{"id":80967,"date":"2022-05-12T10:26:57","date_gmt":"2022-05-12T15:26:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=80967"},"modified":"2022-05-12T10:29:08","modified_gmt":"2022-05-12T15:29:08","slug":"80967","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=80967","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

BLUF:
\nThey’re not a bad round to carry in a snubbie<\/p>\nPRMRRU-2021Ballistic-test-compressed<\/a>\n

Snubnose Revolver Ballistic Gelatin Tests<\/a><\/p>\n

When I was a kid back in the early 1980s, my parents had some rural land where we spent weekends hiking, hunting, and shooting guns.\u00a0 A man up the road from my parents\u2019 place was a well known \u201cgun guy.\u201d\u00a0 He shot constantly and often offered to let young Greg shoot all his cool guns.\u00a0 One day my Dad and I were visiting him and I saw a gun on his kitchen table that I hadn\u2019t seen before.\u00a0 I asked if I could look at it.<\/p>\n

The man knew I was a safe gun handler, even at my young age.\u00a0 He said \u201cIt\u2019s loaded.\u00a0 It\u2019s a Smith and Wesson revolver.\u00a0 You know how to unload it.\u00a0 Point it towards the ground, unload it, and then you can check it out.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

I took it out of the leather belt holster and carefully unloaded it.\u00a0 It turned out to be a two-inch Smith and Wesson Model 10 round butt.\u00a0 It was loaded with target wadcutters.\u00a0 I knew what the bullets were because I bought a $5.00 box of wadcutter reloads at the local gun shop to shoot in my Smith and Wesson Model 19 every weekend I visited my parents\u2019 rural property.<\/p>\n

Even at age 14, I knew that wadcutters were target loads.\u00a0 My dad\u2019s police revolvers were all filled with the\u00a0\u201cTreasury Load\u201d<\/a>\u00a0110 grain +P+ jacketed hollowpoints that were in vogue at the time.<\/p>\n

The man explained that this was the gun his wife carried when she walked around in the woods on their property.\u00a0 I asked him about why it was loaded with wadcutters.\u00a0 He explained that most hollowpoint .38 ammunition didn\u2019t expand well out of two-inch barrels.\u00a0 He said that the wadcutters would penetrate deeply, would cut a sharp hole, and had mild recoil.<\/p>\n

He then made the statement: \u201cOut of a short barrel, the wadcutters perform better than the hollowpoints.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Internally, I laughed.\u00a0 Everyone knew hollowpoints were better for defensive use than target wadcutters.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Now, almost 40 years later, I\u2019m not quite as confident in that opinion.\u00a0 Maybe the old dude actually knew some\u00a0 things\u2026<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been interested in ballistics as long as I can remember.\u00a0 I\u2019ve witnessed hundreds (maybe thousands) of bullets shot into every test medium you can imagine.\u00a0 For what it\u2019s worth, back in the early 1980s we didn\u2019t have ballistic gelatin.\u00a0 We soaked big phone books in a five gallon bucket of water overnight and shot our rounds into the sodden paper to see if they would expand.\u00a0 The .38 special\u00a0 \u201cTreasury Load\u201d killed lots of old phone books.<\/p>\n

Flash forward to present day.\u00a0 My friend\u00a0Chuck Haggard<\/a> has done ballistic gelatin testing at several of the conferences I\u2019ve attended as a student or instructor.\u00a0 I always found his demonstrations to be fascinating.<\/p>\n

Last fall Chuck performed some ballistic testing during a block at the\u00a0Pat Rogers Memorial Revolver Roundup<\/a>\u00a0held at Gunsite.\u00a0 Since the class was revolver-centric, Chuck did his ballistic gelatin shoot using snubby revolvers.\u00a0 Mark Fricke assisted him with the demonstration.<\/p>\n

Mark got all his expansion and penetration data recorded into a useful format yesterday.\u00a0 He requested that I share the information with my audience.<\/p>\n

The tests used Clear Ballistics gelatin (which isn\u2019t identical to the FBI calibrated gelatin but pretty close).\u00a0 The revolver muzzle was approximately one foot from the gelatin block when Chuck fired each shot.\u00a0 All of the shots were fired through a challenging four layers of denim material before entering the gel block.<\/p>\n

The denim often plugs hollowpoints.\u00a0 It regularly makes bullets penetrate deeper than in bare flesh.\u00a0 Chuck shoots his tests through four layers of denim because the bullets that come out after that particular test look the most similar to the bullets Chuck has seen pulled out of dead bodies at the morgue.\u00a0 Although I probably haven\u2019t been to quite as many autopsies as Chuck, I will concur with his conclusions.\u00a0 Bullets pulled out of people don\u2019t much look like the perfectly mushroomed hollowpoints the ammo manufacturers show you.<\/p>\n

Here is the data from Chuck Haggard\u2019s demonstration compiled and analyzed by Mark Fricke.<\/p>\nPRMRRU-2021Ballistic-test-compressed<\/a>\n

Take a look at the results.\u00a0 Are you surprised?<\/p>\n

As my dad\u2019s old friend told me almost 40 years ago: \u201cOut of a short barrel, the wadcutters perform better than the hollowpoints.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Most of the hollowpoints out of the snubbies didn\u2019t expand.\u00a0 The ones that did aggressively expand often didn\u2019t meet minimum penetration guidelines.\u00a0 All of the factory loaded \u201ctarget\u201d wadcutters penetrated at least 12 inches of gelatin (the FBI standard).\u00a0 Some expanded slightly and some yawed.\u00a0 In general, they performed as well or better than almost all of the premium defensive ammunition.<\/p>\n

For many years I\u2019ve been\u00a0advising folks to carry wadcutters, Speer Gold Dot 135 grain hollowpoints, or the 110 grain solid copper hollowpoints like the Corbon DPX load.<\/a>\u00a0 See why?\u00a0 Those bullets are top performers in the .38 special gelatin testing results.<\/p>\n

In the .22 caliber snubs, I carry and recommend the CCI Velocitor.\u00a0 It performed very well in this test.<\/p>\n

If you are interested in snub revolver terminal ballistics, study this data.\u00a0 I think it\u2019s one of the single largest snubby revolver ballistic tests I\u2019ve seen published on the internet.\u00a0 Thanks to Gunsite for hosting the class.\u00a0 Thanks to Chuck and Mark for doing the work and compiling the data.\u00a0 I hope it proves useful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BLUF: They’re not a bad round to carry in a snubbie Snubnose Revolver Ballistic Gelatin Tests When I was a kid back in the early 1980s, my parents had some rural land where we spent weekends hiking, hunting, and shooting guns.\u00a0 A man up the road from my parents\u2019 place was a well known \u201cgun … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gun-schtuff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=80967"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80967\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":80971,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80967\/revisions\/80971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=80967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=80967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=80967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}