Black Talon

[skateboarder74]

Is it legal to buy Black Talon ammo?
Is it legal to sell Black Talon ammo?
Is legal to owne Black Talon Ammo?

[BONECUTTER]

Yes
Yes
Yes

[CSDGuy]

Yes.
Yes.
and Yes.

Unless you're in a state that prohibits HP ammo...
Winchester SXT ammo is the newest/best version of this stuff.
Search online and you'll easily find this out.

[anothergunnut]

I don't know, black talon sure is a scarey name. I'll bet it is as dangerous as assault weapons. So dangerous, in fact, that it will go off without a person shooting the gun, or maybe not even a gun! I think we should ban it! I just hope if it gets banned nobody paints it pink and puts hello kitty stickers on it.

[Matt C]

Yes to all, and it's good stuff. Called Ranger "T" now. I prefer the bonded.

[skateboarder74]

Thanks you!

[bmg308]

They could have used Black Talon to shoot down that satelite

[Matt C]

where is the law on that.i've never seen it.i was under the impresion that the doctor people asked them not to becuase it was cutting them during surgery

BS, surgeons don't use fingers to bullets out...

[CSDGuy]

There is no law prohibiting "Black Talon" bullets in California, that I know of. Certainly not at the state level, anyway.

[Maddog5150]

BS, surgeons don't use fingers to bullets out...

I used to work with AMR and one night a crew was telling me how there was a doctor at the local hospital who liked to prod the gun shot wound with his gloved hand and stick his finger in the cavity to feel around. Really effing creepy but if this guy ever got or gets cut from a sharp edge... well stupid is as stupid does.

[Matt C]

I used to work with AMR and one night a crew was telling me how there was a doctor at the local hospital who liked to prod the gun shot wound with his gloved hand and stick his finger in the cavity to feel around. Really effing creepy but if this guy ever got or gets cut from a sharp edge... well stupid is as stupid does.

Well I guess never say never. I think that's pretty unusual though.

[CSDGuy]

Well I guess never say never. I think that's pretty unusual though.

Actually, it's not that unusual. Exploring a wound track with a finger is not all that unusual. Mostly they do it to determine if there is a penetration into a body cavity. I'm also a Paramedic. Haven't worked as one for a couple years, but I'm still somewhat active with some trauma discussion groups.

[CSDGuy]

then why did you answer yes to all three questions.

There's always the remote possibility that some city or town has a local ordinance that prohibits HP ammo and hasn't made their local ordinances very well known. I have yet to hear of such a thing here in California though.

[thomasanelson]

If memory serves correct, Black Talon was pulled from the market because of bad PR and fear of legal retribution. The story was that all the gang bangers were using it to shoot each other and yes surgeons feeling around to find bullet fragments were getting cut. They complained, the news media jumped and Winchester voluntarily stopped selling Talon retail.

Here is what "The Gun Zone" says:

O, those deadly…
Winchester Black Talons
The handgun ammo that was just "too good" to survive the pants-wetters.
On Thursday, 1 July 1993, 55-year-old mortgage broker Gian Luigi Ferri entered the San Francisco law offices of Pettit & Martin and opened fire with two Intratec TEC-DC9s and a Colt .45 ACP pistol1. Ferri killed eight and wounded six before turning the gun on himself. Moving through the office, he fired the TEC-9s which were loaded with a combination of Black Talon and standard ammunition. Ferri ended the lives of some of the wounded with Black Talon rounds from his Colt pistol. Faced with financial problems, Ferri held a grudge against Pettit & Martin because the firm had represented him in a 1980s trailer-park deal that had gone bad.

Contemporaneous news reports cited the Black Talons' "razor sharp claws," and the resulting wounds as "devastating and non-survivable." However, a year later at an International Wound Ballistics Association conference, the San Francisco Medical Examiner, Boyd Stevens, M.D., who had conducted the post mortems of the shooting victims stated that the wound trauma produced by the Black Talon was "unremarkable."2

Five months and six days after the Ferri shootings, Colin Ferguson, a native of Jamaica (BWI), went on a murderous rampage on the Long Island Railroad (NY) with a questionably purchased3 Ruger P89 loaded with 9 X 19mm Black Talon 147-grain rounds, approximately one month following Olin's decision to remove the entire Black Talon brand of ammunition from the Winchester commercial catalogue.

Representative of the anti-gun, anti-Black Talon hyperbole of the period was this over-wrought description of the carnage Ferguson wreaked on unarmed citizens:
Perhaps a prayer can stop a Black Talon. But a pocketbook probably will not. The bullet is designed to unsheathe its claws once inside the victim's body and tear it to pieces. That's what Colin Ferguson was firing, to the right, then the left, as he walked backward through the third car of the 5:33 train to Hicksville, New York, last Tuesday night. And the passengers who crushed toward the exits or dove under their seats or tried to hide behind their handbags did not stand much of a chance.
– Time Magazine, 20 December 1993
One can not unreasonably argue that "Black Talon" never really had a chance either… except in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit: McCarthy v. Olin Corp., 119 F.3d 148 (2d Cir. 1997) which ruled…
The Black Talon is a hollowpoint bullet designed to bend upon impact into six ninety-degree angle razor-sharp petals or "talons" that increase the wounding power of the bullet by stretching, cutting and tearing tissue and bone as it travels through the victim.
. . .

[P]laintiffs failed to allege the existence of a design defect in the Black Talon because the ammunition must by its very nature be dangerous to be functional. … The risk of the Black Talon arises from the function of the product, not from a defect in the product.
. . .

The very purpose of the Black Talon bullet is to kill or cause severe wounding.
. . .

Because we hold that the Black Talon bullets were not defectively designed, we must affirm the dismissal of appellants' strict liability claims.
And that's where the Black Talon issue rests today.
It was the Winchester Ammunition Company's BIG announcement for the 1991 SHOT Show: "Black Talon" handgun ammunition, the first major munitions maker's response to the post-11 April 1986 hysteria over the "ammo failure" in the notorious FBI Firefight.

The trade publication, Shooting Industry, awarded the design two years running:
1992 Winchester Black Talon handgun ammunition
1993 Winchester Black Talon rifle ammunition
In Fall 1993, Winchester took their Black Talon brand of hollow-point ammunition off the commercial market after the rounds were singled out during a particularly intense period of concern about gun violence.

Winchester officials used research to show that the Black Talon was no more deadly than any of the other hollow point bullets on the market, but they pulled the ammunition from the shelves to quiet public concern. Black Talon was the first product Winchester had ever removed from the market for reasons other than manufacturing defects in the almost 130-year history of the company.

"It is a hazard and shouldn't be used," says Dr. Edward Quebbeman, professor of surgery at the Medical College of Wisconsin and a general surgeon in Milwaukee hospitals. "At an absolute minimum, I would like to see it banned from the civilian population."

So too did the eloquent and blustering Democratic Senator from New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan4, who told the horrified interviewer, "It's designed to rip your guts out!" in response to a question from Jane Pauley on WNBC's "Live at Five" show.

Within the week, then Winchester Ammo President Gerald W. Bersett, having been ambushed in his own driveway one morning by a TV crew intent on some headline-making "gotcha journalism," ordered the rounds taken out of the commercial distribution chain.
What it is/was…
The original Black Talon5 line of handgun ammunition was introduced at the 1991 SHOT Show in Dallas, and was marked by a black-colored projectile seated in a nickel-plated case, which made for a very "sexy" round! With the black bullets and gleaming cases, they looked as if they were the "official handgun ammo" of the Oakland Raiders football team.

The bullet's black molybdenum disulfide coating… Winchester's proprietary name for which is "Lubalox…" was applied for increased lubricity. The tip of the projectile utilizes six serrations on the hollow cavity's nose (meplat). Upon expansion in soft tissue, the projectile's jacket along those six pre-stressed lines forming the "talon."

Winchester described this as:
Six uniform, radial jacket petals with perpendicular tips.
Winchester's Dave Schluckebier and Alan Corzine designed the Black Talon with what they termed a "reverse-taper jacket;" i.e., unlike conventional hollowpoint handgun projectile construction, the copper jacket is thicker at the nose than at the base. This heavier gauge to provides the necessary stiffness to the "talons" after expansion so they remain in optimal position to slice through tissue as it parts around the mushroomed skirt of the bullet.
The Scandal and Beyond
The controversy over the Black Talon took place in an era when the public was largely uninformed about the reality of the new bullet technology developed in response to the FBI-facilitated Wound Ballistics Seminar at Quantico in September 1987.

To complicate matters, sentiment was already being heavily influenced by the efforts of anti-gun organizations such as Handgun Control, Inc. The issue blew into a firestorm, with HCI, the media, and even some in law enforcement vilifying the rounds and inflaming the public with such near hysterical statements from a surgeon in a Houston, Texas Emergency Room that the rounds were…
…being designed to explode inside a person like a thousand razor blades, (with) most people having almost no chance of survival.
Little wonder that Ms. Pauley looked a little pasty around the gills.

And HCI, having worked Josh Sugarmann's extraordinarily prescient "strategy of confusion"5 so well in the aftermath of the Patrick Purdy schoolyard shooting in Stockton, California almost five years earlier, reconfigured that campaign to "help" the public believe that the Black Talons were "deadly Cop-Killer Bullets."

At that point it was an understandable "corporate decision" for Winchester's Bersett to hit the panic button as a damage control measure.

[ar15barrels]

Is legal to owne Black Talon Ammo?

There's no "e" in "own".