What could Hornady possible gain from selling a person a bullet that will fail?
They have bullets for everything from varmints to dangerous game. Animals are not getting any tougher and cup and core bullets have been killing the lot of them for many many years. One of the most trusted is the InterLock. The SST is basically an InterLock with a plastic tip. Having driven both long ways through big Whitetails, I find their performance near identical.
If you remove the shoulder, legs and skin from a Whitetail or Elk we are looking at less than a foot for a through and though. A quality LR 22 can and will kill them stone dead if they travel through heart and/or lungs.
Having said all that, if you want a stouter bullet by all means buy an InterBond ELD-X or GMX. They are every bit as accurate and will retain weight and penetrate even better. Unlike the trailer salesman that wanted to up his sale by getting you into more trailer than you need, Hornady will be every bit as happy with you purchasing one of their other bullets, probably more so as they are more expensive.
I know people like to prepare for the worse case scenario but one should consider the best bullet for what they are trying to accomplish. I shoot animals in the chest. If I don't have a shot, I wait until I do or pass completely. Once into the chest cavity an SST absolutely sickens the animal and DRT is the end result with no more than some rib meat gone.
The results I have witnessed from the so called "premium bullets" is lots of tracking if the shoulder or spine isn't hit. I'm too old to be tracking an animal for a mile and much too old to be dragging him out an extra mile.
It seems to me that most people that did not appreciate the performance of the SST had pulled them from a dead animal or else are just speculating from something they read. I have yet to hear anyone say that they made a good shot and the animal ran off like nothing happened when using SST. Surely if these are "gernading" on impact like people are claiming more would be written of these failures and/or Hornady would improve the design. They do seem to know a thing or two about bullets.
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