IIRC, he started off with SuperVel but after his first shooting he noticed it had skidded off the perps skull a couple of times. He started experimenting and came up with
a sort of jacketed wadcutter designed to bite into the skull at an angle. Also he was loading pretty hot at essentially mid range .357 magnum pressures.
I like the BB load as well. When I'm lazy and tote the LCR in the woods instead of a "real" gun, I swap out the EDC Speer Short Barrel load for the BB Wadcutters.
As for being a revolver connoisseur, what if instead of boxes of factory ammo you have bins of brass, a huge stash of powder and primers, a lead furnace, a lubrisizer, and several hundred pounds of lead? #PreparedForTheZombieApocalypse
Chris
Best I remember, Cirillo spent a fair bit of time trying to get better terminal ballistics himself in the pre-Miami days. A lot of the accomplished gunmen who wrote seemed to express a feeling of considerable consternation at their first experience having shot bad guys with handguns only for the bad guys to have taken very little notice of it. That resulted in a lot of experimentation in search of something that would accomplish the intended result sooner.
It wouldn't surprise me if, after years of experimentation on his own and paying careful attention to wound ballistics, he settled on wadcutters for the snub in his use and that idea spread to others from him.
3/15/2016
While we're on the topic of terminal ballistics and revolvers, we would be remiss if we didn't listen to Bob Stasch:
Especially his account of engaging a perp with a .44 magnum multiple times...one who, prior to that, had taken an entire cylinder of .45 Colt AND a cylinder of .38 +P from another officer's primary and backup revolver...and upon seeing no useful result stopped targeting the chest and put two rounds into the dude's pelvic area to finally knock him down. And the dude took 10 days to die.
3/15/2016
A look at some JHP rounds Chuck Haggard fired at the recent Revolver Roundup in his 4 layers of denim test. Note that you don't really see expansion. Most of them penetrated adequately. Contrast that with the wadcutters:
...which look pretty much the same. The hard corner of the wadcutters has a more pronounced cutting action in flesh than most of the JHP rounds when they fail to expand. In the typical 2" or less small revolver, you're just not getting anything extra apart from the blast and recoil.
3/15/2016
I'm not sold on gaining nothing with the jacketed bullets. Given my highly scientific back forty plinking, I'd wager things would look different with something like a couple layers of sheet metal car door between the gun and block. Those soft lead wadcutters are eventually going to meet a barrier that will stop them but the faster copper sheathed JHP would still clear.
Similarly, the rise of the individually owned automobile was another factor in the popularity of the 357 Magnum. There, the extra belligerence did tend to give more reliable performance. At least in the era of plain lead solids.
That said, I'd still take the easily realized accuracy and low recoil of the match wadcutter over whatever a JHP has to offer in the flyweights.