Cartridge Families (1) - Large .3xx / 9mm
Kim du Toit
May 20, 2006
8:05 AM CDT
Some time ago, a Reader asked whether I had taken any pics which compare the various rifle cartridges, because sometimes it’s difficult to imagine their relative sizes. I pointed him to Frank Barnes’s Cartridges of the World, but while that shows the cartridges, they’re not to scale.
Well, I’d already asked my Readers to send in cartridges for me to incorporate into the GGP section—allied, of course, to gun pics. So now I have all these cartridges, and I thought that I could now accede to the original request.
I’ll do the pics grouped more or less by a combination of “family”, power and (more commonly) bullet diameter.
The first one I’ve called the “Large .3XX / 9mm” Family. Here they are:
In this and all future pics, I’ll have a .22 LR cartridge on the left, because that’s the most common cartridge in circulation and everyone knows its size.
I don’t recall ever firing any of the old 9mm cartridges, although I may have, back in the Kaiser’s day. But I’ve fired all the others, and of all, my favorite is the venerable .375 H&H Magnum. Just about every large animal, including elephant, can be taken with this outstanding old cartridge, which was first put into circulation in 1912.
To this day, when this cartridge enters the discussion, the knowledgeable big-game hunters will just nod and say, “Good cartridge.”
That’s not to say the others are lousy—anything but. And I have to say that the mighty .30-378 Weatherby Mag is probably one of the most accurate cartridges I’ve ever seen. At BoomerShoot I’ve seen a guy use this monster to take twelve boomers with thirteen trigger pulls, at 800 yards. But beware if you don’t have a rifle with a serious recoil pad—something which can be said for all the large cartridges in this picture.
They’re all boomers.
Gratuitous Gun Pics
