Scott making his chiropractor a very rich man.
"What's up everybody, my name is Scott and you're watching Kentucky Ballistics!"
Kentucky Ballistics is a firearms-focused YouTube channel
started in 2010 by former Kentucky State Trooper Scott DeShields. Unlike most gun-tubers, Scott takes a decidedly comedic approach, such as shooting giant jugs of condiments with hilariously overpowered guns, or testing the effects of shotgun shells loaded with candy on the human skin.
Scott also runs two secondary channels: Kentucky Kustoms, which as the name suggests features custom vehicles, as well as other videos such as the self-descriptive Wreck-It Wednesday; and Kentucky Ballistics Breakdowns (introduced in 2023), in which he discusses firearms featured in his videos in a more serious tone.
All right, here we go!
- Abnormal Ammo: He has videos where he tests out some oddball shotgun rounds, mainly various types of less-than-lethal rounds and one case, shells loaded with candy. As it turns out, while most candies would break skin at worst, gummy bears of all things have the power to punch through a person's sternum when fired out of a shotgun.
- In his "gun safe ve. punt gun" video (see "Once per Episode"), he took his first shot with golf balls... which seriously dented the safe. He took a later shot using small flechettes (darts); a few penetrated fairly deeply into the metal (though didn't make any holes).
- Achey Scars: Played for Black Comedy: when Scott is about to shoot a particularly sketchy gun, his neck scar starts tingling.
- Armor Is Useless: Averted for professionally made armor. As he has demonstrated on multiple occasions, modern polymer and ceramic ballistic armor is actually incredibly effective at stopping powerful rounds like the .44 Magnum, rifles rounds up to .308 Winchester, and the highest-rated armors can even sometimes stop elephant gun rounds (though the impact itself will probably cause you massive internal injury, as the poor zombie torso demonstrated). Heck, ceramic armor is even capable of stopping a harpoon.
- Played straight with oddball or improvised armors, like the one he made of fiberglass. Not only are they heavier than their ceramic counterparts, they also offer pitiful protection against anything larger than a medium-caliber handgun.
- Exaggerated and double subverted triumphantly by the punt gun. Given the state of the zombie torso after the shot, Scott had initially assumed that the Level IVA plate had failed to stop the enormous round from the punt gun. Reviewing the slo-mo footage revealed that while the plate did stop the round, the bullet had so much energy it instead pushed the plate completely through the zombie's torso and out the other side.
- Awesome, but Impractical: When he decided to test medieval weapons against modern polymer armor, the 9-foot-long claymore he brought out was shaping up to be the grand finale - a massive, intimidating-looking sword set to chop right through the armor and the zombie torso wearing it like Guts and his Dragonslayer. In reality, the sword was so flimsy it basically landed on the zombie like a wet noodle, bending the blade in multiple places while the zombie was hardly worse for wear. To drive home the point, the handguards popped off afterwards, much to Scott's embarrassment.
- Boisterous Bruiser: Scott's so chipper and enthusiastic it's easy to forget that the reason he's able to shoot those monstrous guns so effectively is due to his being a former police officer and a powerlifter.
- BFG: His specialty. Scott owns an arsenal of massive elephant guns of various calibers that he frequently shows off in his videos. His most insane rifle is arguably his 4-bore note elephant gun, which he has tested against condiment containers, watermelons, and zombie torsos to extreme effect. There's also the .950 JDJ Fat Mac, which fires a bullet comparable in size to the 4-bore and weighs 50 pounds.note And yes, he shoulder-fires both. Exaggerated with Fury the Punt Gun, which is everything the name entails, and is a 1-bore gun compared to 4-bore.note Since that gun wieghs about 150 pounds, Scott placed it on a special sled designed to absorb the recoil, hooking up a rope to the trigger so he could fire it from a safe distance.
- Buffy Speak: Scott doesn't what his medieval weapons are called, so he just makes up his own: "spiky meatball on a stick" for a morningstar, "spiky scepter" for a mace, "spiky ball on a chain" for a flail, and "meat tenderizer" for a war hammer.
- Die, Chair, Die!: A non-video game example. Most of Scott's targets are assorted furniture, mannequins, junked cars, jugs of water and condiments and canned food.
- Does Not Like Spam: According to Scott, "nobody likes eggplant!" So he just riddles them with bullets instead. After kicking one. (Except in one video where he doesn't shoot any eggplants, but runs over them with a fat-tire motorcycle.)
- Edible Ammunition: His shotgun shells loaded with various kinds of candy, though the shell itself obviously isn't edible.
- Half-Witted Hillbilly: Parodied with Scooter, a mullet-wearing redneck who "helps out" Scott by powerwashing his rifles or smashing his car with a crane.
- Hand Cannon: Scott loves to shoot massive handguns like the Smith & Wesson Model 500.
- Gosh Darn It to Heck!: Scott never swears on camera.
- Gorn: This will be ultimate fate of any zombie torso he shoots up over the course of an episode, since the aftermath of taking multiple large-caliber bullets on the human body would never look pleasant. However, since they're filled with green blood (or sometimes blue), it doesn't upset the YouTube censors.
- Kevlard: He tests this out by shooting 100 lbs of beef fat with various pistol, shotgun and rifle rounds. Turns out, being chunky could potentially protect your vital organs from most common pistols and even 12 gauge buckshot, but only if you're so obese you shouldn't even be able to walk.
- Muscles Are Meaningful: As demonstrated in his collaboration with British strongman Eddie Hall, being ludicrously muscular lets you better handle recoil and therefore shoot accurately. Despite having almost no experience shooting, Eddie barely budges shooting the monstrous 4-bore, whereas the highly experienced (and hardly a small man himself) Scott gets noticeably shoved by the enormous recoil.
- Once per Episode: Every video of Kentucky Ballistics has one unfailing constant: the tables Scott uses to place his targets never survive.
- There is one episode in which he doesn't use a table at all... but it's still not an aversion, as the gun safe he used as his target didn't survive an assault from Fury the Punt Gun. Neither did two of the guns he placed in it while he was shooting at it.
- There is one episode
- Pungeon Master:
- "THERE IS POUPON EVERYTHING!"
- When you see Scott shoot up some nacho cheese, don't say a word...Scott: Because you know what kind of cheese this is? (slow motion) NOT 'CHO CHEESE!
- Reliably Unreliable Guns: When this happens to him, Scott will play a clip of Jeremy Jamm saying "You just got jammed!".
- In his video review of a knife-gun, while it may be reasonably effective as a knife, the rather poor build quality of the breech caused the gun to fall apart after only a few rounds.
- While it hardly fed reliably when it worked, his Benelli M2 XRAIL failed catastrophically after only two magazines, resulting in the barrel flying off the receiver and the magazine tube ejecting all of its shells in a humorous fashion.
- The Dueller 1911, essentially a double-barreled Model 1911 pistol, often jammed when he manually chambered the first rounds, but otherwise worked flawlessly. However, by the end of the video, it became effectively unusable because the front sight had completely detached from the slide.
- He does have one occasion of this trope getting played for straight horror: When Scott was testing the durability of a fire hydrant from multiple .50 BMG rounds (fired out of a Serbu Firearms RN-50 breech-loading single-shot rifle), the firearm could not handle the continuously-building pressure of an unstable and unusually-hot SLAP round note to the point where it literally exploded in front of his face and body. As a result, not only did he get a broken arm and nose, but the shrapnel from the gun lacerated his jugular vein to the point he almost died from blood loss. Thankfully, his dad, who was recording the video, was able to take him to the hospital. The picture of him bloodied and hospitalized was not exactly pleasant to say the least.
- In his video review of a knife-gun
- Running Gag: Aside from the aforementioned "You just got jammed!", he has several more, most notably "Watermelon Time!", where he just starts randomly shooting up watermelons.
- He has a habit of editing in a loud explosion as a jumpscare whenever he's doing something precarious, such as loading a Serbu rifle with a homemade round.
- He also loves to put Furbies through the wringer, while also portraying them as terrifying hellspawn which must be destroyed at all costs. So much so that when Scott found out about the 2023 revival, he announced he would be declaring war on the things.
- If Scott brings out a chronograph to measure a bullet's velocity, there's a 100% chance he's going to wind up shooting the chronograph instead.
- Shout-Out: Scott typically ascribes the warnings from the Gremlins franchise (don't feed after midnight, don't get them wet) to Furbies.
- Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: Scott has several, most notably the T. rex and Scooter.
- Smashing Watermelons: At the 5:49 mark of this video, Scott takes "Watermelon Time" in a completely different direction. Instead of shooting watermelons, he takes them out with a replica of a medieval military flail.
- Surprisingly Super-Tough Thing: One particularly thick section of bulletproof glass proved worthy of the name - to Scott's earnest surprise, the glass tanked literally everything he brought to the range that day, including the .416 Rigby and the 4 bore. He eventually managed to poke a hole through it, but only after unloading an entire revolver's' worth of .500 Magnum into one of the impact craters left by the 4 bore. To wit, it took four shots from four different elephant guns, entire magazines of 9mm, .45 ACP, and .50 AE, a whole cylinder of .500 Smith & Wesson Magnum, and 7 rounds of 12-gauge buckshot to put a single hole into that glass.
- Synchro-Vox: Parodied in the intro to this episode.
- Torso with a View: As Scott's zombie torsos demonstrate, if you are unlucky enough to take a shot to the chest from an elephant gun, or God forbid, the punt gun, there probably won't be much of anything left to attach your head to your belly.
- Wood Chipper of Doom: Scott often makes use of a device he calls the Chip-O-Matic 5000, though he tends to use everything but wood for itnote . Sadly, the chipper finally gave up the ghost in the MAG-7 video, though it was replaced a couple months afterwards with a more powerful chipper, the Chip-O-Matic 6000.
- Your Head Asplode: Pretty much what happens when he shoots a zombie torso in the head with the 4-bore, and later with the .600 Overkill. Aside from that, he also shows how surprisingly difficult this is to achieve with most common bullets — a zombie torso's head would remain largely intact after a round from the .500 Smith & Wesson Magnum, the most powerful production handgun round currently on the market.
- And as always, my name is Scott, thank you so much for reading Kentucky Ballistics, and I'll see you next time!
[drives out of the range, ripping a table to pieces]
