Some love em, some hate em. I fell into the former for about a decade, now in the latter. I dont think there?s any question they CAN work. They are however inconsistent. I dont care what anyone uses in any way shape or form but i would be completely disingenuous to not tell anyone asking what would be the best bullet in any circumstance to recommend an xtp. I do use em for target practice and if its what i had id use em in a pinch. That said, its too bad because i orobably have more xtp?s than anything else on the shelf. Easily over 10k of em waiting to loaded, though they will be clanging steel and not hitting flesh. In regards to the above example. I would have serious reservations about a 400 grain bullet not exiting a 90lb sika deer. A 400 grain aspirin fired at a deer should kill it so a dead animal of that size should be expected after being hit with a pill that big. The most interesting question, and one that will never be answered, is what happened to the blackbuck. Was it hit poorly? I dunno, it died in fairly short order. Never saw a wounded one running around. Or was it hit by a bullet that did as shown above and just not perform as advertised and lead to a slow and lingering death. Or did it do both? We will never know. That said, i think its safe to say the above bullet didnt perform as advertised as a large and dangerous game load. I never said it was to be used for that, the factory did. I think we can all agree that the above xtp didnt perform near as well as the one lynn shot into the bear. I believe it was jd jones, but i could be mistaken, tested the 400 grain xtp and found it not to open reliably until one was pushing over 1600 fps. A poor choice for a load generally shot out if revolvers that dont even approach that velocity.


Btw, anyone else notice hornady started bonding their safari line?! Perhaps they should expand that practice.