Once the dominant choice of plainclothes and off-duty cops and armed citizens with concealed carry permits, the supposedly-obsolete short-barrel revolver remains the most likely \u201cround gun\u201d you\u2019re likely to find in a gun shop display case of handguns that is crowded with polymer frame semiautomatic pistols these days. Why has this particular revolver endured so well in a time when autoloaders are dominant?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Simply because they have certain real-world advantages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Contrary to popular belief, they\u2019re not just \u201cshort range weapons.\u201d In one of my cases many years ago I had to prove that an armed robber with a stolen Charter Arms 2\u201d barrel Undercover .38 Special would be a deadly threat at 100 yards. With a notary public present to record the whole thing, I took four snub-nose .38s to a one hundred yard range and emptied them at a man-size silhouette target. The exemplar Charter and a Smith & Wesson Chief Special delivered two out of five life-threatening hits each. A six-shot S&W snubby did so fifty percent, and my wife\u2019s Colt Detective Special .38 went six for six. Back in the day at Lethal Force Institute, when we shot handguns from 100 yards in the third-level class, two brothers from New Jersey shot the whole thing with the one-and-seven-eighths-inch barrel S&W Bodyguard .38s they both carried, and held their own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The snubnose revolver fits the side pocket, the hip pocket, the coat pocket, and the chest pocket of overalls and I know people who carry them all those ways. A friend of mine is alive because when a larger, stronger man had him disadvantaged and was ripping his service revolver from its holster, my cop buddy drew a Model 38 Bodyguard snub from his off-side hip pocket and blew the would-be cop-killer\u2019s brains out. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This type of gun is ideal in an ankle holster. Two of my readers bought ankle rigs and .38 snubs after one of my articles recommended them for backup in Combat Handguns <\/em>magazine. One, a black security guard, killed a white racist attacker who had disarmed him of his service revolver with the Charter .38 he snatched from his ankle. A cop in the Carolinas who couldn\u2019t reach his duty weapon while seat-belted did <\/em>pull his Colt Agent .38 snub from his ankle holster and blow away the ambusher who had shot him while in his patrol car.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My favorite backup gun has long been the \u201chammerless\u201d S&W Centennial-style .38. No safety catch to release, no hammer to be cocked to dangerous-under-stress hair-trigger status, but five rounds of 135 grain Speer Gold Dot +P hollow points designed by Ernest Durham and his team at Speer for positive expansion from a snub-nose .38 Special back when almost all NYPD officers carried snub .38s for backup or off-duty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Once the dominant choice of plainclothes and off-duty cops and armed citizens with concealed carry permits, the supposedly-obsolete short-barrel revolver remains the most likely \u201cround gun\u201d you\u2019re likely to find in a gun shop display case of handguns that is crowded with polymer frame semiautomatic pistols these days. Why has this particular revolver endured so […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":7831,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-7825","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7825"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7825\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7826,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7825\/revisions\/7826"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}