Hornady's LeverEvolution bullet technology makes the stomping new .44 Magnum load a faster, flatter round with tons of penetration.

Well, those clever guys and gals at Hornady have done it again. Perhaps you've heard of their LeverEvolution ammunition? They came up with a soft synthetic plug to fit into the hollow points of bullets. The soft plug allows them to create spitzer bullets that can be loaded into the magazine tubes of lever-action rifles. The soft tip, unlike the hard tips of hollowpoints or sharp-tipped softpoints, won't detonate the primer of the cartridge ahead of it. Lest you think it is some sort of urban myth or hunting camp legend, I've seen half a dozen lever rifles detonated in exactly that manner.

The advantages are not just that you can use sharp-nosed bullets safely but that those bullets can have better external ballistics, lower drag, flatter trajectories and better-controlled expansion. While the extended range may not be that much, the expansion is. You might only extend you useful range another 25 or 50 yards. But as all modern ballistic technology is centered around the expansion of spitzer bullets, getting that new technology into a lever rifle is a big boost.

So what does all this have to do with me, you ask? After all, this is a handgun magazine, right? Hornady extended the LeverEvolution technology into the .44 Magnum and .357 Magnum cartridges cartridge, and it is a heck of a load in handguns.

I recently had the opportunity to test the .44 Magnum version. The bullet weighs 225 grains and has a spitzer shape with a soft polymer tip in it. Why 225? My first thought was the bullet would be too long. A spitzer-like tip and polymer insert makes a bullet longer, and you might need to trim weight to keep it light enough for stabilization in a handgun's rifling twist rate. Nope. The twist rates of .44 Magnum handguns are so fast you could add 100 grains weight to the bullet and still have it stabilize.

No, it weighs 225 grains because that is all Hornady needed for expansion and penetration, and a lighter bullet with that shape will have a plenty flat trajectory. How much expansion and how much penetration? We shot the bullets into ballistic gel to check. From 50 yards the bullets penetrated 22 to 23 inches of ballistic gel. That's more than enough to get through and out the other side of a big game animal like a deer and even enough to get the job done on a black bear or a big ol' wild hog.

Expansion? Classic, .650-inch-diameter mushrooms and only a slight amount of tipping at the end of the wound track. The bullets did not swap front for back as they sliced through the gelatin.

At the range where I first shot the Hornady ammo, our host has some steel silhouettes out at 200 meters, and I found it easy to get hits as long as I paid attention to proper follow-through and ignored the recoil that was coming. For the recoil was not insignificant. As full-power hunting ammo, you'd expect it to be stout. And here you'd be right.

I managed to score enough ammo to take home and test at my home range. There I shot some out of my favorite .44 Magnum, my four-inch nickel S&W Model 29. The recoil was even more ferocious than it had been out of the long-barreled hunting guns I'd shot in my first go-round with the ammo--so much so that I didn't even bother trying to check accuracy while shooting over sandbags. Such a "test" would be more a test of me than of the ammo.