I live in an area with lots of bears. Many nights last fall I had one in my back yard rooting around my garden. The locals shoot lots of bears but seldom hunt them. My friends and I hunt them but usually up high where they can't get into garbage or fish drying racks. They taste much better when they have been grazing on lush vegetation and berries. Most any rifle will kill them cleanly at around a hundred yards but myself and my friends mostly use 30 cal or better with a good mushrooming bullet for anything over that. I did shoot a bear once with a .270 using 150 grain Norma bullets. It wasn't a trophy but it was destroying a friends orchard so he called me up and asked for help. It took six rounds to put him down because the bullets weren't opening up, just drilling holes. The sixth finally hit the spine and that did the job. Fish and wildlife once called me to destroy a bear that was digging up a guys garden and he was too old and sick to look after it himself. A friend and I went over and waited and when it showed up it was huge, between five and six hundred pounds. I shot it with an 8-06 using 200 grain Speer hot cores and it went down and got back up, then my friend hit it with his 340 Wby using 250 gr. Noslers, and it went down and got up, and then we both did the same thing over again and he finally stayed down. It was an old bear. His teeth were wore down to the gums. We were at fairly close range and none of our bullets exited. That going down and quickly getting back up thing is fairly normal for bears no matter where they are hit. It doesn't indicate much. I don't use anything now except premium bullets, mostly partitions, but if they won't shoot well in a gun I use Barnes TSX or TTSX, the old "X" bullets used to work pretty good too. The best advice I would give to any new bear hunter is get as close as you can. In fact, I believe shooting them from long range in many cases is unethical. Black bears are the most undefined target I have ever hunted. Even in good light, in the open, they are just a black blob and it is hard to get your crosshairs on a spot where you are sure to kill them cleanly, and wounding one is ugly, for many reasons.