Dots Don't Go Everywhere...Yet

I'm on record as mentioning I'm not a huge fan of the 3" J-frame, and that steel J-frames in general don't have a ton of applicability in my world.

Small revolvers fall into one of two categories in my world. Either they're a pocket/ankle gun, or they're a belt gun. For me, a 3" J-frame is too long for a pocket, and a steel-framed one is too heavy for a pocket. I've pocket-carried a S&W 432 (and a 442 before it) for almost 25 years now, but a steel gun would make my winter coat hang funny.

"But you could carry a 3" J-frame in a belt holster!" you say. Well, sure. But I could also carry a Detective Special, a Taurus 856/327, or a 3" Smith & Wesson K-frame in a belt holster with no more real difficulty and get a 20% ammunition capacity boost. In fact I have been carrying an 856 TORO for a year now.

This is what makes the new R.O.C. J-frame red dot mount from Shield Arms a real head-scratcher for me. It mounts to a Smith J-frame using the sideplate screws, but all the photos show it on a Model 442. That effectively makes the gun too big for a pocket and anyone who's actually carried an ankle gun should get a good belly laugh out of the idea of sticking an MRDS in the most dirt-and-lint collecting spot where it's possible to tote a blaster. (Even IWB, the 507k on my TORO needs blowing clean every few days.)

I guess you could use it to mount a dot on a belt-carried 3" 640 or something, but all the J-frame revolvers in Smith & Wesson's current catalog lineup that could really benefit from a small red dot... think the 3" Model 60, Model 63, or Model 317 ...all have adjustable rear sights, which means that they're already compatible with an Allchin-type scope mount.

I mean, I get that red dots are awesome, but we're a ways off from a functional MRDS solution for pocket guns.

(H/T to Gorillafritz.)

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Is Novelty a Necessity?

In a post about the Heritage Roscoe on social media, a reader asked what the new offering from Heritage would do that a double-action revolver hadn't already done, or if maybe it would do it in a different or better way.

That got me to thinking on how a segment of the market demands novelty as the justification for a new model.

In the case of the Roscoe, you only have to look at the name of the manufacturer, "Heritage", to realize that cutting edge novelty isn't exactly their milieu. After all, their bread and butter offerings are inexpensive plinkers that are functional and cosmetic clones of a 151-year-old revolver design.

Sometimes the retro is the point. Colt has done reissues of their WWI and WWII era M1911 and M1911A1. Springfield Armory sold bunches of their "Milspec" model, so much so that they brought the GI, or as we called it in the shop back then, the Even Milspeccer Milspec.

In the case of the Roscoe, what it does is bring the basic blued-steel 5-shot snub-nosed revolver back to market at a reasonable price. Smith & Wesson still offers the Model 36 Classic, but the MSRP on that thing is better than double that of the Roscoe. 

Of course, fifteen or twenty years ago there would have been no call for a gat like this because its main competition would have been the ocean of used Model 36's, but these days even J-frames aren't immune to price pressures from collectibles. A Chiefs Special that's priced like the Roscoe is gonna be a beater, and one that looks like all shiny and new is going to present the owner with that classic quandary: How much do you want to shoot a gun when a turn ring on the cylinder can knock a Benjamin off the value?

You could do like a lot of collectors: Put the pristine Chiefs Special in the safe and buy a beater 36 to shoot. Or you could buy a shiny Roscoe and shoot it.

Heavy Metal Range Trip

At the range yesterday morning with the Daniel H9 Compact reboot of the Hudson, as well as a Walther PDP Compact Steel Frame, both of which will be in reviews in upcoming issues of Shooting Illustrated.

There was a time, not all that long ago, where metal-framed guns were largely a dead letter, because the difference in manufacturing costs were so great that there just was no point in even trying to compete on price.

With the advances in CNC manufacturing over the last decades, costs have come down enough that some metal-framed pistols, like the alloy-framed Smith & Wesson M&P variants, are barely more expensive than their polymer-framed kin.

There's also this idea that a metal gun, being heavier, will shoot much flatter and faster, although the difference is usually minimal for the vast majority of shooters (and raw split times are among the most meaningless measurements in shooting.) Still, though, think of how many jillions of dollars people have spend on esoterica like tungsten guide rods in the hope of adding another ounce or two out toward the muzzle.

I, personally, just dig the fact that there are more choices out there.

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Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #252...

You know how I know that I've been living in plastic pistol land for a long, long time? The Walther PDP Steel Frame Compact test pistol arrived for a Shooting Illustrated review and I was like "Jeezis this thing is a boat anchor. How the hell is anyone supposed to carry this?"

I threw it on the scale and it weighed in at a hair over two pounds, six ounces. You know what else weighs a hair over two pounds, six ounces? The Smith & Wesson 5906, as do the various full-size steel 1911s that I carried every day for something like ten years. 

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Git Gud Scrub

Differently Triggered

We live and we learn... Well, hopefully we do. I know people who haven't changed an opinion in years, or even decades. In my most recent column at Shooting Illustrated, I talk about triggers...

"This is going to be another in an intermittent series of columns examining the various topics on which I’ve changed my mind over the last 20 years or so as a result of being hip-deep in the defensive-pistol world.

This particular column is going to be all about triggering people by discussing what I’ve learned about triggers over that time—and why what I thought I knew about triggers before then was wrong, possibly even counterproductive..."

I really wish I'd gotten the Model 19-5 onto Denny Reichard's bench before he passed. I suppose I can just swap factory springs back in myself, but it ain't the same.

Snap Softener

The ostensible purpose of yesterday's range trip was to get the Trijicon optics dialed in on the FN 509's, but on the way out the door I tossed the Smith & Wesson Model 639 into the case as well, since I hadn't fired it yet.

I'd forgotten how much 9mm recoil a two-and-a-quarter pound all-stainless pistol soaks up. This is a very soft-shooting handgun. I'd also forgotten how the stainless front sight, machined integrally with the slide, disappears against light-colored targets.

I let my friend Michael pop off a few mags, too, and managed to get at least one decent action photo!

Less-Than-Special Sauce

The .44 Special cartridge debuted with the large frame Hand Ejector revolvers at the start of the previous century.

It was a hot-rodded version of the existing .44 Russian cartridge, and used a longer cartridge case so to avoid being chambered in the old top-break No.3 Smiths, in much the same way that .32 S&W Long had been stretched so as not to be used in older .32 top-breaks.

The natural home for the new round was a big N-frame with a 6.5" barrel, like the one at the top in the photo above. In those hoglegs, it lobbed a fairly heavy 246gr lead round-nosed projectile at velocities on the north side of 750 feet per second.

With the coming of the .44 Magnum, though, the old Special largely fell out of favor and is now mostly found in one of two settings. The first is cowboy action shooters who just gotta be different from the .45 Colt majority and are perfectly happy shooting 246gr LRN bullets in their single action sixguns.

The other setting is big-bore snubbies on medium frames, a fad that started with the Charter Arms Bulldog, but has since been riffed on by Rossi, Taurus, and Smith & Wesson.

Shooting heavy, unjacketed projectiles in these smaller pieces tends to turn them into kinetic bullet pullers, especially the lightweight models. In fact, the aluminum-framed and titanium-cylindered Smith & Wesson Model 296Ti, bottom center in the above photo, goes so far as to mark "MAX. BULLET 200 GRAIN" right there on the side of the barrel.

There are a few 200gr loads I'd carry without much in the way of worry: Speer's 200gr Gold Dot would be my first choice, but I wouldn't lose sleep if all I had was 200gr Federal LSWC-HP or 200gr Winchester Silvertips.

I dunno about the Hornady Critical Defense, though. It uses a 165gr version of their FTX Flex-Tip hollow point, and clocks over 900fps out of my Model 296. Thing is, Hornady's own ad copy says it'll only penetrate ten inches of ordnance gel after defeating 4LD. And against bare gel? Well, it expands beautifully but bleeds off a lot of penetration in the process, barely making it eight inches into the gel block. That's pretty underwhelming performance for a big-bore revolver cartridge.

Remember, bullet placement is three dimensional!

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King of the K-frame Carry Magnums

One of the most sought-after postwar K-frame variants, from back in the earliest days of the Smith & Wesson Performance Center: 

"In the early ’90s, Smith & Wesson introduced their Performance Center, and back then it was much more of a custom gun shop than it is now. With the pistol half of the Performance Center helmed by Paul Liebenberg and the revolver side of the house under the supervision of John French, the shop turned out small numbers of essentially hand-built variations on the standard production models found in the Smith & Wesson catalog.

In 1995, the Performance Center took standard round-butt Model 13 frames and fitted 3-inch heavy barrels, but with a full underlug. The cylinder latch was cut away on the bottom to make sure it would clear speedloaders, which wasn’t the standard practice on S&W revolvers at the time. With the action converted to double-action only, the hammer spur was bobbed and the trigger had a non-adjustable overtravel stop fitted in its backside.

The action was slicked up, the cylinder charge holes were chamfered, and the barrel was treated to quad Mag-Na-Ports to tame recoil. Finally, the whole thing was finished in a bead-blasted matte blue, fitted with abbreviated Eagle Secret Service grips for maximum concealability without compromising grippiness, and the finished product was etched with the Performance Center logo."

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Neat Blaster!

Ian's got a video with the story behind a very historically significant Smith & Wesson Chiefs Special, from back when S&W had cool names for their wheelguns instead of boring numbers.

Performance Center

I was pretty happy with how this photo for RECOIL: Concealment turned out. The article's not half bad either, if I do say so myself.

It's on newsstands now, or you can get a genuine dead tree copy from BezosMart.

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Best Millimeter?

Greg Ellifritz put a post up recently wherein a reader of his blog inquired as to the desirability of toting a specific 10mm load in his CCW piece, namely a 200gr hard cast solid.

We'll overlook the fact that said reader used the phrase "stopping power" in relation to handgun bullets, and note that his choice of a 200gr hard cast solid is emblematic of the state of 10mm ammunition up until recently.

The 10mm Auto cartridge hit the scene in the mid-late Eighties and peaked in popularity in the early Nineties, featuring brief usage by, most notably, the FBI and the Virginia State Police, as well as a longer stint with the Kentucky State Police.

Durability issues with the frame-decocker models ended the flirtation with the round by the Feds and the VSP, and after a decade's use the KSP guns were starting to show wear and tear, and the pistol had been long discontinued by S&W so Kentucky went to the Glock 35.

For many years there were only a handful of CCW/defense type handguns on the market and lack of interest meant that most carry-type loads dated to the late Eighties and early Nineties, in the chambering's heyday. Projectiles like Winchester's Silvertip, Federal Hydra-Shok, and Hornady's XTP were generally excellent performers in bare and clothed gelatin, but lacked features that made for modern barrier-blind (or at least barrier astigmatic) performance.

Then again, as a private citizen I'm not as worried about defeating windshield glass or shooting through plywood with my concealed carry blaster. Were I toting a 10mm, I'd have no issue carrying the 175gr Silvertip, for example, which performs well in tests as well as in real life.

In addition to the classic loadings, there are newer ones out there, thanks to the renewed popularity of the chambering. Rounds such as Speer's Gold Dot, Hornady's Critical Duty, and Federal Punch take advantage of developments in projectile design made since, oh, 1992 or so.

With the newer bullets, I don't know that there's a lot to choose between with .40S&W and 10mm performance. With the older loads, like Hydra-Shok and XTP, I've found that the extra ~100fps bump from the Big Ten turned the heavier 180 and 200 grain loads that could be marginal in the .40 into more reliable expanders that were less likely to glog up and over penetrate.

As far as high-velocity heavy bullet loads, save that stuff for hunting or hiking in bear country, because most of the extra steam's wasted on non-quadrupeds.

Never Deal in Absolutes

So, the latest weekend knowledge dump from Greg Ellifritz linked a column about holsters that I wrote for Shooting Illustrated some five years ago. In that column I made an absolute statement with which I no longer agree, or at least not entirely.

Starting with the most important, a concealed-carry holster needs to safely hold a handgun in such a way that it cannot be inadvertently fired when in the holster. An object that won’t do this is not a holster as far as I’m concerned. It might be a very nice, tooled-leather gun-holder thingie you put on your belt, but a holster it ain’t.

“But, Tam,” you say, “A lot of classic revolver holsters back in the day had cutaway trigger guards! For speed!” I think we can safely say we did a lot of things in those days that weren’t very safe in retrospect, like chain-smoke while pregnant or dump raw sewage in rivers. Let’s not do those things anymore.

Talking with Darryl Bolke over the intervening years has definitely softened my stance on that. 

A properly-fitted quality leather holster will be snug enough around the cylinder that it is phenomenally unlikely that the cylinder can be turned while the gun is holstered. After all, what's the first thing you do if you're grappling with a dude holding a revolver? Right. You grab the cylinder to tie the gun up.

This does not change the fact that I have seen quite a few poorly-fitted leather or nylon gun-holding belt pouches with exposed triggers that do not hold the cylinder that snugly and I have, in fact, pulled the trigger to demonstrate that fact for their owners.

While I think that as a general rule of thumb, "cover that trigger guard" is a safe principle if you prefer erring on the side of caution, if you're smart enough to tell the difference between a well-fitted wheelgun holster and a substandard sausage sack, get down with your bad self. If it's fitted well enough that there's visible boning for the cylinder, you're almost certainly good to go.

We live and we learn and we adjust our opinions to reflect the things that we learn.

Smith & Wesson Model 57 in PWL pancake.

Tab Clearing...

Some bookmarks for things about which I need to write longer posts:

• Mas reviews the S&W Equalizer.


• How to tell that you've spent way too much time on the internet.


• Go touch some non-ballistic grass.

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Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #245...

Here's a personal favorite of mine: A 1955-vintage K-22 Combat Masterpiece.

This pre-Model 18 with Spegel stocks basically lived in my range bag for years. I have no idea how many rounds it had before I got it, but it's seen rather a large number since then.

It's safe to say that I've busted more caps in this revolver than any other single wheelgun I've owned. It's entirely possible I've put more rounds through it than all other revolvers I've owned, combined. 

I couldn't tell you the exact round count I've put on it, but it's definitely in excess of 10k. Maybe as much as half again that total. There was one leisurely afternoon in the bays at MCF&G where I shot up a whole 525-round carton in a sitting, having to punch the chambers every hunnert, hunnert-'n'-fitty rounds or so to keep them from getting too sticky. Had to brush the cylinder face & forcing cone, too.

That was when I'd been shooting enough to still have a pretty good callus on my trigger. That narrow, serrated trigger chews me up enough these days that I'm usually pretty much done after a hundred rounds of fast double action.

I need to get that front sight fixed from where some previous owner had filed it down because he thought the gun was shooting low and left. Now, even with the rear sight bottomed out and cranked way to the left, it still shoots high and right of the sights. I've shot it enough that I can automatically dial in Kentucky windage at seven yards, but on an 8" plate at 20 yards you gotta hold off the lower left edge of the plate to get a ding.

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Hey, look!

"With factory Novak sights, a bobbed hammer spur, factory frontstrap checkering, wraparound Delrin grip panels, ambidextrous safety/ decocker levers, and more, the 3913 was an answer to the pleas of the cognoscenti that the second-gen 469, with its chubby double stack grip, hadn’t addressed. There was a hot minute in the early ’90s when the 3913 was the CCW darling of the cognoscenti."

Suitable for adventures...

...but you'd need a bullwhip made out of some kind of fancy leather to go with it. Maybe with sparkles.

Here's a Sunday Smith: A factory nickel .44 Special Hand Ejector Second Model, dating to early 1921. The serial number would indicate it was the 472nd one off the line when production resumed after the Great War.

The mother of pearl stocks are gorgeous, but are too old, fragile, and valuable to actually fire the gun with them on it. They're just for lookin', not for shootin'.

Photos were shot with an Olympus E-510 & a Zuiko 12-60mm f/2.8-4 lens.

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #242...

Smith & Wesson made literal millions of their famous Military & Police model medium-frame revolver in the .38 Special caliber, but only a little bit more than a hundred thousand in .32-20 Winchester.

The .32-20 was a popular round for small game in Winchester and Marlin lever action carbines, and matching revolvers from Colt and Smith enjoyed a brief period of popularity in the early 20th Century.

While Neal & Jinks's indispensable book claims the Model of 1905 - 3rd Change only came in four- and six-inch barrel lengths, this example is quite clearly a 5" gun and Paul Scarlata wrote up a 6½" model in his review for Shooting Times, so take the Jinks info with a grain of salt.

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Sneak Preview

Today's Sunday Smith, a pre-World War One K-frame Hand Ejector in .32-20 Winchester Centerfire.

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Snub Noir

My Classic Carry piece on the Smith & Wesson .38 Terrier, "A Gat for Gumshoes", should be on newsstands now, in issue number 33 of RECOIL: CONCEALMENT.

Speaking of noir, I seem to have been Tuckerized as the femme fatale by Kelly Grayson in his short story in the collection Pinup Noir. It was actually a pretty good story, very noir, and there are 1911s.

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