Originally Posted by
LSP972
Well, do you want to SHOOT it, or CARRY it? Sounds to me like you're looking for something to augment your M-642; something more "shootable". That's wise, and the older 640 you've been looking at is the perfect match.
OTOH, the AirLite/Ti-Scan (titanium cylinder, Scandium frame) J frames weigh a steady three ounces less than the AirWeights… and if you pocket carry, that matters. Belt or ankle, its a wash and not worth fretting over. But until I began doing it (carrying an AirLite in my pocket) there is NO way you could have convinced me that those three ounces made a difference. It most assuredly does.
No free lunch, however. As you correctly deduce, the AirLites are distinctly unpleasant to shoot; which presents one with a dilemma.
Allow me some wandering philosophy here: use it, or ignore it, as you see fit…
As a long-time trainer of cops, with the added responsibility of assisting in the clean-up after one of them shot something/somebody, I was a hardcore proponent of the "Practice as you do" dictum. IOW, if you carried a flyweight snubby, then by God that's what you should be training with. And that's why I have over 5K of rather unpleasant rounds through my EDC M-360PD AirLite snubby.
Time and age tends to alter one's perspectives. Two things to consider here: one, as I have aged, my tolerance for discomfort in general and recoil in particular has diminished noticeably. Second (and the more important of the two, IMO), after many thousands of rounds downrange through various "platforms", I feel comfortable and confident picking up (or drawing) a weapon that is very similar, if not exactly identical, to the one I normally shoot.
My rambling point here is, if you want a practice snubby that is more comfortable to shoot, go for it. You want to shoot bunny farts in it? Go for it. As long as your "shooter" is pretty close in configuration to your EDC example, you'll get plenty of training value. What I'm taking about here, specifically, is the stocks you put on both weapons. Those should be the same- EXACTLY the same.
One thing I have noticed about folks who were weaned on bottom feeders is their near-total lack of understanding of how much of a difference stocks make on a revolver. No fault of theirs; its something you learn after lots of exposure, and they lack that.
To get specific, lots of folks carry a flyweight snubby with small, "carry" stocks, yet their shooter has Pachmyar Compacs or similar, hand-filling, recoil-attenuating stocks. Number One on the list of Why That Is Not A Good Idea is this: the more comfortable stocks are NOT going to shoot to the same POI, especially one-handed under duress.
Anyway, sorry for the novella. Good luck on snagging that old M-640.
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