pgandy
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Post by pgandy on Oct 6, 2016 1:27:41 GMT
My dad had a Colt Government Model in .38 Super. I was not impressed with it. I think the cartrige was originally developed for the FBI because of its superior penetration in regards to .38 Spl. Later I discovered there was an accuracy problem with an off the shelf Colt but after modification, usually rebarrelling with a third party barrel resolved this. The problem appeared in the chamber and I cannot remember the issue now. The term “packing in the woods” made me think of trail gun and I think a large frame .357 with at least a 6” barrel would be hard to beat. Personally I like S&Ws. If one is thinking of survival I’d go with a .22 LR. The game that it is capable of is more plentiful, one can carry considerably more .22 than larger centre fire cartridges, and it’s quieter. And what’s more important squirrels, birds, rabbits, etc. are more numerous than big game, and they can be dressed, cooked, and eaten in much shorter time than larger game. Not to mention what one is going to do with all of that bear, or whatever, meat in the field? There is a storage problem to keep it from spoiling not to mention attracting packs of hungry animals vent on an easy meal. I see a difference in a trail gun and a survival piece. Just thought that I’d throw that out there.
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Post by bluetrain on Oct 6, 2016 10:57:35 GMT
I believe, though I'm not absolutely certain, that the issue with the .38 Super was that the case head was not fully supported. That also was a problem for those who wanted to soup up the cartridge to what they thought it should be. There is apparently a school of thought that believes that neither firearm manufacturers nor ammunition manufacturers know what they're doing. Anyway, the .38 Super has never been all that popular, probably because the .45 auto had such a good reputation.
The thing here is that not everyone can afford to have a number of guns, each one for a specific purpose. But selecting a good all-round handgun isn't so easy. Everyone has their favorites guns and favorite scenarios. The selection is huge, too.
I mentioned that I thought a 3" barrel K-frame was a good (not exactly ideal) all-round gun, assuming that you might want to carry it concealed now and then, but I've had several with 5" and 6" barrels, including one Model 29 with a 5" barrel. That was my Skeeter Skelton Special. One model that I may have mentioned before that I thought was an interesting combination of features was a Model 60 with a 5" (it might have been 6") barrel, in .357. It wouldn't have been pleasant to fire, to be sure, but it looked like it would have been awfully handy. Never had one, though. There's a long list of guns I've never owned but the list of ones that I have had is pretty long, too.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 6, 2016 11:35:40 GMT
Ammunition selection is an important consideration. For large North American mammals you'll need penetration to reach vital organs. There are a fair number of good choices available commercially (Buffalo Bore comes to mind, though I don't use them. I roll my own.). My personal opinion, carry the gun you shoot well and load it appropriately.
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Post by L Driggers (fallen) on Oct 6, 2016 14:18:13 GMT
Here's a interesting fact Grizzly Adam's used 2 36 cal cap and ball revolver to kill a lot of grizzly bears. If did kill them he finished off with a knife. Yes Grizzly Adam's was a bear killer a long with other animals, he did have a pet bear named Ben.
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Post by bluetrain on Oct 6, 2016 15:28:52 GMT
Well, bears are a lot tougher than they used to be. Everybody knows that. Used to be you could kill a bear with a .44-40. Can't do that anymore. Nothing short of a .300 magnum, which is a bare minimum, will do. And anyway, they keep loading down factory ammunition and nothing is as good as it used to be. Fortunately, bears don't know that.
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Post by AndiTheBarvarian on Oct 6, 2016 16:10:45 GMT
Interesting, how comes? Grow they bigger, fatter? Wear they vests? Will you need a rocket launcher in a few decades?
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Post by Deleted on Oct 6, 2016 18:27:51 GMT
Yeah, W.D.M. Bell hunted bull elephants with 6.5x54mm back in the pre-WWI era. That caliber is considered low end for white tailed deer these days, and don't even mention using it for bears.
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Post by scottw on Oct 6, 2016 20:35:17 GMT
Lmao. Hey, you want to shoot a bear with a .22, I say go for it. For my part, my mom raised ugly kids, not stupid ones.
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Post by bluetrain on Oct 6, 2016 20:40:28 GMT
We once had an injured deer show up in our yard a few years ago. Someone knocked on the door to tell us that and to let us know they had already called animal control. A half-hour later a young woman came and killed the deer with a .22 rifle. It did take two shots, however (deer probably wouldn't hold still) but it was dead.
Colt had an advertisement years ago claiming that someone had killed some dangerous animal with a .25 auto. Savage showed someone shooting an alligator with a .32 auto. But advertising has always been 90% hyperbole. Take the .45 auto for example....
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Post by scottw on Oct 6, 2016 21:03:02 GMT
Agreed. I suppose if you don't have any experience with firearms, you believe the claims. And .22 rounds are fine for headshots, on small to medium animals with skulls that aren't too dense. But why chance having to chase them if you don't have to? I'm not so big on hunting anymore, I suppose because it's not necessary to survive. But when I did, I always took the sure approach. It just made the most sense I guess.
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Post by bluetrain on Oct 6, 2016 23:02:33 GMT
No offense to all the woodsmen out there but where I live, it's more likely you wouldn't be in the woods in a survival situation. You'd be lucky to be on the road. Might as well stay in your own well-stocked home.
Alternative situations suggest to me that you are very unlikely to have anything at all with you and you'd probably be injured to boot. Likewise, you probably already know that much of the country is not forested at all but is either grassland or just plain desert. Much of it is farmland, too. Overseas, however, it's a different story, depending on where you might find yourself.
All of the above not withstanding, there are woods behind the house where I live that goes on for a mile, intersected here and there with roads and ponds. There is game there, from squirrels to deer. Sometimes I see deer, even from the kitchen window, but to go find one deliberately is another story. I always see tracks, which I think are usually fresh, at least when the ground isn't too hard and dry, but you're lucky to see the deer themselves.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 6, 2016 23:39:15 GMT
Sorry, I misunderstood the discussion in this thread. I didn't realize the OP was hunting bear. Totally agree, take a big game rifle, bear can be pretty tough to but down and you want to do maximum damage. I never got a bear, did get an elk in Wyoming, and a lot of whitetails during my hunting years. One lesson I learned very young, it matters less what you shoot them with than where you put the shot.
I knew guys who jacklighted deer with 22LR, back in the day. But there's no stretch of the imagination where you call that hunting...
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Post by AndiTheBarvarian on Oct 7, 2016 3:49:27 GMT
I really want to know why it's harder to shoot bears know?
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Post by scottw on Oct 7, 2016 4:13:52 GMT
I really want to know why it's harder to shoot bears know? It's not Andi, there's just better tools available than .36 caliber cap and ball pistols (which weren't exactly pop guns to begin with). It's a matter of the right tool for the job. Myself, I would not feel secure at all with my nine mm beretta against a large pissed off black bear, that just wandered into my path with three cubs following her..not the ideal tool for the job. I would want a .44, or at the very least a .357. Ideally a rifle, but the op was talking about sidearms.
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Post by scottw on Oct 7, 2016 4:21:22 GMT
I believe, though I'm not absolutely certain, that the issue with the .38 Super was that the case head was not fully supported. That also was a problem for those who wanted to soup up the cartridge to what they thought it should be. There is apparently a school of thought that believes that neither firearm manufacturers nor ammunition manufacturers know what they're doing. Anyway, the .38 Super has never been all that popular, probably because the .45 auto had such a good reputation. The thing here is that not everyone can afford to have a number of guns, each one for a specific purpose. But selecting a good all-round handgun isn't so easy. Everyone has their favorites guns and favorite scenarios. The selection is huge, too. I mentioned that I thought a 3" barrel K-frame was a good (not exactly ideal) all-round gun, assuming that you might want to carry it concealed now and then, but I've had several with 5" and 6" barrels, including one Model 29 with a 5" barrel. That was my Skeeter Skelton Special. One model that I may have mentioned before that I thought was an interesting combination of features was a Model 60 with a 5" (it might have been 6") barrel, in .357. It wouldn't have been pleasant to fire, to be sure, but it looked like it would have been awfully handy. Never had one, though. There's a long list of guns I've never owned but the list of ones that I have had is pretty long, too. The model 60..the one I wanted but never got. I lusted after that pistol in my youth..I would look at pics of them magna-ported with the 5" barrel and custom grips and just drool
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Post by bluetrain on Oct 7, 2016 10:51:52 GMT
I just went back and re-read the original post and he didn't mention hunting bears. He was worried about them hunting him.
I may have mentioned this before but recoil should probably not be an issue with either a .357 or .44 (or .41) magnum. But the blast from those cartridges is something else. Make no mistake, however, there is serious recoil from all of those cartridges, although the 125 grain .357 is much less than the others. The blast combined with the recoil does make for a handful, though.
Personally, meaning something based on my own experiences only and not what someone else has written, the one gun with the hardest recoil I ever fired was a lightweight Colt Officer's ACP, which was a .45 auto. The blast wasn't much and the recoil didn't hurt but you really had to hang onto the thing. There wasn't going to be any double-taps with that little thing. Other than that, it was a really nice little gun. For some curious reason that I've never figured out, a lightweight Colt Commander in .45 auto was nothing like that and it was only a little bigger. In fact, I'd even go out on a limb and say the lightweight Colt Commander was just about perfect. But for the life of me, I don't know why I don't have one. I guess it has something to do with wanting to own every gun, one at a time. Doing pretty well so far.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 7, 2016 13:03:03 GMT
Personally, I prefer a revolver for an outdoor situation where you may have to draw and fire at very close quarters. I typically carried a 4 inch L frame in .357 for anywhere east of the Mississippi. Practice was easy with .38 special (can't even guess how many went through that old S&W) then loaded full power stuff for the field. From hunting situations I wasn't worried about the extra recoil. In adrenaline-heavy situations you never notice it. For the Rockies I bumped up to a .44 mag. We were up in the Bridger wilderness area and grizzlies were a possibility, but so were moose. Never saw a bear but did wind up in a staring contest with bull moose at 25 yards. We both wound up very slowly going our separate ways, but, damn, those things are BIG! My buddy who lived out there laughed when I told him about it later. His opinion was that a bear will usually try to avoid you, but a moose is more dangerous because it doesn't care.
But if you're going to carry a handgun for defense against wild animal, I'd seriously recommend a lot of practice, and not go any lighter than a .357. Under stress it's ridiculously easy to miss with a handgun, even at close quarters.
Yeah, lightweight commanders are nice guns. I used a full size 1911 for IPSC (don't know what they call it these days) just like most everyone else back then. Commanders weren't too popular. The serious competitors put thousands of rounds through their guns, and the aluminum frames on the Commanders had trouble taking the pounding.
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Post by bluetrain on Oct 7, 2016 13:40:27 GMT
I used to shoot a lot but I never put thousands of rounds through anything. Of course, some people will tell you that if you don't go out and shoot one or two hundred rounds every weekend, you're not properly trained. It should be assumed that all handgun shooting will be at close quarters. However, most of us probably do their shooting at indoor ranges. I did, anyway, and the closest outdoor range is almost fifty miles from home. The indoor range had a maximum range of 25 yards. But go outside and 25 yards seems like nothing. The question is, when do you start shooting? How close?
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Post by Deleted on Oct 7, 2016 17:40:15 GMT
I was lucky, I had an outdoor range. We usually practiced at 25 yards, but our local matches liked to throw in longer range stuff, so it wasn't unusual to show up and find yourself engaging targets out to 40 yards. For hunting practice we'd go over to 100 yard range and play with the big boys. Even back then I had to use a scope on my .44 at those ranges. The guys who really impressed me were the silhouette shooters, routinely knocking over steel plates at 200 yards with iron sights.
Yeah, when to shoot is always the question. Probably best rule of thumb is the same one to use in cases of self defense against humans. Be prepared to shoot when you're in immediate fear for your life... and be prepared to defend that choice afterwards. Killing a game animal out of season, or a protected species anytime, will buy you quite a bit of legal trouble.
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Post by augustine on Oct 7, 2016 17:58:42 GMT
S&W 500 magnum 4" barrel is what I carry in the woods.
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