight and easy to carry.

[Keith Rogan]

Will a Glock feed heavy flat-nosed bullets? Does anyone even sell such loads? If you're shooting ball ammo with a rounded nose, I doubt it will go through the 3 to 5" of bone necessary on many head shots - round nosed FMJ bullets will simply deflect.
This is as much about bullet style as it is about weight or velocity.

[BB]

Cor-Bon makes a 200gr FP 1200FPS 10mm. Still, that ain't my idea of a bear gun, and semiautos are too finiky IMO. If you have contact with the bear, the slide could be pushed back out of battery and your done. Dan Wesson .445 Supermag with 4" barrel is more my idea of a bear gun.

[Don S]

Keith,

Actually, I was thinking of central nervious system hits. Brain or spinal column.

You are correct about round nose ball ammo. It penetrates well but tends to glance off of skulls. Several flat nose 230 FMJ .452 slugs have been marketed (by Nosler and Hornady, I believe). These should do better than ball but can still glance off at a bad angle. There was also a bullet specifically designed to not glance off a skull, and I believe it was later marketed as a "pin gripper" to the pin shooting crowd. Roundnose ammo tends to glance off of human skulls, as well.

Large, flat nose .45s weighing 240 to 250 grains can be launched in a .45 ACP. They may or may not be reliable in a given pistol.


On actions:

It seems to me if you can still use your hand to pull a trigger, you probably can use your thumb to cock the piece or disengage a manual safety. Of course, it better be second nature for you to do this.

[MADISON]

In the late 80's to early 90's someone was trying to sell a signle action, 5 shot 45-70 to citizens in ALASKA. The revolver was for brown bear attacks. If you could control the gun, it should stop a bear.

[Keith Rogan]

>>>>>>It seems to me if you can still use your hand to pull a trigger, you probably can use your thumb to cock the piece or disengage a manual safety. Of course, it better be second nature for you to do this. <<<<<<

If you think you can cock a gun when an 800 pound bear is shaking you like a dog with a rat, then have at it! I can only tell you what I experienced, and relate that I don't think it would have been possible. I'm not sure I could have even hung onto a handgun, much less cocked and fired it.
The only point I might have gotten a shot off was in the first few seconds when she had me on my back shaking me around by the knee. I recall taking a couple of ineffectual swings at her nose with my fist and she swiped sideways with her claws and tore the muscle out my hand below the thumb. I don't know if I could have gotten a holstered gun out at that point, or even if it would have still been in the holster considering how I was being tossed around. I mean, the alders for 6 or 8 feet around were all broken down - from me being swung through them!

There are no "pauses" in a grizzly attack, the animal is all over you faster than you can imagine, it's using both front paws to rake and pound you, it's biting you and shaking you with it's teeth (actually picking you up and SHAKING you) and even jumping on you with its full weight to squash you - and all of this is lightning fast - like a cat, much faster than I ever imagined a big "lumbering" bear could move.

Bottom line is that I still go out in the bush and I REALLY don't worry too much about bears. I just give them more room than I used to, I avoid tight quarters and heavy brush. I always have some pepper spray. The trick with bears is to avoid the encounter in the first place, or to defuse it with spray. Don't surprise them or let them surprise you.
A handgun is the weapon of absolute last resort. Given a choice between the finest Hamilton Bowen "Super Whazzit" or a $39 can of pepper spray, I'll take the spray every time. At least if I have an opportunity to use the spray, the odds are that the bear will retreat. A handgun may just make them angry and even more aggressive - it's unlikely to kill them unless you are damned lucky.

[Don S]

Keith,

I checked out your bear site, and it was interesting. One thing of interest was the result that less powerful handguns can penetraite the bear skull.

I know of two cases where people used .44 magnum revolvers to defend themselves from big bears. One was in the American Rifleman. A bird hunter was blind-sided by a Griz, and ended the attack with his revolver while the bear was mauling him. The other was reported in National Geographic. An artic explorier stopped a Polar bear attack with two shots from a 4 inch model 29 (I believe he shot center chest). Perhaps a revolver wouldn't have worked in your case. Sometimes, nothing works at all. Did you see the bear coming, or did it blind-side you?

Sure, a handgun might make a bear mad. So might pepper spray. The handgun can work farther away. And if I was being mauled, I'd rather be reaching for a handgun than pepper spray. A .44 through the brain will stop anything. The spray only irritates. That said, I'd carry the spray as a less lethal alternative.

Last night on the Discovery Channel, several shows on bear attacks were replayed. Black bears and Polar bears were covered in seperate shows (another show covers Brown bears, but if they played it last night I missed it). They interviewed an Inuit man who was attacked on two seperate occasions. In the first, he got lucky and was able to push over the bear. In the second, he wasn't as lucky, lost an eye and suffered horrible injuries. In all of the Polar attacks, it appeared that a gun would have been very useful--that there would have been time to employ one had one been at hand.

[CoyDog]

Hello Keith: I hope I wasn't being sacreligious by shooting up the gun magazines. I was trying to give them a natural demise. After reading them from cover to cover, using them for penetration fodder seemed better them throwing them in the trash.

I doubt that PETA or HCI brochures would even stop a bullet. Just not enough substance there.

Seriously, I appreciate your web site and your willingness to share your bear experience for the benefit of us who haven't been attacked. I tend to agree with your statements on caliber and bullet type.

As for the pepper spray, do you have any concerns about the danger of self-administration? It's awfully windy where I hunt in Wyoming, and I don't feel very good about having to check wind direction with an attack in progress. I keep thinking that the only thing worse than being mauled by a bear would be getting mauled while blinded and gasping for breath from a dose of cayenne.
Good Shooting, CoyDog

[Red Label]

Good one CoyDog! I often think about that too! I've heard that the bear stuff is waaaaay more potent than the human stuff. And I know that the human stuff that some LEO's and miltary organizations administer to themselves to find-out what it's like, really does the job. So I'd HATE to be just tryin to stay alive from the pepper spray dose, while the bear was maulin me good. I guess that's where the jokes about it flavoring the bear's food come from. If it's windy on the day I'm out and have a run in, I'm thinkin that the sprayin I should be doin is from my 12 gauge...

[handgun357]

Keith Rogan,
Thanks for the bear-attack insight.
I would rather have a double action revolver also.
I hope what you've posted gives someone the neccesary info to help themselves should they ever experience a bear-attack.
Happy Hunting.............

[Keith Rogan]

A couple of replies to various comments:

With pepper spray, there are times to use it and times not to. Obviously, if you've got a wind in your face you can't use it. If it's a full out attack (The animal is running at you and CLOSE), a firearm may be the better choice (if you have one). All of these decisions are going to have to be made by YOU, and instantly.
Every encounter is going to be unique and there's no magic formula.
90% of close range (negative) encounters will have the bear either do nothing (stand and stare at you) or go into a "threat display" where he'll puff up and click his teeth, pound the ground with his paws, etc. This is a very GOOD time to use pepper spray, and a very BAD time to shoot.
If you do nothing (stand your ground, yell), he'll PROBABLY retreat. If you squirt him with pepper spray, he'll almost certainly retreat. If you shoot him and don't kill him, he'll either attack or retreat.
This is the most common type of negative bear encounter you'll have and in my view, the most dangerous of the 3 responses above is to shoot.
And of course, the 4th possible response - running away - is almost certain to result in a mauling due to setting off the "prey-predator" response.

I have been as close as 6 feet from a large brown bear, with a half butchered deer in between us, and walked (edged) away safely. If I'd have jerked a handgun, I'd probably be dead.

Now, I can give you all kinds of anecdotal information about this guy or that guy who drew his revolver and "kilt a grizzly bar". Some of these are even true.
But I can also relate stories about what's left of humans being found next to their emptied handguns while a dead bear is found nearby, neatly perforated half a dozen times. I know of many more personal encounters where even a relatively heavy rifle didn't do much good!
You CAN instantly kill a bear with a handgun if you get a good shot in the center of it's face (the nose). If you're off by an inch or two... there's a lot of bone to get through before that bullet reaches the brain. A chest shot, well, in most cases that takes a long time to kill an animal like that.

I'll leave this with just one analogy, and then it's time to let it go. Grizzly (brown) bears go up to 1500 pounds, but even a mountain grizzly can tip the scales at better than 600 pounds - somewhere between 3 and 10 times the mass of a human, and an enormously strong and muscular human at that.
There are probably variables here that don't quite compute, but in essence a .44 against an animal like that equates to something less than a .22 against a normal sized human. You can certainly kill an attacking human with a .22 (been done plenty of times), but it ISN'T the best choice.

Literally hundreds of brown/grizzly bears have been successfully hunted with a .44 or .454 (or what have you), but what the writer leaves out is that a guide is always standing there with a .375 and in many, if not most of those cases, it is the guide who ends up putting the bear down. And of course, sniping an unaware bear through the shoulder socket and then perforating his lungs and heart four or five times is a far different thing than taking a frontal shot at an angry, adrenalized bear charging you at a range of 5 or 10 feet.
If you ever come to Alaska and get the opportunity, buy a bear guide a couple of drinks and listen - you'll likely learn a few things about some of these stalwart gun writers that will give you pause when they recommend some of the things that they do.

[Keith Rogan]

I rereading this, I MUST say some other things - to sort of balance the tone of this thread.

The most memorable times I've had in the back country have been just sitting back and observing bears. They can be amazingly "human" in what they do. You can tell when a bear is tired, or pissed off, or in a good mood. They are fun to be around and largely, only dangerous in the way that a city bus is dangerous - you don't step in front of a bus or a bear.

A dozen or so years ago, not long after I first came to Kodiak, I found myself sitting on hillside on a hot August afternoon. It was likely opening day of deer season (1 August) or thereabouts. Anyway, it was a hot, still day and I was waiting for evening and hoping deer would move through the big ravine below me. A cloud of those little "no see um" gnats was hovering around my face and I kept alternating between lying back and snoozing with my hat over my face and sitting up waving the bugs away from my face.
At some point, I saw movement opposite me on the far side of the ravine - maybe two hundred yards away. I picked up my binocs and was startled to see a really enormous male Kodiak bear sitting just below the crest at about the same level I was. When I say "sitting", I mean "sitting", just like I was with his back legs stretched below him on the steep slope and his hands, er front paws, in his lap.
I watched him for an hour or more as he yawned, brushed gnats away from his face, lay back in the sun and drowsed - did everything I had been doing for the previous hour. At one point, he reached down to his crotch and scratched away in exactly the same way a human would (when the wife ain't around).
I was close enough to watch the expression on his face change from annoyance at the bugs, to a vacant stare as he got drowsy and lay back for a snooze, and occasional interest at the movement of birds or salmon splashing in the stream at the bottom of the ravine below us.
It was really a weird and uncanny thing to watch - you could see that this was a "thinking" animal, like a wolf or a dog, rather than a deer or whatever, but his actions and mannerisms were just like a big lazy human - like any one of us sitting in front of the tv watching a dull ball game, one Budweiser over the line.

It was the first time I'd ever been able to observe a bear at close range for any length of time. I was mesmerized and I remember every detail of that encounter, and treasure it.

This is what bear encounters ought to be - and what they usually are if you allow them to be. You don't need to fear bears, just give them respect and distance. They are not predators in the same way that a tiger can be (though, it does rarely happen).
I have no issue with anyone hunting bears, and I've done so myself.
But I don't want to help foster any sort of thinking where an armed response is considered normal and appropriate when encountering bears - that is rarely the case!
I live in the midst of the richest bear habitat on earth - 1 grizzly bear per square mile here! In the summer and fall I encounter them all the time and have done so for many years. Yet, only a handfull of those hundreds of encounters was in any way "negative", and all of those were my fault for allowing myself to get too close or for being inattentive.
But even in those cases, the bears generally made their disapproval known and just walked away... except for that one time...

The lesson I'm trying to get out is to be prepared. Read up on bear habits so you know where bears are at various times of the year in your area - know what they eat, and when those things are coming in, and where those things are so you can avoid those places. Study up on the body language of bears so you can "read" them when you do encounter them - there's a lot of that on my website, and it is far more valuable info than the firearms stuff. There's a number of books out that will give you a thorough understanding of these things.

Respect rather than fear. Knowledge rather than ballistics.

Sermon over.






[Edited by Keith Rogan on 02-16-2001 at 02:57 PM]

[Cosmoline]

One thing I've learned hiking in bear and moose country--LISTEN! Every time I've run across a bear, I've heard it long before I've seen it. That's why I don't wear those bells.

[4V50 Gary]

Sorry to spoil the fun but I still want a double barrel, 58 caliber Minie Ball shooting gun.