Revolvers: Perfect or Out-Dated for Personal Defense?

Am Shooting Journal ^ | 5/8/2018 | J Hines

[VRWCarea51]

I shoot my 460 a few times then grab the .357 Mag.
It feels like a cap gun...

[IronJack]

Before my canoe overturned, I had a Dan Wesson .357 Mag. Sweetest action I’ve ever shot. And plenty of punch.

[Mr Rogers]

I find my S&W Model 60 easier to conceal than my Glock 27. I use thick grips on my Lady Smith because it makes it OK for shooting 357s. Although the grip is longer when measured from the sights, and a little thicker, the Glock's sharp angles stick out more against a cover shirt. The protruding square corner at the Glock's rear sight always seems to poke out, either against my shirt or against my belly.

I think the constantly changing curves of the revolver hide better than the corners of the Glock. I normally carry 8 rounds of 40 S&W in the Glock and can reload it much easier than the 5 rounds of 357. But I don't spend much time in cities. Almost never at night. I don't have a lot of scenarios where I could see me shooting more than 5 rounds.

And for a "get off me" belly gun, the S&W is very hard to beat. As shown, it has a big enough grip to easily grab, and will fire when shoved into someone's gut. I think, at least. I've never tried it...and Lord willing, will never need to do so.

In 40 years with revolvers, I've had light primer strikes in a 686+ from a strain screw coming loose. Loctite now. I had one time in a night-long sand storm where enough dirt got in my Dan Wesson revolver that it wouldn't fire. Maybe the Glock would have handled it. Don't camp out in sand storms any more. Prefer beds in motels now.

The Glock 27 is a good gun. I'm just not sure it does much that the J-frame with oversized grips doesn't do better.

The Lady Smith, BTW, has a great trigger. Smooth, but long and stout in DA. Makes me laugh when people talk about an 8 lb trigger pull as too hard. In SA, it is very crisp and precise.

[RightGeek]

Hammer vs hammerless?

[Mr Rogers]

I like the hammer. I sometimes carry the Bodyguard version, but I’ve never had the hammer catch on anything. I like having the option of using SA, although I can’t think of many scenarios where it would apply. I usually carry it OWB under a loose shirt. Sometimes IWB. Pretty tight fit as a pocket gun in my Wranglers...although I’ve done it. Never had it snag practicing a draw from my jeans pocket. But mostly OWB.

I also like putting my thumb behind the hammer when putting it into a holster.

[Sam_Damon]

Charter Arms .44 Special wheelie. More power than a .38 or .357 without becoming uncontrollable. Only downside: 5 shots max. But after one hit, said perp ain’t goin’ nowhere except a hospital.

“Big bullets let more air in and blood out.” — attributed to Elmer Keith.

[Lurker]

“Yup. So get a LCR.”

I like a bit more oomph in my EDC. We went with Springfield XDS in .45.

Marvelous little pistol that one. And a great value as well.

L

[ealgeone]

That small canon will knock you flat if you’re not paying attention.

[Freedom_Is_Not_Free]

There are no bad guns made today (except those gang banger .25 cals and such.

A revolver does not have a safety to bother with and is great for people who struggle to rack a pistol’s slide. Reloads are generally slower and you are limited in capacity. But there is no reason to avoid a revolver for self defense. Even a .38 special will usually get the job done, but the sky is the limit on cartridge power for those who desire it.

Nothing wrong with a good revolver. Pick your favorite tool drom the tool box, and just practice frequently.

[Ancesthntr]

One nice thing about revolvers is that they don’t leave brass everywhere. Sometimes, you just might not want to leave a calling card.

[chuckles]

I had a Jam-O-matic once, but took it apart and started to examine the relevant parts. I found a bent ejector. Replaced the ejector and no more jams. Stove-piping was what it did 90% of the jams.

Most guns are designed well enough, but quality control is sometimes suspect. Cheaper guns are usually cheap for a reason. I've shot several boxes through this "Jammer" with no problem now, but feel like the ejector was some sort of inferior metal, maybe even pot metal. I would love to have a replacement part made with stainless or something else, but who would try to make a living from spare parts from other guns? The old ejector would flex just pushing it with my fingers. It's now just a shooter at the range because I just can't trust it with my life even with a new ejector that is working now at 100%. Is the next round going to be the one I have to fire at multiple perps and it decides to fire once?

[gathersnomoss]

I saw that...

[daler]

My pick.

Fits nicely in any pocket, good quality but not expensive, and presumably quite lethal if the situation calls for it.

[daler]

How about that?

I lost mine in an unfortunate boating accident, too.

[Vaquero]

Cool. I went for the LC-9 s Pro 9mm. Small light and powerful enough.

[Made In The USA]

Looks a like my Model 65, I took the longer barrel.

For whatever reason, I am way more accurate with it than my 9mm semi-autos. Probably just me flinching or whatever and practice, practice, practice will solve. But I like like the bigger holes from the .38 and .357....

[USS Alaska]

A revolver is a semi-automatic, every time you pull the trigger, a single shot is fired, just like a gas operated, auto-eject weapon.

One spews its spent shells out onto the ground, the other keeps them in the cylinder until emptied and replaced.

In the revolver, you have a speed loader, that permits reload of the entire cylinder with one device, like the replacement of a magazine.

The gas operated weapon is faster, and I own both, but my preference is a S & W 357 Magnum, loaded with hollow points.

Any gun is better than a hammer, because even when out of ammo, use can use the gun as a hammer:)

[Lurker]

“I went for the LC-9 s Pro 9mm. Small light and powerful enough.”

Nice. We stuck with the XDS because we already own a set of XD Compacts in .45. Plus we have some Kimbers for showing off. LOL.

We already reload .45 and .44 so we have a pile of primers, brass, and bullets for them. 9 mm just didn’t make sense. Although I suppose at some point we will have to break down and grab a pair of them GawdAwful Glock 19 things for SHTF sidearms.

We should be able to find a brace of used ones cheap enough.

Best,

L

[schurmann]

Actual numbers (malfunction rates and such) are missing in the posted article. Not a good idea: the decision to select this or that sidearm can hinge critically on comparisons of quantifiable attributes.

Feed reliability is the most critical attribute of a self-defense handgun: a user will want a high probability that the second shot will go bang when needed.

From the introduction of the autoloading pistol until about 1980, the best that could be coaxed out of an autoloader was a feed failure rate about 5000 times higher than that of a revolver. And this could be maintained only when using full metal jacket round-nose bullets - not the best design for effectiveness.

Around 1980, better bullet design and better autoloader feed-system engineering began to make themselves felt. The discrepancy shrank to its present level: individual bullets are now more effective, but revolvers are still 100 times more reliable than autoloaders. This is not a fixed situation: to get the discrepancy down this far, autoloader parts must have rather loose tolerances, which degrades accuracy. Tighten up the tolerances, and accuracy may rise, but reliability will decline.

Another advantage of a revolver is that any bullet size or configuration can be used, loaded to any velocity up to the max allowed, and the revolver will function. It depends only on mechanical movement with energy supplied by the users themselves.

Since autoloaders utilize a small amount of energy from the cartridge to cause them to work, cartridges for autoloaders must keep within rather strict limits of size, bullet shape, and velocity; straying outside these limits results in a malfunction.

Shot for shot, revolver cartridges - magnums and such - can be quite powerful, far beyond what any practical autoloader is capable of taking. The chief drawback is that these powerful revolver rounds can be very hard on the user.

The trigger pull on a revolver is generally better than that on an autoloader, or can be. The chief reason for this is that the revolver’s trigger/sear mechanism does not have to withstand the vibration and shock caused by high-speed movement of the slide and other parts on an autoloader, which cannot be avoided if the autoloader is to function at all. Not that all revolver triggers are that wonderful out of the box; but they generally respond to polishing and stoning better than does an autoloader.

Not sure why the authors faulted only the revolver for light primer strikes; they can happen in double-action (trigger cocking) mode, but autoloaders are not immune to this problem. Springs typically weaken over time.

There’s definitely a tradeoff between lightness of trigger pull and ignition reliability; weight of pull depends in part on the stiffness of the spring driving the hammer, and a less-stiff spring will make pulling the trigger easier. But that lighter hammer spring can adversely affect feed reliability in an autoloader: most depend on a combination of the recoil spring and the hammer spring to make everything work. And the smallest, most concealable autoloaders use smaller, lighter parts (especially the slide and breechblock) and thus depend on yet-stiffer springs to make them function.

When confronted with an unacceptably heavy trigger pull, the reaction of the neophyte is to demand a lighter hammer spring. Pistolsmiths do not approach the problem in the same way: in performing a “trigger job,” they stone the engagement surfaces, refining the angles where sear and hammer meet, and even out roughness introduced during manufacturing. They polish the hammer, trigger, frame, and other internal surfaces where all these parts rub against each other as the gun functions.

The result is a crisp-feeling trigger pull that smoothly moves only a short distance before letoff, which feels much lighter than one that is mushy, gritty, and moves farther, no matter the spring power for either.

Revolvers can be left loaded for extended periods, without having any springs compressed. In autoloaders, having the gun ready requires that the magazine be loaded, which can weaken the magazine spring over time.

And a revolver is simpler: safety systems are typically internal and automatic, functioning without conscious user input; this is not true of many autoloaders, which can have external safeties demanding manual operation. One simply picks up a revolver, aims, and squeezes: nothing to remember, nothing to forget. Since the introduction of the Glock, and many copycat autoloader designs, this latter difference has come to mean less.

Paradoxically, many stoppages of an autoloader can be cleared with immediate action, easy to perform. But if a revolver does malfunction, some stoppages can be very serious and involved, and may require the services of a skilled pistol smith to unravel, working for numerous hours. If a light charge forces the bullet part way out of the case, in a revolver it may come to a stop part way into the forcing cone. This halts all cylinder movement. Sometimes it proves impossible to drive that bullet back into the cylinder far enough to allow the cylinder to spin. Then the ingenuity of the smith gets a real test: it can require a jeweler’s saw inserted in the barrel-cylinder gap to cut the bullet apart, or other techniques that deform, grind, or cut down the bullet to get it out of the way.

Tradeoffs must be made. Each design offers advantages and each has drawbacks. Determine exactly what you want to do and choose accordingly.

[Magnatron]

Although I don’t carry it as often as my Glock 43, I’ll never give up my .38 S&W J-Frame.

You’ll never get more reliable than a wheelgun.