The Cartridge
I’ve long been a proponent of the idea that you can shoot little stuff with a big gun, but you can’t shoot big stuff with a little gun. Or, as the late, great Robert Ruark so succinctly pointed out, “Use enough gun.”
Now, some people can’t use the real bruisers. She’s tiny-framed and her physical issues make her sensitive to recoil, so her usual Ruger M77 Mk II Compact in .260 Remington is about the most she can handle. So, she doesn’t go out after big stuff.
It’s important to know your limitations.
Me, I’m big-framed and not very recoil-sensitive. So, I can shoot my .45-70 Marlin 1895G and my own custom .338 Winchester Magnum, Thunder Speaker (yes, I name my favorite guns) with aplomb. The biggest gun I’ve ever fired was a .500 Nitro Express double rifle, and the only reason that gave me a pretty good whack in the snoot was that the stock was too short for me.
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At some point, though, a fella has to know when to say “enough is enough,” and you know, the .950 JDJ may be on the other side of that line. This monster, the brainchild of SSK Industries gunsmith and inventor J.D. Jones (hence the JDJ) was developed by taking a 20×102mm Vulcan cannon case, shortening it, and necking it up – yes, you read that right, up – to accept a custom-made .950 caliber, 3,600-grain bullet. That’s over half a pound of bullet right there.
Now, before someone points out that rounds like this, being over .50 caliber, should be proscribed in the United States as Destructive Devices (and it certainly is that), we would note that SSK received a sporting use exception from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives for this big round and the single-shot rifle built to fire it. So this is legally a Title I rifle, meaning that if you can legally own a .22 long rifle Ruger 10-22, you can legally own one of these, assuming you can afford it.
The Power Levels
This monster knocks out that big bullet at 2,200 feet per second (fps) for, get this, 38,685 foot-pounds of energy at the muzzle. That’s over 19 tons of muzzle energy. On the other end, that develops over 200 foot-pounds of felt recoil, and to that I can only say, “ouch.”
By way of comparison, the .338 handloads I use in Thunder Speaker use a 225-grain Spitzer at 2,800 fps, for a little over 4,000 foot-pounds. My .45-70 loads punch out a 405-grain hard cast lead slug at a little over 1,400 fps for about 1,900 foot-pounds of muzzle energy. The .460 Weatherby, once considered the most powerful sporting rifle cartridge money could buy, launches a 500-grain slug at 2,700 fps for 8,100 foot-pounds of muzzle energy.
That means that the .950 JDJ is putting out over nine times the muzzle energy of my .338 Winchester Magnum loads. This is the rifle, in the spirit of “you can shoot little stuff with a big gun,” I once used to take a 110-pound spike mule deer for freezer meat, and the game warden who stopped by my camp later to check the tag of the skinned deer carcass he saw hanging from a tree next to my trailer exclaimed, “What did you shoot it with? A bazooka?”
That’s enough to make one wonder: If you shot something with a bazooka, would someone be tempted to ask, “What did you shoot it with? A .950 JDJ?”
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This is a round that is too much. Too much power. Too much recoil. Too much bullet at too much velocity. Too much money, too, most likely.
Unless, of course, you have just enough gun to handle it. And that gun may be even more impressive than the cartridge that it fires.
The Gun
As for the gun, well, it’s perhaps even more of a monster than the cartridge. These guns, made only by SSK Industries, used a massive single-shot, custom-made bolt action. The receiver was completely enclosed; no ejection port. To load the piece, you removed the bolt completely from the action, placed the cartridge in the bolt, then loaded the bolt and cartridge back into the rifle. The stock was a synthetic benchrest-style stock. The barrel was a 38-inch Krieger barrel with a massive 18-pound multi-chamber muzzle brake that looked like it belonged on the main gun of a tank.
Total weight of these custom-made arms ran between 85 and 120 pounds, except for the very first, which was only 61 pounds, and which nevertheless earned the nickname “Fat Mac”.
Now, obviously, this isn’t something you could tote around all day, or shoot offhand, sitting or kneeling. No, this bruiser has to be on a tripod or a weighted benchrest mount to even begin to manage it.
This is a cartridge and rifle that is overkill for any living animal on the planet. If something the size of a blue whale could somehow come ashore, this monster would handle it. If you shot a huge Alaska grizzly or moose with it, you could pass a beer stein through the resulting wound channel without getting the edges wet. Robert Ruark cautioned us to “use enough gun,” and this would be enough gun for a WWII armored personnel carrier.That’s too much gun by any practical standard, which doesn’t make them any less cool, and doesn’t make me any less willing to try shooting one, should the opportunity ever present itself.
Where Can You Get One?You can’t. Well, probably not.
Sadly, SSK doesn’t make this monster anymore. Only three were made, and those are all in the hands of private shooters and collectors. As far as I’ve been able to determine, the last one to sell, through the famous Rock Island Auction Company, went for a cool $12,650.
So, if you have a safari planned to hunt tyrannosaurs or perhaps a titanosaur, or if your neighbor has an armored car he keeps parking in your yard and you want to put a hole through its engine block, well, you’ll have to find another option. Like, say the aforementioned bazooka.
Now, though, if one were to take the 30mm Vulcan round used in the A-10, and neck it down to an even inch… No. No, I need to stop that line of thinking right now. Enough is enough.
