Do mercury-filled/loaded bullets exist?

[garyoak99]

I watched a French movie about two warring police chiefs and a band of armed robbers. After the robbery a detective said one of them was killed by a mercury bullet.

 

I looked up a few sites; one said they don't work and that they are the creation of novels, movies and TV shows; the other said that mercury-loaded bullets not only exist but they are the work of professional assassins.

 

Mercury-filled/loaded bullets; fact or fiction?

[Shibathedog]

Yes I did try this about twenty years ago using.22LR hollow points as the

vehicle. It does not work. After injecting the mercury into the cavity, I

don't recall if I enlarged the cavity or not, I placed a dab of epoxy over

the nose. The following morning after the epoxy should have cured I found

I had one of the prettiest silver, not lead-colored, bullets and the epoxy

had receded into the cavity. Since that time I found out about "amalgams":

alloys of mercury with other metals.

 

Mercury goes into solution with a number of metals at room temperature, lead

being one of them along with silver, tin, copper, zinc, aluminum, and a host

of other metals. This is the reason you can use mercury to dissolve any leading

in your barrels. For the record any of you with fillings in your teeth are in

all probability walking around with silver-tin amalgams in your mouth. The

reason these are safe is that they are mixed up in precise proportions and all

of the mercury is bound or is supposed to be anyhow. There has been some

concern in the biomedical arena that some of the mercury may leach out.

 

Back to the issue, the reason the bullet surface was a bright silvery color

was that the mercury had migrated along the free surface of the cavity and

reacted with the fresh lead along the way. I guarantee that if you put mercury

in a hollw cavity in a lead bullet without first coating the lead you will

wind up with a fairly brittle homogenous bullet that will not "explode" or even

"splash" upon contact. It will instead fracture. I am assuming here that the

hollow cavity is of conventional size in relation to the bullet. What the

result would be like with a large cavity and a smal amount of lead I cannot

say.

 

Geoff Kotzar            gmk@falstaff.mae.cwru.edu

[garyoak99]

Yep, that was the article I read that said they didn't work! Does anyone have any other articles concerning mercury-filled/loaded bullets?