I’m with you. I’ve heard about it, but never actually seen any evidence to support the claim.
Bah. People (especially cops) change guns all the time…put on different grips, night sites, lasers, recoil compensators, flash lights, grip extensions, magazine release extention, has the barrel throated, etc., etc. And I’ve heard of not one case where it tripped somebody up after a justified shooting.
“…let alone succesfully.”
Argh.
Home defense? 12 gauge shotgun.
Not o over simplyfy…but rememember your basic physics.
1/2mv(squared) = kinetic energy.
it’s the velocity that matters more, not necessarily the size of the projectile. Of course, for maximum effect said projectile has to STOP and transfer all energy to target…
that being said, i’d go for which ever can hold more bullets if I was going to carry it.
don’t listen to the “well, I only need 7-10 rounds cause I always hit what I’m aiming at…” argument. If I have 18 rounds, and you have 10, odds are in my favor, I rekon…
shooting is one thing, having to reload while getting shot at is something altogether different.
my 2 cents.
Not to mention just the sound of jacking a shell into a 12 ga pump will stop most people cold. It is a very distinctive sound, and unless they are a total idiot they will know that what comes next will end them.
This thread is nearly a year old, I realize, but I have a substantive update. In addition, the information contained within is still just as valid now as then, so I hope the Mods don’t see anything wrong with me making an update, which tells how I used some of the advice in this thread.
I finally, finally found someone to loan me a Beretta .380, which I took to the range and compared with my 9mm.
I hate the .380. As was advised in this thread, the .380 was a smaller and lighter gun, which meant:
- It did jump around quite a bit.
- Was terribly inaccurate (for me).
- Had MUCH louder report and MUCH brighter muzzle flash.
- HURT my small hands. Bear in mind I can shoot 50 rounds of 240-grain .44 Magnum and only have mild discomfort. I shot 25 rounds of .380 and I actually have a bruise on my hand from it.
In fact, I rarely leave the range with unfired ammo - and yet had 70-some unfired rounds. I just couldn’t face shooting it anymore. Fierra emphatically agreed that “that gun sucks” and proceeded to Bogart the 9mm for the rest of the afternoon.
Looks like I will go with a heavy-barreled .357 Magnum, firing .38 out of it, as the next trial. And I have 70-some unfired .380 to dispose of…
If you can find one, I’d advocate purchase of a Grendel P-10. That little .380 is a great CCW, and you should have no problem holding a 6" pattern at 20 yards. I’ve found it to be a comfy piece to shoot, no hurt at all.
Grendel is no longer in business, their founder having started Kel-Tec. 
If I want something with more bite than the Grendel, I’ll choose the S&W 1006, although it will give your wrist a workout after a few bricks.
I haven’t read this whole thread, but I’ll pipe in a few cents worth.
I owned a .380 something which I liked, but it seemed to kick a bit. It was a smaller gun about the size of a Walther PPK. In fact, it fired and felt just like a PPK with a hint more kick.
I ended up selling it and going with a slightly larger 9mm. I went this route for two reasons. One, the gun I bought didn’t seem to kick as much. It had more of a “thud” then a “crack” (if that makes sense).
Second, 9mm ammo was far cheaper then .380 at the time. I haven’t priced .380 against 9mm for years, but last I looked it was still more expensive with less options.
Something to consider anyway.
Off subject: I used to own a .32 Bernidelli (sp?) which I loved. But I ended up getting rid of it because the rounds were more expensive then .45’s. That seemed a bit silly to me.
.380s as straight blowback weapons will kick more than 9mm. Picking up a Ruger or Smith and Wesson steel .357 and loading it with .38s is about your only option for ‘powerful yet not too powerful’ and low recoil.
FWIW my favorite carry gun ever was a Smith and Wesson 317 Lady Smith. Less than a pound loaded. No recoil. But it was just a lowly .22 however. But 8 rounds of .22 is nothing to sneeze at.
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- If you don’t like the vertical kick of a snub-nosed gun, then find a longer gun. 5- or 6-inch barrels don’t help concealability much, but do a lot for shootability.
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- If you don’t like the vertical kick of a snub-nosed gun, then find a longer gun. 5- or 6-inch barrels don’t help concealability much, but do a lot for shootability.
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No gun you buy will prevent you from flinching. That is a fundamental of marksmanship and is completely independant from the type of firearm used.
Dry fire your Ruger about 200 times before putting a live round in it. Each time, be meticulous. Aim, and squeeze the trigger the way you would normally. When the hammer drops, keep the trigger depressed with your finger. Rack the slide to reset the trigger and then come back on target. Then slowly let off the trigger until you hear/feel a metalic click. Then slowly squeeze again.
Keep dry firing like this until you really get used to shooting the gun unloaded. It will give you sort of a trained Pavlov response. Pulling trigger doesn’t equal huge recoil. Dry fire A LOT! Challenge yourself to pull the trigger smoothly and evenly with no flinching. Put a dime on the barrel if you have to. You dont need to be at the range for this. Pick a spot on the wall at your house. It’s free, and it does more for your aim than hours shooting live ammo.
After that, have a friend randomly load your magazine with live and dummy rounds. (You need to be at the range now 
) Come on target and do everything you were before. Squeeze the trigger until the hammer falls. BANG? Maybe, maybe not. You wont know until it happens. If there was a live round in the chamber, you would have gotten the “suprise” bang and recoil. Now, slowly release the trigger until it clicks, and start squeezing again. This time it might be a dummy round. The hammer will fall and nothing will happen. Rack the slide to cycle out the dummy round and repeat. Do this a lot. Until you dont flinch before, during or after you pull the trigger.
Try it, you’ll be amazed. Once you are used to firing an empty pistol and you convince yourself that the thing is empty, your flinching will be gone and your accuracy will improve.
I dont like to get into the “what gun do I buy” debate. There are way too many opinions. But since I never worked on commission, I would offer you some alternatives to buying a new pistol. If you want to reduce your recoil, go with the light loads as suggested and add some mass to your pistol. A good way to add mass - buy a light for the end of it. I light on your pistol is a must have for self/home defense in my opinion anyway! There are several models and makers. Let me suggest a Surefire. They are metal, heavy, and the brightest lights in existance. Adding one of these to your pistol will reduce muzzel flip.
Even if you get a new gun, get a light for it!
I suggest you visit Kim du Toit’s weblog. He seems to know his guns.
I think Bear_Nenno nailed it, this is a training issue and not a gun issue. You have an acquired habit that will be hard to un-learn. I also advise you get a .22 pistol and buy ammo in 1k quanities to practice with. I started my wife with a Browning Buckmark and she does extremely well with it because she learned no bad habits from day one. Dhe still doesn’t like the recoil of larger pistols but she doesn’t shoot erratically beause of flinching. It’s modestly priced, an excellent target pistol and has negligible recoil, particularly if you get one with a target barrel.
I’ll advise against a Walther P22. It looks cool as all get out and has the most sophisticated safeties of any semi-auto .22 I know of but the trigger is atrocious and AFAIk cannot be tuned.
I’ll second the black mark against the P22. We have two at my gun club and both are attrocious and are there to serve a single purpose. We occasionally have members that sign up who are physically incapable of lifting any other pistol. The thing is the most erratic firearm I’ve ever used. (Pardini’s on the other hand, are sweet guns)
Like Padeye said, starting training light will do wonders for accuracy and good habits. We’re not allowed to shoot center fire calibers until we can show 10 standard pistol targets (20 yds, shot with one hand) with scores of 70+ an the .22 pistols. I generally can shoot in the high sixties with a 9mm under the same conditions, and have shot a 77/9 shots from a .38 revolver. I like Berretta, and Sig Sauer. I wasn’t overly impressed with the Hi-Power but I haven’t shot anything for a large number of rounds except the Berretta. One of our pistol team members prefers to shoot IPSC with a CZ-75 or a Glock (don’t ask me which model, I don’t know).
All in all I don’t really care what I shoot so long as I’ve been training right (lots of .22 for accuracy).
-DF
I’m trying to resist the siren song of the Ruger .22 with the heavy “bull barrel” I think it’s called. IMO it’s just soooo much money for a .22…
My flinching problem is odd - you know, it may be hard to believe, but I really don’t think I flinch much with the Super Redhawk - and I typically can shoot fairly well with it (my groups are much tighter than with the 9mm). I’m fairly happy with the .44 Mag, except my arms are not very large (I have thin wrists too) and it’s difficult to hold it for more than 3 deliberate shots without resting.
I can’t help but wonder if part of the flinch issue is the semi-auto discharge. You see, nowadays I can only shoot at an indoor range - one where the P85 fires its shell to the side and back, where it riccochets off of the side wall and typically just past my right eye, off of my head, or onto my breast. So, trying to analyze this factually, I wonder if part of the problem is the fear of the ejected shell coming back to hit me. It is quite distracting, and I’ve had more than a few each session hit my safety glasses quite hard. And that damn .380 hit me so hard with the ejected casing it hurt my collarbone!
Of course the Super Redhawk is a revolver…maybe a heavy barreled .357 firing .38 Special (can I fire just .38 out of it too, to reduce the power even more?) would be good.
I mean, I believe the points on flinching are well made and accurate, and it’s likely I will in fact have to untrain myself out of the problem. But perhaps the problem would also be lessened with a smaller revolver…? I’m not certain if I can untrain myself when I’m getting tense over being whapped with the casings.
In days of yore when I was a really accurate shot playing Kansas Farmgirl, I always tested on outdoor ranges, and never had shells hit me except by freak accident…
.38 Special is the proper name of the ‘.38’ (as far as revolvers go); They are the same thing. You can shoot .38spl, or .38spl +p, or .38spl +p+, but they are all ‘.38’. SAAMI is the organization that officially determines what a ‘normal’, +p, or +p+ pressure would be for a given round. .38spl is as ‘weak’ as you can go in a .38/.357 pistol, though people can handload specially weak loads. The danger with that is that if it is too weak, you get a ‘squib’ load, in which the bullet doesn’t leave the barrel, and if you pull the trigger again, WHAM!
The only .357s that I know of that won’t shoot .38spl are the really small carry pistols; Some of them require a .357 load of a certain weight or higher because of cylinder spacing. The manual or a quick googling will tell for sure.
One thing to try that may help you with flinching (which everyone does or did!) is to practice with ‘snap-caps’ in the magazine or cylinder. A ‘snap cap’ is just a dud approximation of a round, to be used for training. That way, you can practice trigger pull wherever, and if you do it enough, it’ll rub off on you. Saftey, of course, is a major consideration when doing that at home. (Snap caps come in different colors, I like the bright orage, just to be sure!)
FWIW, I got my girlfriend shooting a bit with my Smith and Wesson PC 627 (.357), using .38spl. The gun is heavy enough and the round is tame enough that she got over the ‘flinch’ reaction fairly quickly. The downside is, as you said, that the pistol it too heavy for her to hold for too long. Still, when she does shoot, it’s pretty good. Maybe a Smith and Wesson 686 or 586 would be even better, since they are somewhat lighter, but still heavy enough to help sop up some of that recoil.
As for the ejected case, there isn’t much to be done about that. My little Makarov, with is 9mmx18 (kinda-sorta a Russian .380, some less clever people will actually shoot .380 out of them, even though it’s rather unsafe) will eject cases right towards my eyes. Eh. I go through a new insert for my Wiley-X shooting glasses every season, from getting dinged up from all the ejected cases. Just tell yourself that they cool off pretty quickly, even a .50 BMG case I caught down my shirt once
You, too? That’s the one thing I don’t like about my two Makarovs. Both of them kick brass straight back. Bad design flaw, that. I wonder if filing the ejector down a bit on one side would alter the trajectory any?
I’ve got tens of thousands of rounds through my KMK-678GC. It’s the best money I’ve ever spent on a gun. I rarely go to the range without putting at least 500 rounds through it. At one point, I had a thousand round a week habit.
Hard to afford that kind of practice with a centerfire. 
I believe just about any money you spend on a rimfire is money well spent.
I didn’t consider trying that. Mine is a Bulgarian. Maybe the Bulgarian people are made of sterner stuff, but getting hot laquered steel in my face isn’t the funnest thing in the world. Curiously, when I put a few boxes of (brass cases) Hornadys through it (sacrilege in a ComBloc weapon, I know!), it ejected back and to the right, though the brass was gouged like heck. Nothing but Wolf lately, though, and that is straight back. (Well, up and back.)
My buddy has a E.German, that ejects to the right, and a Russian that ejects forward and to the right. Shrug
Hey, for the 150 bucks I spent on it, I won’t complain. Too much.