That’s a nice article. I wonder about the statement that flat nose bullets “hit harder” then round nose. (In the “Better then 9mm” section). Has this ever been borne out with a force vs time graph? Searching around sure turns up a lot of discussion but very little real data other than the water jug variety.
I did find some ballistic gel photos that showed that flat nosed bullets penetrated deeper than round nose, which is really counter intuitive. I couldn’t link directly to them. There is this exhaustive report but I didn’t quickly see the same weight/caliber bullets tested as round vs flat:
I don’t know if I completely buy that either but the argument, I think, is that a lower amount of energy with a similar sized bullet (almost identical actually) with a flat nose causes it to tumble on impact where the higher energy bullet with a point stays straight. So it should have less penetration in effect, but more stopping power. Hollowpoint and various other enhancements notwithstanding, that seems plausible.
This sitegives what looks like a pretty solid side by side comparison of the two. It seems to go back and forth a lot - “on one hand the 9mm… but on the other hand the .38 special…”, and it bases some of it’s conclusion on the fact that 9mm guns can hold more ammo and are smaller and easier to carry than a 38 revolver, which aren’t relevant points in the question of which has more stopping power as a single bullet. But it concludes:
Depends on the gun. Things like the condition of the barrel crown, cylinder alignment to forcing cone, etc…
Put a decent snubby in some sort of ransom rest and fire a group with it out of the same cylinder chamber (hole), it’d probably print a very respectable group at 25 yards.
Give it to a person who struggles with it’s long double action pull and short sight radius, and the term belly gun is born.
Give it to someone like Jerry Miculek and…
That’s true of most cartridges though. There are eight different marks of .303 British service ammunition, with different projectile weights/types, but they’ll all safely chamber and fire in any .303 British-chambered rifle.
Even now, many commercial cartridges come with a range of different projectile weights/velocities but we don’t consider them “variants” of the main cartridge.
Leo, I believe the wadcutter is a favorite of some for defense. For those who don’t know what it is, a wadcutter is simply a cylinder of lead, no point or tapering at all. Used by revolvers only for target shooting as it cuts a perfectly round hole in the target, no shredding.
The .38 special is also NOT 38 caliber. It is .357 and can be shot in the same guns as .357 magnum shells.
Back in the days when I would take friends to the range, I would load my .357 revolver with alternating cartridges to show people the difference in BANG and recoil. Then let them shoot both rounds in my 1894 Cowboy II.
I haven’t re-read the thread for this, but this is pretty extraordinary if it is true (which I have no reason to doubt or even check), and that after all this chatter among experts it is mentioned only now after the smoke has cleared, as it were.
Re the human target, it was basically a setup for the Man himself to chime in.
Like any other technical nomenclature from the 1700s, firearm and ammo designation is full of exceptions and weird measurements left over from Olden Tymes.
12 guage shotgun shells are bigger in diameter than 20 guage. Why? Because when you use a pound of lead to make spherical balls to shoot from your gun, you can either make 12 big ones or 20 smaller ones. It made sense at the time given the things they could measure precisely and the things they couldn’t.
Stuff labeled “.38” that’s really .357 inches in diameter is just another oddity that made some kind of sense for backward compatibility in 1820 or whenever.
It’s to do with whether the diameter of the barrel is measure from the lands or grooves of the rifling. It’s .357" from the lands, .38" from the grooves, I believe.
These are for the more expensive weapons, weapons designed to kill not merely for personal safety, and high quality weapons designed to cope with the higher pressure … I guess when they designed a cartridge and bullet to be better at killing, they wanted to label it as something … also they didn’t want anyone to think there wasn’t much difference and use them in a cheap weapon that can hold a .38 cartridge… And having realised they had a sweet spot on the bullet and cartridge dimensions, they realised that they didn’t want to give it a specific name , such as “.38 army”… they sold it to all military and police…
Sorry, I don’t want to sound especially rude, but did you read the thread and the many factual and knowledgeable answers to the OP’s question it contains?
Beat me to it, newme. I wrote an article a few years ago explaining how various names and caliber designations came about. I may still have it around here somewhere. As you mention, the .38s are simple, case diameter to within a thousandth or few.
A few quirky ones pulled from Cartridges of the World:
500 Express Nitro for Black
5.5mm Velo Dog
7mm Shooting Times Easterner
7mm Whisperer
375 A-Square
44-95 Peabody “What Cheer”
I have no idea how many small arms cartridges there have been. My older copy of the book lists over a thousand cartridges with an article on each one. And within many of those articles are mentions of previous or similar cartridges too obscure to list.
The 12th Edition of that same and rightly esteemed volume lists more than 1500 cartridges, many of which are - as you note - beyond esoteric, even to arms historians like me.
What’s crazy is people keep inventing new cartridges too.
