First, they made the Ruger LCR in .38 Special +P. And I tried it. And my god, that thing hurt to fire. I am not in any way inexperienced in pistols, but that was hellish recoil even for a snub.
Then they made the .357 Mag LCR. And I fired it, just to see. .38 +P was about the same as before, no real change, but .357 was… intense. I’d like one for carry, once I get my CHL, because the noise and flash from the sucker would probably make an attacker die of fright*. Like having a stick of dynamite go off in your hand. Hell, the muzzle flash would probably light a muggers shirt on fire.
This just in! A short fic piece I wrote a while back, ON THE FARM, is appearing in this month’s Under The Bed Magazine! Check it out!
*This statement is completely false and not to be construed as any form of serious opinion, or your life is forfeit.
KAHFINBOOM… …eeeeeehhhhhHHHHHHHHHIIIIIIIIINNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGG… …huh? what’d you say? I can’t hear you…
I said where’s your hearing protection…?
I’d want cans instead of wussy plugs for that suka too.
s/instead of/over/
I’d put my muffs over my plugs at an indoor range. Double up on hearing protection.
Although it may not be evident on first glance, Joe IS wearing plugs in the comic.
I personally think that plugs aren’t enough at an indoor range for anything bigger than .38 sp. Outdoors… YMMV.
Have a S&W 649 .357 that lil bastard hurts like a bitch to shoot.. like being hit in the hand with a bat with each pull of the trigger… that said, there’s no way in hell I’d want to be on the receiving end of that…
I had my ported 1911 at the indoor range the other day. That was a little blasty. Then a dude came in with a .357 snub and took the lane next to me. Hell’s bells, my own sinuses were ringing by the end of his first (and last, heh) cylinder.
If you can’t fire the gun all day long at a training session with the full-power ammo you’re going to carry, it’s the wrong gun for you.
Meh. I’ve got a ported 2″ Taurus Titanium in .357Mag and it doesn’t hurt (me) to shoot it. My friend has the matching .41Mag, and it is louder but still not painful to pull the trigger on. There must be something about the “Ribber” grips that Taurus uses that helps tame felt recoil, and the porting keeps the muzzle rise down to about the same as a .38Spl with a 4″ barrel. Muzzle flash is on par with a Mosin carbine.
Ruger Super Redhawk Alaskan 454 Casull 2.5″
Fire that and then come talk about recoil.
How about “not no, but hell no”?
Want a gun-snob thing to incorporate into the comic?
Revolvers aren’t pistols.
A pistol has the chamber and barrel as one unit. A revolver’s chambers are separate from its barrels.
Battle/2=Knowing
Do you have a pre-1900s source for that? OED makes no such distinction (defining it as, “A small firearm designed to be held in one hand…”), and its two claimed potential etymologies are either Czech for “whistle, pipe, flute (apparently first applied during the Hussite wars to a weapon with a barrel and a clear-sounding shot…)” or Italian for a short sword or dagger (Pistolese, named after Pistoia, a town in Tuscany known for them). Neither of those would pertain to that precise an aspect of design. It seems to have been popular in the mid-1900s to make a distinction between “automatic pistols” and “revolvers”, but it seems to have been peculiar to that era; note that Samuel Colt’s patent #1304 (1839) includes mention of his invention (the revolver) as pertaining “to rifles, guns, and pistols.” (The 1836 patent didn’t appear to mention anything but the mechanism from what I saw.)
Don’t misunderstand me; I’m all for unnecessary pedantry, and would love for this to be true (largely so that I can be an ass about it to somebody else). I just want to know a source to back myself up with. 🙂
Wait, what is this? Two gun comics in a row?!?!?! You know someone’s going to complain!
🙂
There’s supposed to be “silly humour” tags around that comment. I hate wordpress….
Hey! The Bersa .380 is what we’ve got for CCL. Nice little weapon. Strong enough for a man . . . but fits in my small hands comfortably. Accurate as all fuck, even at 50 yards.
Got a good deal on a S&W 640-3 several months ago. I bought it mainly for indoor training with wax bullets, but did take it to the range once. Thanks to very good grips, it was fine with .38 Special (haven’t tried +P). I managed to get through a full five shots of .357, but figured that was enough.
For a lifetime. 🙂
BAH. Call me up when someone makes a snub 600 Nitro Express.
Wait, you won’t have to, I’ll hear the thing from here.
That’d be one of those carry pistols where your response to a would-be mugger is something along the lines of “back off, dude, or I’ll make you shoot this gun!”. 🙂
“It’s a 60 caliber. Only legal in four states, and this ain’t one of ’em.”
close, made me remember the movie. actual quote is:
“The Cowboy: Slim, I ain’t never seen a handgun that big before.
Frank Dooley: Yeah, it’s a 50 caliber. They used to use it to hunt buffalo with… up close! It’s only legal in two states. And this isn’t one of them.”
pretty good John Candy movie. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090660/?ref_=ttqt_qt_tt
load it up with some lighter .38 special rounds, should be fine.
My wife has a 640 that we shoot Magnum rounds through all the time. But, being a SS gun, it’s got enough weight to soak up a little recoil. Its hurt-your-handium cousins however, are significantly more robust on the kick. I’m pretty sure that full power Magnum out of a 340PD is about the least pleasant recoil I’ve felt from anything. The gun loses enough weight with each shot that each subsequent shot actually hurts worse. It’s cheaper to hit your hand with a hammer five times. They kill on one end and maim on the other. Those guns are horrible to shoot. I want one.
The LCR ain’t that bad. The Hogue grip has plenty of padding that dampens the recoil pretty well.
I agree with Dave. I have a LCR 357 and it’s not bad at all. Even with hot loads I shoot it one handed.
Yeah, not bad at all. Not the most controllable, but not bad.
Although, if you’re used to the “pop” of a .380, “earth shattering kaboom” is an accurate description of a hot .357 load out of that short barrel. The depicted fireball could be a little bigger and a lot brighter, too.
So this one time at gun camp… A friend had a .410 derringer. One of those little Cobray things. He only ever shot shot shells out of it, but it would take deer slugs… So I got a box and tried it. It didn’t hurt. at first. Just a shock and three fingers went numb. It hurt a lot later on. He declined to try it, and I think he still has the other four slugs.
Meh. I carry an American derringer as backup. .410 in one barrel, .45 Long Colt in the other. Took the original fat wooden grip slabs off and replaced them with thin stainless steel plates, covered with Shoe Goo.
Wouldn’t want to shoot it a lot, ’cause I’m not sure how many rounds the thing will take before it blows up. But recoil isn’t that bad.
I’m getting the idea that sensitivity to recoil is kind of a personal thing.
You may have, at some point, seen this guy used as a meme:
http://sherkat.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/redneck_hunter.jpg
@Dave Aronson knows him, as do I. Dude’s a recoil junkie. One Friday night, he showed up with his latest acquisition, a Magnum Research BFR in .45-70. He likes to share his toys, so several of us got to take a shot. With Winchester White Box, wasn’t bad. G decided he was disappointed in the recoil. Spent the week looking up SAAMI specs for the load, max tolerance for the BFR, and so forth.
The following Friday, G showed up with some handloads, and announced a testosterone test. Load one chamber, and take a shot in bullseye stance. Good thing there was only one chamber loaded. The sucker backed me up out of the booth, spun me around, and left me facing up-range with the gun pointed at the ceiling. I’m not a little boy. He’d found that the max possible load for that cartridge and gun was a 450+ grain bullet, loaded to about 1200FPS. In other words, about equivalent to my old .58 Springfield rifle-musket, with a double powder charge.
I hear ya. I fired Mel’s Fuckstick out at the ranch this last weekend, because I’d forgotten how much recoil it has.
Chopped down 18″ 10 gauge H&R single shot.
Pull the trigger and it feels like you’ve been roundhouse kicked in the shoulder. Always leaves me aching and back half a step. Mel doesn’t mind it, because she’s a kickboxer. Fuck that gun.
Cut down 18″ 10 gauge? I see why you call it the Fuckstick. Gotta be kinda fun to blow shit up with though.
Everyone, including me, pulls the trigger, then yells “FUCK”.
Every time we go down to the ranch, I put a round through it. And my shoulder feels it for days – goddamn thing is a cannon. And I bitch about it. And then we go back to the ranch and I forget what it was like last time, so I put a round through it.
So what you’re saying is that her Fuckstick is your Candy Corn?
I am reminded of when I switched from a 9mm para to .45ACP. Muzzle flash was GREATLY reduced thereby, though I did get into the habit of wearing both plugs and cans. (The only outdoor range was single-load. I only went there because that was the only place that let me shoot my SKS — there was a LOT of cheap steelcore ammo for it at the time.) And yes, I’ve shot .357 magnum too, and that puts out a blast as big as a basketball, even from a 6″ Colt Python.