I just love story time. Tell us another?
Sure.
When I turned eighteen, I celebrated by purchasing my first center-fire rifle, a Marlin 1895G. This was the model with a straight grip, square finger lever, and a plastic butt-plate. I learned what a flinch was with this light 45-70, and how to overcome one with it. - A lesson that served me well later on, when I developed an interest in medium and big-bore magnum rifles.
Not long after I got it, I was walking some family land in hopes of a target of opportunity, and ran across a cotton-tail rabbit that was perhaps fifty yards away. At the shot, there was a pink mist and I saw the rabbit carcass flying. It landed five or six feet away from where it had been when I fired.
My cousin ran forward to inspect the rabbit and exclaimed, "It's heart is still beating!"
Sure enough, the rabbit had been turned inside-out and its internal organs vaporized by the 400 grain slug, but the heart was still intact and in plain view - still beating. The entire thing was blood-shot so there was not much point in bringing the rabbit home.
I learned an important lesson that day, and thereafter I stuck with head-shots when shooting rabbits with anything bigger than a twenty-two rim-fire. In fact, I once got a squirrel for the pot with a 30-06 without putting a mark on it by 'barking' the squirrel, shooting the branch it was sitting on, instead of shooting the squirrel itself. A squirrel doesn't sound like much, but we had been hunting whitetails for days with no success, and were very low on grub at that point.
This of course has nothing to do with rifle barrels, but you asked for a story.