shotguns, ammunition, myths, identificationNear the end of Jurassic Park, Dr. Grant fires the shotgun three times at a Velociraptor through a window. When the camera gets to the window we find three 9mm sized bullet holes.
What type of shell would be required to duplicate this action? Are there commercial shells available that would have this effect?
There are conversion shells such as this one from Dina Arms that act as a chamber-within-the-chamber to allow you to fire any sized round you want from a 12 gauge shotgun.
You lose a lot in accuracy as there’s nearly no rifling to speak of and very little contact with a barrel. Very similar to a snub-nosed revolver. They are really good for nothing but fun and games, or perhaps special effects such as this (assuming they didn’t just have a terrible consultant that didn’t realize how shotguns work).
For whatever it’s worth, IMDB has this noted as a mistake in the film on the “goofs” tab of the triva page for this movie. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107290/trivia
In my mind that’s the simplest, and probably therefore the most likely explanation.
I have never seen anything that would leave a single 9mm hole. There are slug shells available that fire a single projectile and while those do vary in size, I do not believe they come in something that small.
The only thing that comes to mind is 00 Buckshot, which contains roughly 8 pellets, which are roughly 9mm in diameter.
Three rounds of 00 Buckshot would have dispersed roughly 24 pellets.
The likelihood of seeing the result described is very low. Most of the pellets would need to miss completely. At close range, the grouping of the pellets is still fairly tight, so seeing only three holes would be almost impossible.
When firing slugs into paper targets, I often encounter multiple holes from the slug, cup and wadding. When hit at the right angles, it will be hard to tell them from the slug hit with a cursory glance.
It is certainly possible a props/effects team working on the film observed this at a gun range and attempted to replicate it for the movie.
Well, sabot ammunition for shotguns exists, you can simply google for all different types of it.
However, I don’t know of any 12 bore sabot cartridge with just a 9mm projectile (maybe for smaller shotgun calibers?).
But overall I’d simply say I’ve seen way worse inaccuracies in Hollywood movies. This one can’t bother me.
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