Fifty years ago Roy Weatherby was telling anyone who would listen that a lighter, smaller-bore bullet, when pushed fast enough, did as well as the slower, bigger bullets. It took awhile, but soon enough we were pushing bullets faster than ever. Well, we might well be on the cusp of another change.

Extreme Shock (www.extremeshockusa.com) is a new manufacturer, and I went off to see what the new revolution may well be. The company is tucked away in a secluded corner of Virginia near the Kentucky border. It is at the end of a twisty county road leading up a narrow valley that, on a sunny day, would make me wish I still had my old 1968 MG.

As we all know, modern smallbore ammunition is some variant of the "cup and core" design. A brass tube, closed at one end, contains a lead core. By shaping the jacket and core, ballisticians create bullets that expand when they strike but do not come apart. In regular bullet designs, fragmentation is a bad thing. But Extreme Shock technicians not only accept fragmentation, they embrace it. The key is the new composition of the bullet core, a sintered tungsten alloy. Extreme Shock has gone to great effort to learn the dynamics of both ends of the process: the bonding of the tungsten-nytrilium composite into a core and its controlled disruption in the target.

In a nutshell, they've designed barely controlled-rate disintegrating bullets for a number of applications. At the short end, they have handgun bullets that will catastrophically disintegrate, and thus limit penetration to just as many (or few) inches of bad guy as you need. The idea is to limit penetration of other objects such as aircraft fuselages, hydraulic lines, etc. At the other end are bullets that disintegrate violently but still drive fragments more than a foot deep in various test media.

Some of you are shaking your heads. "We've done that, and what you get is shallow penetration, nasty-appearing wounds and game that runs off." Well, yes, you've done it with lead. But lead has mechanical properties that make it a poor candidate for sintered-core designs. First, lead will re-bond to itself. It doesn't take much pressure to get two pieces of lead to adhere. So your carefully contrived sintered-lead core, on impact, re-melds itself into a solid core. Or it doesn't, and the relatively lightweight lead fails to penetrate deeply enough.