By tipped, i mean they feature a uniform front end that is typically made of some kind of. Because most people who use guns for defense now believe penetration is more important than expansion, mercury tip bullets (which have long been legally prohibited as “toxic,” however. Tipped bullets are quickly becoming the standard for many bullet makers.
Some believe that adding the mercury make bullets more powerful and deadly by loading the tip with mercury. In california, a marxist domestic terrorist group, the symbionese liberation army (think patty hearst) was using cyanide tipped bullets when they assassinated oakland city. Filling the tip of a bullet with some mercury fulminate crystals would create an explosive bullet (though not nearly as powerful as books and movies might make it out to be).
These bullets feature a hollow tip filled with liquid. Mercury goes into solution with a number of metals at room temperature, lead being one of them along with silver, tin, copper, zinc, aluminum, and a host of other metals. The mercury will instantly alloy itself with the lead. The internet is rife with myth, heresies, and conspiracy theories born out of fiction, but mercury tipped bullets do not exist.
The problem in designing a mercury filled bullet is to fill the hollowed cavity of the bullet with mecury without pockets as the mercury hardens almost immediately. Rifle a bullet with a hollow inside containing a quantity of mercury. Not commercially and not legally either. I fell for the urban myth and had to try it.
This was supposed to cause the object hit to explode. I've never tried it because i've never had a gun i wanted to risk shooting them in. These bullets are designed to maximize. Tipped bullets are more aerodynamic, resulting in a higher ballistic coefficient.
In a way, it does make them more deadly, as mercury is poisonous, and even if. I've heard of seating primers in hollow points to make exploding rounds.