What about killing a bear with the tiny caliber .22LR? It happened!

Looks like a crazy proposition, but someone did it. It was a lady and I guess was luck, because the exception doesn't make the rule. Here applies the saying of Teddy Roosevelt: 

I once saw a man kill a lion with a 30-30 caliber rifle under certain conditions, but that doesn’t mean that a 30-30 rifle is a lion gun.

Our lucky lady was Bella Twin, a Canadian Cree Indian already in her 60s. She killed a thousand pounds bear that set the world record for 1953.

Not even Hemingway, who once defended the .22, believed that killing a bear with this ammo was possible. 

Now standing in one corner of a boxing ring with a .22 caliber Colt automatic pistol, shooting a bullet weighing only 40 grains and with a striking energy of 51 foot pounds at 25 feet from the muzzle, I will guarantee to kill either Gene Tunney or Joe Louis before they get to me from the opposite corner. This is the smallest caliber pistol cartridge made; but it is also one of the most accurate and easy to hit with, since the pistol has no recoil. I have killed many horses with it, cripples and bear baits, with a single shot, and what will kill a horse will kill a man. I have hit six dueling silhouettes in the head with it at regulation distance in five seconds. It was this type of pistol that Millen boys’ colleague, Abe Faber, did all his killings with. Yet this same pistol bullet fired at point blank range will not dent a grizzly’s skull, and to shoot a grizzly with a .22 caliber pistol would simply be one way of committing suicide.

Well, life proved Hemingway wrong. Bella Twin dented the skull of a grizzly.

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