This topic addresses some people’s quest for a projectile that will destroy the bad guy while not doing anything else. This perfect bullet would be unable to penetrate the walls of a standard home so that a stray shot wouldn’t endanger someone else yet if this bullet touched an (unwanted) individual, the bullet would hit with the same or greater force than a bullet made of copper-covered lead – or whatever is normally used in the particular cartridge. There have been various attempts to manufacture and sell cartridges with these types of “safe” bullets. Usually the bullet’s jacket is filled with small BBs and then capped with a plastic sealant of some type. Note that there are also “frangible” bullets which turn to dust when hitting any hard object. These are used when shooting at steel plates and in other specialized training exercises and are not designed to be used in normal defensive situations. There are also cartridges loaded only with tiny lead balls intended for use on snakes. These are not about to stop a snake on two legs.

Back to the safe bullets that won’t penetrate walls. If true, that means the BBs inside the bullet must not impact with any kind of real force. I can easily drive a long nail all the way through a wall with one strike from a 16 oz hammer, and sometimes manage to run the head of the hammer through the first layer of drywall, much to my consternation. Clearly there is very little force being applied. Those bullet BBs must have even less. If they won’t penetrate drywall, why would one think they would cause a bad guy more than a minor inconvenience? I don’t think I would trust my life to these kinds of projectiles. Those who want these kinds of bullets to exist are mostly those who do not want an errant bullet to go through a wall and injure a family member. That I completely understand, but there is no bullet that will remove that risk and allow one to put effective fire into the bad guy. If someone says their bullets are “safe,” they are marketing bullets rather than trying to help manage the threat of collateral damage.

The risk of bullets penetrating where you don’t want them to go can’t be totally mitigated. Short of armor-plating your walls, all you can do is strive to shoot accurately, and perhaps have a signal or something that would alert family members to get on the floor or move to some central location.