Don’t misunderstand me, I’ve owned and carried revolvers for years. While six-shooters absolutely have their place in a shooter’s arsenal, they’ve often employed wrong. This isn’t to say that they’re a bad choice when shoe-horned into roles they weren’t built for, but more so that a combination of factors have caused some of their most shining moments to eclipse. Paramount among these is the .38 special snub-nosed revolver. Compact, reliable and fool-proof, the .38 wheel-gun should be the perfect concealed carry option for new shooters – but it's not.
Here are four reasons why it's not.
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I carried a little Charter Arms snub nosed 38 Special for years and can vouch for the points brought up this article. Yes, I can.
It took a lot of practice before I could hold a tight group and you better believe it had some recoil to it until I learned to concentrate on my sights and target. After that, the recoil wasn't really even noticed.
Yes, it was difficult to reload. Using a speed loader, I had to insert that at a slight angle because of the grips, release the bullets, then turn the cylinder a quarter turn before all five bullets would drop into the cylinder.
As far as the terminal ballistics go..... meh. They're comparable to a 9mm and a hell of a lot better than the .380 that seems to be the rage nowadays, so I'm not going to even go there with that.
Now, all that being said would I still be comfortable carrying one? Yes - it just takes some practice getting used to.
"A snub-nosed, double-action-only revolver in any caliber is a very difficult firearm to shoot both accurately and quickly."
ReplyDeleteThis guy has never seen my permit holder bride shoot her Ruger LCRx. She shoots it better double action than she does single action.
And personally, I resent being told by a guy that I've never heard of that I'm not a good enough shot. Especially a guy with no gray in his hair. He needs to loose some of his hubris.
I like J Frames. My first was a Model 36 handed down from my uncle when he passed.
ReplyDeleteSecond was an M60, my backup for many years.
My current favorite travelling companion is a 640 in .357Mag.
Pro Tip- Pachmayr Compac grips:
https://www.amazon.com/Pachmayr-03252-Compact-Grips-Frame/dp/B0018EXSXS
These tame the recoil of even full-boat Magnum ammo.
Plenty of info here:
http://snubnose.info/
=TW=
When the wife's friend wanted a purse gun, first question was would she practice what it. Knowing she would never get proficient with IA drills, I recommended a. 38 snub-nose spurless hammer. I'm a auto fan, but you can't beat the wheelgun's reliability.
ReplyDeleteChances are if you need it, you'll won't need all 5 shots. But the revolver will give all without stove piping, failed to extract, or feed problems that can happen with autos.
I taught The Baroness to shoot with a Model 36 equipped with Hogue grips. The first thing I showed her was that the first shot is usually the best shot, because you are not ready for the flash/bang. By way of demonstration, I pulled my Combat Commander and made a quick first shot to the forehead of the target. I explained that after the first shot, you're going to be rattled, and you are likely to miss. Demonstration - my next two shots were off enough to make a kill shot to the head iffy. She took it to heart and now she can pull, hit the target, and slowly line up for subsequent hits IF NEEDED. As far as people giving up after two reloads, sh'yeah - the guy is a wimp. All I ever hear is "you didn't bring enough ammo!", "and why only two speed loaders?".
ReplyDeleteMy Carry is a Springfield Armory single stack .45 with tactical rounds.
ReplyDeleteWhat are "tactical rounds"?
DeleteHollow points
Deletetactical. Hahah
DeleteJust takes a bit of practice is all.
ReplyDeleteSame as the kid. A Springfield .45. You could say many of the same things about .45's. They do take some getting used to. Not everybody can shoot them well.
ReplyDeleteMeh, I've carried a Colt Agent for years as my 'summer' carry. And yes, practice is important. It's not much good past seven yards, but it will get the job done. I now carry a new Colt Cobra and I don't have any problems with it, but then again I have practiced with it. I actually prefer Bianchi Speed Strips for reloading, since that is what I learned with. 2 at a time, and pay attention!
ReplyDeleteI had a Charter Arms revolver that I was never able to shoot well, even though I fired hundreds of rounds through it at the range. On the other hand, I have a Ruger LCR that I can shoot fairly well. I attribute the LCR's better trigger, grip, and sights (after replacing the front ramp with a fiber optic sight) to my shooting it better than the Charter Arms.
ReplyDeleteI have both. With the Ruger LCR, I got aftermarket footplate extensions for the mags so that I could get all fingers on the grip. It makes it slightly harder to pocket, but the grip improvement made a world of difference.
DeleteWith the Charter snubbie, it has so much recoil that if the shells weren't firmly crimped, they would prairie-dog out of their cases. First 2-3 rounds were fine, but the fourth or fifth were so far out of their cases they'd jam the cylinder. Not a good thing, but as a backup boot gun, it's passable.
Before the canoe overturning accident I really enjoyed my Little Bulldog in 44 SPC. My previous 44 Mag was just too heavy and recoil hurt me after about four reloads. The frequency of the 38's and 357's make my ears ring for a week or so. 44's don't do that, neither does the 9mm.
ReplyDeleteHad a nice Kimber in 45 once, but it's dollar value exceeded it's worth sitting in a box all the time.
Never been on the criminal end of things but my guess is when they hear the boom booms they may not care what it comes from. Those people always look to have the upper hand and dont like a surprise. But I could be wrong..........again.
ReplyDeleteHumph. I have a .38 S&W Police Special snub nose that I've owned since the 70's. It's a beautiful little gun, easily concealed, and I'm a very good shot. I took the head off a sparrow at around ten yards one time. That's equivalent to an eyeball at thirty feet. It's my choice to carry out and about. I don't wander around in the Barrios or Ghettos, and don't wander down dark alleys, so I don't think I'll be getting into a gun battle requiring more than the five rounds it provides. My opinion only, but it's a great little gun. Another advantage of it - When I purchased it, I just walked into a sporting goods store, plucked down the cash, and walked out. No registration, no name, no drivers license, nothing. Even threw the receipt away.
ReplyDeleteThe purpose of a side-arm is to get to a long-arm.
ReplyDeleteWhy is that so difficult to comprehend?
MN Steel
Wirecutter, if your 38 loads are comparable to 9mm you are loading some very hot +P loads or some weak assed 9mm loads. My 9mm loads are more equivalent to low end 357 Mag loads. Then again I keep my 357M on the low end of the 357Mag spectrum.
ReplyDeleteMy standard 38 Special load was 158 gr HP loaded to (just barely) +P velocities. I'm not real familiar with 9mm loads so maybe I was talking out of my ass.
DeleteI carry nothing but Hornady's Critical Defense in my 357. It's accurate as hell and the ballistics are pretty impressive.
A Ruger LCR is my spouse's first handgun. She ran through 50 rounds practicing. She won't win a bullseye competition with it, but she does keep them all inside the diameter of a paper plate at 7-10 yards. I load her practice rounds using 110 grain fmj bullets (whatever brand is on sale at Midway) and the listed starting/minimum grains of powder of Win 231. I figure reasonably comfortable loads enabling more shooting before fatigue sets in is better for good shooting habits than 5-10 rounds of full power loads in a very light revolver.
ReplyDeleteHodgdon/IMR/Winchester says your loads are doing 948 fps. Just for giggles you might try 148 grain Wadcutters loaded with a starting charge of Trail Boss. Hodgdon says they're doing 625 fps!
DeleteTrail Boss is great because even an old fart with lousy vision like me can't double charge. I use it wherever I can, including for 45-70 plinker rounds.
My wife has both an LCR and an LCRx. I have been amazed at their accuracy when shooting at 25 yards of off of a bench. 2" groups aren't unusual.
He isn't wrong.
ReplyDeleteAll his points are correct. The .38 Special is a low-pressure blackpowder era cartridge of marginal power even before you cut it off at the knees by shooting it through a 2" barrel. Some of the target wadcutter loads recommended by gun store commandos don't even get 600 feet per second out of a 2" snubby. Real talk here: the .38 Special isn't "about as powerful as 9mm." Like the .380, it's about half as powerful. Like the .380, the vast majority of ammunition available with expanding bullets either aren't going fast enough to get expansion after clothing or don't have enough energy to reach the 12" minimum in calibrated ballistic gel after the bullet deforms. It's a very short list with either caliber if you want both expansion and 12" both before and after clothing, and if you were thinking about auto windshields, or plywood, or the other FBI tests, forget it. The .38 just doesn't have the juice. 9mm can play in this league. .38 and .380 can't.
Sights on these tiny revolvers are invariably an afterthought. Reloads can be timed with a calendar. Teeny tiny double action revolvers with teeny tiny crappy sights and teeny tiny sight radius are absolutely the most difficult type of handgun to master, absolutely the most unforgiving when it comes to imperfections in stance, grip, trigger control, or sight picture, and absolutely the most difficult type to get metal on target in a hurry even when someone isn't trying to kill you. Even those target wadcutters that so often glance off human skulls at conversational distance have nasty, stinging, tooth-rattling recoil when fired out of a twelve-ounce revolver with teeny tiny hard plastic two-finger "boot grips," making practice an ordeal to be dreaded and avoided. A 4" Model 29 with factory wood grips and full-house, balls-to-the-wall Keith loads is pleasant to shoot by comparison.
I'll give you two more reasons why they're a sub-optimal choice.
If five shots don't suffice, you get to try to fumble five more into the gun with a Speed Strip, or, MAYBE, a speedloader, while a junkie tries to part your hair with a rusty machete. You have the rest of your life to reload the gun and put more metal on target. And that is IF you're one of those people who carries spare ammo and doesn't just drop the gun in a pocket and hope it'll be good enough--a habit I notice is strongly statistically correlated with carrying tiny snubby revolvers by preference and saying things like "it's prolly good enough" and "practice? Practice don't matter, it's whoever gets off first!" Complacency kills.
Sometimes five don't get the job done. In 2017 there was an incident in Ohio where a bad guy got into a shootout with the Highway Patrol and soaked up twenty-two rounds of .40 caliber hollowpoints, seventeen of them to the body cavity, and stayed in the fight, causing one cop a fatal gunshot wound, then ran almost nine blocks before the other cops arriving at the scene could catch him, taze him, wrestle him to the ground, and get cuffs on him. He was still fighting when the ambulance got there and he was still fighting when he got to the operating room, though he died of multiple organ failure a few days after surgery. Granted, this was an outlier, but it happened. They tell us that, for cops or armed citizens, there's a "Rule of Three" for uses of lethal force: statistically, almost always the distance will be three yards or less, the fight will be over one way or the other with three rounds or less, and the fight will last three seconds or less. Statistically. Most of the time. Usually. On average, that is.
End part 1.
Part 2.
ReplyDeleteAlso, the thick, fat, bulging cylinder on these otherwise teeny tiny revolvers makes them much thicker and harder to conceal and much more prone to "printing" than a slim, flat modern compact pistol in .380 or 9mm, too. Spare mags are much thinner and easier to hide than big blocky speedloaders. There is absolutely no comparison when it comes to reload times, either, and most of the handguns in this category carry seven or eight plus one, having almost twice as much ammo on tap before you have to reload.
As a practical matter, the snub-nose revolver in .38 Special has been obsolete--in the sense that a superior alternative with no down sides exists--ever since the Colt Model 1908 in .380 ACP.
I've posted these observations in a number of forums, and gotten a lot of heat and a lot of dubious responses.
"Stand in front of it, why doncha?" I wouldn't stand in front of a matchlock arquebus, either. Does that mean it's the best tool available and a serious choice for self-defense in the present day?
"But them there new-fangled automatic pistols jam alla time!" This one's usually from people who don't trust that there new-fangled smokeless powder, either. There have been improvements in the state of the art since the Broomhandle Mauser and the Borchardt. Really, there have.
"If a revolver don't go off, you just pull the trigger again!" Yeah, maybe. Unless a squib load moved the bullet halfway into the forcing cone. Unless that teeny tiny revolver's prodigious recoil made bullets jump the crimp and move forward, blocking the cylinder from rotating. Unless the "traditional, reliable" revolver had MIM internals and one of the tiny, delicate Swiss-watch levers and ratchets inside it chose this moment to break. If a semiauto stops, tap-rack-bang and it generally goes again. If a revolver stops, you are likely looking at having to use it as a bludgeon until you can drop it off with the armorer and get it fixed.
My favorite is "I can shoot a revolver through my coat pocket! Betcha can't do that with an automatic, it'll jam!" This one is generally from people whose idea of training is to watch pre-WWII black-and-white gangster movies. The kindest response I can think of is: doesn't that make it kind of hard to see your front sight, friend?
The firearms world is conservative and change comes at a slow pace. Which is why revolvers still exist at all outside the niche where they are still the most efficient and effective choice, the big ones in calibers with "magnum" in the name for hunting large game and tipping over steel rams at 200 meters. But for serious people, when weather and wardrobe dictate that you can't conceal a modern full-size handgun, or at least something like a Glock 19 or a Lightweight Commander, the serious choice is a modern single-stack 9mm subcompact, or a tiny .380 for when "concealed means CONCEALED." Any other choice tends to indicate either a lack of awareness pertaining to advances in firearm design since 1900 or an individual who isn't really serious about preparing or training to fight for his life and the lives of his family, if not both. He's just LARPing. And in the 21st Century, our movement needs serious people.
You bring up very valid points which is why I gave up the little 38 for a 45 caliber 1911 as a carry gun. I'm also not above a 4 inch 357 when the mood strikes.
DeleteI love the concept of snubnose revolvers. They are classy, concealable and have the advantage of simplicity.
ReplyDeleteAnd despite owning many of them over the years and plenty of practice, I can't shoot them for shit.
As Dirty Harry said in Magnum Force: "A man's got to know his limitations." And snubby revolvers are one of mine.
And that's why I carry Glocks. No hate towards the choices of others.