Winchester Black Talon ammo...

[Seismic Sam]

Way back when, long before there were any Kevlar vests for cops, they did have 357 Mag rounds that had a tungsten core in them, but that was in the good ol' days when gas was 25 cents a gallon, and tungsten wasn't that expensive. The price of tungsten then went through the roof, and the bullets disappeared.

[mrShinola]

Before I started shooting, I attended a First Shots class at Bill's, where the woman instructor was telling a story about her family finding a loaded weapon in a deceased relative's home. The relative had worked in some sort of high clearance government job, and the gun and bullets weren't legal for civilians to have. I asked instructor what sort of ammo could it be, and she told me "why would you ask that? You don't need to know".

That's when I would have started laughing and asked for a full refund for the class.

It was a freebee or I would have asked for my money back.

[PHATSPEED7x]

Think I'm going to keep these in the safe just as part of the collection. I would like to get a box of pdx1 in 357 for my LCR for carry.

[gunsmith]

A little more from wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Talon

The bullet was designed in 1991 under the supervision of Alan Corzine, who at that time was VP of research and development for Winchester.[5] The round quickly developed a reputation as a very effective expanding bullet. The alleged armor-piercing notion is urban legend, and was a result of media hyperbole—rather than test or field data from actual shootings considering the short time it was on the market.

Despite its unique design, the Black Talon was found to be comparable in performance to conventional hollow-points. Black Talon pistol loads are not loaded to higher working pressures or higher velocities "+P" loadings for like and different calibers.

The ammunition was used by the gunman of the 1993 Long Island Railroad mass murder for his Ruger P-89 9mm pistol. In 1996 a lawsuit was subsequently filed by one of the victim's family members (McCarthy v. Sturm, Ruger and Co., Inc., 916 F.Supp. 366 (S.D.N.Y., 1996)) claiming that Olin Corp. should be liable for the shooting spree based on the design, manufacture, marketing, and sale of Black Talon ammunition. The claims against Olin were dismissed because it was held that the bullets were not defectively designed.[11]

Here is a link between the Black Talon cartridge and 'gun control' Carolyn McCarthy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolyn_McCarthy

. On December 7, 1993, her husband, Dennis, was killed and her son, Kevin, severely injured on a Long Island Rail Road commuter train at the Merillon Avenue station, when spree killer, Colin Ferguson, opened fire on passengers.[4] Ferguson killed six and wounded 19 others.[5] McCarthy responded to the crime by launching a campaign for more stringent gun control that eventually propelled her to Congress in 1996 on the Democratic ticket. She defeated freshman Republican Dan Frisa by a large margin.

In the biographical 1998 television movie The Long Island Incident, which portrayed these events, she was played by actress Laurie Metcalf.[6]

In 1993 Winchester removed the ammunition from public sale,[12] but at no time was Black Talon ammunition uniformly prohibited by law. Winchester's Ranger SXT line of ammunition is of the same basic design.

Winchester discontinued the Black Talon line completely in 2000. The “Ranger SXT” ammunition sold later by Winchester is very similar to the Black Talon though without the black Lubalox coating on the bullet. Among shooters, a running joke is that SXT stands for “Same eXact Thing", though the official branding is “Supreme eXpansion Technology”. However, there are differences in the anatomy of the bullets which become apparent when carefully examined side by side. The hollow point cavity dimensions and angles of the meplat were altered to enhance reliability of expansion, though the basic "reverse taper" design pioneered by the Black Talon was retained. This "reverse taper" refers to the bullet's jacket being thicker at the tip than toward the base, enhancing rigidity which allows the sharp petals to remain largely perpendicular to the wound path, unlike traditional designs where the expanding jacket petals would peel back almost completely behind the expanded lead mushroom. This difference is obvious after firing into ballistic gelatin.[13] In 2007 Winchester updated their Ranger SXT line and renamed it Ranger T-Series. Besides further dimensional changes to the hollow point for reliable expansion, the distinctive perpendicular petals were made longer yet more rounded at the tips to retain stiffness.

So. the bottom line is that the Ranger-T (according to Wikipedia) is EVEN DEADLIER THAN THE BLACK TALON.