Why bullets don't contains venoms?

[gravenewworld]

People dip their bullets in things like horse, human, and cow feces so that when they hit the enemy they have a higher chance of causing infection.

It is against the rules of war to do such practices, but many insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan routinely do it.

 

[mgb_phys]

People dip their bullets in things like horse, human, and cow feces so that when they hit the enemy they have a higher chance of causing infection.

A bullet isn't likely to have a viable pathogen coating by the time it reaches the target - a more likely effect is that you will jam your own weapon. And if you are fighting a sophisticated enemy with medics and antibiotics there is nothing that is likely to cause them any real problems.

English archers in the middle ages kept their arrows stuck in the ground in front of them - it was thought by historians that this was done to increase the lethality of wounds.
It turns out that the coating of mud and sand on an arrow helps it pierce armour. Instead of a glancing blow bouncing off, the abrasive material helps the arrow dig into the Armour. A medieval bodmin arrow will go through plate Armour easily.

 

[franznietzsche]

Decreasing the mass would lower the ballistic parameter of the bullet, meaning air drag would have a greater impact on the bullet's trajectory. The kinetic energy remaining in the bullet at time of impact probably would be less.

True, I did not consider that.

It's the wrong argument, anyway. It's not the kinetic energy of the bullet, per se, that kills a person - it's having that kinetic energy rip out internal organs that kills a person. It's that anybody parts hit along the way are ripped loose and add to the size of the object traveling through your body. The exit wound is always much larger than the entry wound. A bullet that would break apart would create several chunks of mass moving through a person's body. If it broke up enough to be truly efficient, you'd break up the kinetic energy into enough pieces that none of the chunks off mass actually left the body, since whatever energy remains in the parts coming out the other side is wasted.

Also true. This is why tumbling bullets do so much more damage, bigger cross section so they smack more stuff. Even though the tumbling would increase drag and decrease kinetic energy, the energy imparted from the projectile into the target is greater.

 

[DaveC426913]

I would think this is the big reason that a poisoned bullet would be pointless. In most cases someone will bleed to death faster than a poison could kill them.

Well, the point I was trying to make was that those who use guns are concerned with stopping someone in their tracks at that moment for whatever reason. Usually, if more needs to be done, there are more effective things after-the-fact one can do to render a threat moot (such as cuffing them, stabbing them, shooting them again, or simply running away from them).

But what would be the point in poisoning them to death? In the several minutes afterward they could have killed you, run away, or drawn a sketch of you.