Wheelgun Wednesday – .38 Specials

On Instagram it’s what’s known as Wheelgun Wednesday where people show off their revolvers. I decided to put any revolver posts on Wednesday to make things easier on myself in terms of having a content calendar which is jargon the pros use for keeping your content creation organized in a logical, thematic way.

I’m going to say this often but I think prepping has developed too much crossover with the tactical shooting community. Revolvers are a good survival arm – which isn’t necessarily a combat arm. The difference between the two is a survival arm must be multifunctional – it isn’t the “best” choice for warfighting or for anything. It is a compromise gun; a go to tool for 100 different situations you may face when SHTF which aren’t you heroically toppling a communist insurgency Red Dawn style.

It should be able to be pushed into self defense if needed but must also be an arm that can be used for hunting or foraging, have limited needed accessories, have a simple manual of arms you can manage as you get older, get sick, injured etc. And it should be something that your unskilled family members can pick up and use easily. It should also be robust and able to function well with subpar ammunition or in less than ideal environments.

Not to mention that survival arms need to be easy on the budget both the actual gun, the ammunition and the equipment needed to care for it.

Survival arms are a gun you will shoot a rabid ‘coon with after dispatching a beaver you trapped while on your way to get rid of the gopher in a neighbor’s yard. That’s real survival – what your ancestors actually did all day before we were the first world.

Revolvers fit that niche well. That’s just my opinion though.

What a survival arm isn’t is what you arm yourself with for assaulting positions, fighting off military opponents, clearing cities and all the other things tactical shooting is about. For that ARs and Glocks are probably the best choice. I’ll leave it to Bearded Tattooed man in 5.11 tactical gear to opine on that.

A revolver in .38 Special is probably a great choice for beginning preppers or preppers on a budget who want a gun to bang around the woods with, run a trapline with or shoo away a homeless goblin. Quality .38s are relatively cheap, the ammo can be found for about 50-60 cents a round and they are low recoil. easy to shoot firearms that people without much training or time to practice can become proficient with.

It should be noted many people buy .357 Magnum revolvers rather than dedicated .38s because they are one way interchangeable. That is to say a .357 can chamber any .38 cartridge including +P+ rounds (overpowered .38s basically that aren’t safe for some guns) plus .357 so if you like .38 your revolver becomes more versatile in this chambering. This is a more expensive option but if you expect to have to shoot large animals a better one. There are also a number of obsolete .38 cartridges you find floating around the Cowboy Action scene that will chamber in .38s safely like the .38 Short Colt and .38 Long Colt.

The .38 Special is actually a very old cartridge but rather than rehash what other gun writers have said let me hit you with a couple of block quotes. First from Gun Digest:

Also known as the .38 Colt Special and, more generally, as simply the .38 Special, this cartridge was developed by S&W and introduced with its Military & Police Model revolver, in 1902. This was originally a military cartridge meant to replace the unsatisfactory .38 Long Colt then in use by the Army. Colt brought out its version in 1909, which differs from the original only in bullet shape, the Colt being a flat-point style. Colt, Smith & Wesson, and others make revolvers specifically for this cartridge.

The .38 Special is considered one of the best-balanced, all-round handgun cartridges ever designed. It is also one of the most accurate and is very widely used for match shooting. Any .357 Magnum revolver will also shoot the .38 Special. It was once the standard police cartridge here and largely in Mexico and Canada. The .38 Special is also a popular sporting cartridge for small to medium game and varmints. With modern hunting bullets, it is effective for this purpose. Because of its moderate recoil, the average person can learn to shoot well with it in a short time, something not true of the .357 or .44 Magnums. The .38 Special is loaded by all major commercial ammunition manufacturers. Bullet weights from 95 to 200 grains have been available.

There is another benefit from that long history that may especially of interest to preppers. The .38 Special can be reloaded with black powder and still retain it’s basic characteristics. Revolvers are an evolution of black powder technology so they will function with these loads.

Cowboy Action shooter Jed I Knight has a video on this:

For more history of the .38 Special lucky gunner has a good write up of the cartridge.

But this section from an article over at Ammoland should partially explain it’s staying power as a cartridge:

The .38 Special is well known for its accuracy, relatively mild recoil, and the variety of loadings available for it. From a 146gr squared-cylindrical “wadcutter” bullet at 600fps, the original 158gr “Police” round nosed lead, later offered in a “high-speed version” by the 1930s clocking roughly 850ft/sec, it has become and will probably remain the single best selling and widely used revolver round in the world.

Read more: https://www.ammoland.com/2016/12/38-special-smith-wesson-cartridge/#ixzz7k9HOGQwt
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution
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Starting in the 1930s, some handloading folks decided they needed to soup up the .38’s speed yet further. These higher-pressure loadings were then used in the Smith & Wesson “N-frame” revolvers, and named the “.38/44 Outdoorsman.” This is the forerunner of today’s +P and +P+ loadings, but the cartridge then was more for sporting purposes, small game hunting and the like, versus the social work use the current high pressure rounds are used for today.

These developments headed by Daniel B. Wesson, with some assistance from Elmer Keith, the late and great gunwriter, eventually produced the equally famous .357 S&W Magnum cartridge, which is another story.

Today, shooters who buy .38s are typically going to be buying a 2” to 4” barreled revolver for home or personal protection use. While the round is not the “one plus ultra” for such use, neither is it exactly a slouch. All the big American ammunition manufacturers, CCI/Speer, Federal, Remington, and Winchester, along with later companies such as Cor-Bon, Glaser, and SIG-Sauer have created computer-designed bullets that greatly increase the .38s ability to stop a threat through controlled expansion and adequate penetration.

The best .38 Special ammunition typically are any of the premium jacketed hollow points from 110gr to 158gr, though many shootists still carry the old “FBI” round, namely the 158gr soft-lead semi-wadcutter hollow point in +P trim, available from Federal and Winchester, the two main suppliers of ammo to LE agencies.

In general you’ll find .38 revolvers in three configurations.

1. A “J-Frame” revolver. Usually a five shot “snub nosed” gun like you’d see in a pulp movie from the 40s. Despite being much maligned by the shooting community they’ve never gone out of fashion, probably because they’re extremely easy to use, easy to conceal and can be fired from a coat pocket without having to draw the gun. This is a “trick” that can’t be done with semiautos for the most part. If you’re planning on using it this way you want a hammerless or “bobbed” hammer style.

2. “Combat” or “service” guns which are full sized revolvers with 4-5 inch barrels. If you’re from the Northeast and are my age these will look familiar as they were the guns armed security at banks and other stores had. Your best ballistics will usually come from these as the snub noses on J-Frames can hamper velocity from the round enough to effect performance. Minorly. The “service” guns are what I recommend for carrying around the garden, on a trapline, camping etc.

3. Cowboy competition guns. Cowboy Action Shooters sometimes like the 38 because the lighter recoil means they can shave time off their matches. Some of these you find used have been “tuned” to be very fast shooters. Other will be replicas of black powder conversion guns which are mostly of interest to folks like me who like the historic revolvers

But .38s come in a lot of different varieties. Honorable mention in my mind is the Uberti Stallion revolver which is a scaled down Colt SSA with a 10-shot .22 cylinder that also comes in a .38 of the same size. I have the 10 shot and it’s a small handy gun and my go to woods runner. The .38 it came with a 3.5 inch barrel and a birds head grip. This would be a find gun if you could find one.

Accessories are also very easy to find for almost any model of .38 from holsters to speedloaders. Double action revolvers really shine with speedloaders which are only about $10 a piece so there’s no excuse to not get the best performance out of your gun.

.38 Special is similar enough to 9mm that Uberti is selling a .357 revolver with a extra cylinder in 9mm. In most carry configurations (short barrels) 9mm beats out .38s in terms of ballistic performance on paper. In a big iron you’re not losing much.

Aside from being rounds limited what are the cons of the .38 Special?

1. While it’s technically feasible to use it to bag small game like rabbits with the right loading without too much meat loss most people are better off with a .22 rifle for that sort of thing. I read a story in The Backwoodsman years ago about a guy who knew a rural family on the Amazon who used an old .38 to bag game. But necessity probably made them better shots than you and I.

2. Bigger animals you may need to engage may not be impressed with a couple .38s. Bears in particular may be quite sanguine after being shot with one though I would assume mountain lions and deer, being about human size, can be taken with a good self defense load from a .38. I’ve never done this so YMMV. Shot placement will be paramount to the effectiveness of this round.

3. Quality of .38 revolvers varies wildly – sometimes within company history. Charter Arms owners from the 70s will tell you the guns are great, people who bought them recently (like me) will say they’re OK. Some people who bought them in-between will tell you they fall apart in your hands. Germany flooded the American market with .38s in the 50s and 60s that were of vastly different quality depending on make and model. Stick with Smith and Wesson and Rugars or Rock Island if you want a real budget piece.

To reiterate point two check this out:

This video was taken almost a mile from the nearest water by a deer hunter. The gator was 13 feet long. You never know what you’ll run into but I wouldn’t want a .38 or 9mm in this situation. This hunter had a bow.

During the last crime wave gunfighters like Jim Cirrilo used revolvers to great effect. On the infamous Stakeout Squad in NYC in the 1960s – 1970s Cirrilo carried Smith and Wesson Model 10 and a Colt Cobra – a service style revolver with a J-frame backup. He paired his brace of pistols with a shotgun (though he sometimes used different guns like an M1 carbine) and came out on top in 20+ gun fights.

So don’t underestimate the .38. But like Cirillo I recommend pairing it with a long gun. I’m a shotgun guy but many people buy rifles chambered in .357/38 to pair with revolvers since shared ammunition is a budget friendly way to build an arsenal. .357 in a rifle is considered a very effective rifle for hunting deer and similar sized game.

If you’re on an extremely tight budget you can get a decent 38, 1000 rounds of ammo, a holster and four or five speedloaders for well under $500 so it’s something to think about. But context is everything. .38s shine in areas where you might forage and work traplines, but leave you outgunned in gang infested urban areas. In Alaska or Canada where bears are bigger the .38 isn’t a good choice. In the southeast where I live it’s fine. You have to figure out what’ll work for you.

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