Am I ever glad I keep my old gun rags! The following advice straight from Handguns '98...
"If you're going to go hand-gunning for bear of any variety, make sure you bring along someone to pack the rifle. Yes, rifle! If you need additional stopping power
right now a rifle will provide it much faster than any handgun. Besides, hand-gunning for bear isn't a sport some would call 'wise' and a hunting buddy is always a good idea."
That being said, the minimum medicine for bear is a .44 Mag. If you can wrap your paws around a Linebaugh pistol in .475 or .500 Mag, you'd best do so! All the artillery jokes aside, bear have a very shock-resistant nervous system. Some won't go down despite being ventilated with a half-dozen of the hottest .44 Mag rounds out there. Not because they aren't powerful enough, but because it takes a hell of a hit to put any bear into shock. Let alone drop one. They possess heavy skeletons with even heavier layers of muscle. "Walking tanks" is a good descriptive.
For rifles, go with a .30 caliber or larger with at least 1,800 ft-lbs of energy behind it. For the ol' 06, stick with 220 grain soft-points or Bonded Bear Claw. My personal choice would be a .45-70 lever gun stoked with 300 grain hollowpoints. If money was no object, it'd be a .470 Nitro Express spitting monolithic solid. The basic principle in hunting any bear is to put them down
NOW![/i] The last thing you want to do is get Teddy torqued off with a pop-gun or merely wound him with your hand cannon. Shotgun slugs are excellent in this regard. If you get a pump gun, stoke it with Federal Power-Shok hollowpoint rifled slugs. They make one shell that hits with 3,000 ft-lbs of energy, though the recoil might make you pick another load. If that doesn't get Teddy's attention, nothing will!
Remington's web site had a nice bit about where to hit game, including graphics of different angles on a bear. Looks like they pulled it, though (drat!).
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Flakbait [Delta6]
