Hundreds of years ago, muskets were loaded with simple round balls of lead. Now, a ball is not exactly what you’d call an aerodynamic shape, and we eventually figured out that bullets would fly faster, farther and more accurately if we formed them into longer cone shapes and shot them out of rifled barrels. Fast forward to today, and we’ve got quite a variety of bullet shapes to choose from, all in that elongated, conical vein. But why? Why are handgun bullets so short and squat, while precision rifle projectiles are sleek and skinny?
To make this really oversimplified, rifle bullets need to travel long distances, and to be accurate, their flight needs to be stable. The less the bullet has to fight the wind, the farther and more accurate it will be. Long, skinny bullets are aerodynamic and therefore hold their velocity longer. This is the most efficient shape for traveling fast with minimal wind drag.
On the other hand, handgun bullets don’t have such concerns—they’re fired at closer ranges and lower velocities. You just can’t get a ton of velocity out of such a short barrel, nor do you need it (or extreme stabilization). So the reason handgun bullets aren’t long and skinny is partly because they don’t have to be.
On top of that, the size of the gun itself is a limiting factor. If you make pistol rounds too long, it affects the size of the gun to a noticeable degree—you’d have to make the grip and/or the chamber longer to accommodate a longer bullet, and the whole point of handguns is to keep them compact and comfortable to shoot from the hands. You have to keep a pistol round short enough that it fits in the grip of a gun. If you want to make said bullet bigger and heavier, you can’t make it longer, so you have to make it fatter.
What about the tip? Why are some bullets flat, some round, some pointed and some caved in? Well, again, think about aerodynamics—a pointed bullet is more aerodynamic than a flat hunk of lead in the same way a Ferrari is more aerodynamic than a monster truck. Ferraris and monster trucks both have their place, but one is built for speed and the other is built for destruction.
There are various types of points you’ll find on bullets. These are the most common:
Pointed (Spitzer) Bullets: The point minimizes drag and allows for flatter trajectories, higher retained velocity and better performance at long ranges. They’re made for distance, so they may not expand as well as you’d like at super-close ranges depending on the rest of the bullet’s construction.
Round-Nose Bullets: You don’t see a lot of these anymore, as a rounded nose is less aerodynamic than a pointed nose. But they do feed well, and they’re suitable for shorter-range hunting because they’re designed to expand and mushroom dependably.
Flat-Nose Bullets: Lever-action rifles usually use flat-nose bullets for safety reasons, because cartridges are stored end-to-end in a tubular magazine. You can’t have a pointy tip stabbing the primer of the cartridge in front of it or things could go boom when they’re not supposed to. These bullets don’t fly as well as Spitzers or even round-nose bullets, but they’re great at dumping a lot of energy into the target quickly, making them good game-dropping bullets at relatively close ranges. They also do well in (light) brush because they’re good at maintaining a straight trajectory—which is how the flat-nosed 30-30 got its reputation as a “brush busting” round.
Hollowpoint Bullets: The tip of a hollowpoint bullet is actually concave, and these projectiles are designed to expand quickly—upon impact, the tip peels back in petals, increasing the overall diameter and producing a big, nasty wound channel. They don’t fly all that well compared to pointed bullets, but the close-range effectiveness is what you want in a self-defense situation for maximum, rapid stopping power. Thus, you’ll mostly see this in handgun ammo. Hollowpoints are good at dumping most or all of their energy into the target, which reduces concerns about overpenetration.
Polymer-Tipped Bullets: A bullet that has a little polymer point on the tip is giving you the aerodynamic advantage of a pointed shape while also offering the terminal performance of a hollow point. It’ll travel fast and true with minimal drag, like a Spitzer, but on impact, the polymer tip helps initiate the same kind of expansion as a hollowpoint has, creating that large wound channel and dumping most or all of the bullet’s energy into the target. These are great hunting bullets for that reason.
