Pocket Handgun: Small 9mm Auto or 642 Airweight?

[Glenn E. Meyer]

i do recommend that all the snubby users run one in a competition. Claude does that successfully. It is really a good evaluation of usage. Now you do have to hang about six speed loaders on your belt but that's OK. Try to focus on good double taps. Also, IMHO, ditch planning reloads - that's gamer and not relevant for snubby usage. Shoot till empty and reload. IDPA is more bug friendly than USPSA. Before I left TX, I shot an IDPA match with two guns, my 642 and 632. My goal was to hit the targets wells, reload without fumbles. It was fun and impressed some of the fancy pants gun users (LOL).

When I shot the 642 in USPSA here - our carry gun mini match - folks said - OH, you should modify the gun for speed loaders, blah, blah. Since when I carried it, it was loaded and a couple of speed strips, I said I would pass. I shot it for practice as compared to a 'win'.

You hand might ache a bit depending on loads. I shot a lot of WWB 130 gr FMJ and that was a bit of a sore hand. I did also shoot some cream puff reloads that I got but decided to stick with reality most of the time. I did shoot SW 32 Long though mixed with full bore 327 mags or 32 HR mags.

[wmu12071]

I'm familiar with the cost difference between LR and Mag. It's one one reason my cheap ass frugal self has a passel of LR pistols and revolvers and zero .22 Mags. To me that sounds like a good reason to have a LR for training and a Mag to carry.

Not sure I can pocket an LCR unless the .22s are smaller than the .38s...

I believe 22s and 38s are all the same size. Maybe a bit less weight. LCRs are ever so slightly larger then j-frames. I would be interested in a DA version of a NAA revolver if you could build such a thing.

[Wonder9]

I must be turning into a boomer.

I got this over another Glock (Peace be upon Gaston), and watched The Weather Channel before my day trip today.

[blues]

Welcome to the club. (Initiation is a bitch, but it beats the alternative.)

[Cecil Burch]

I'm just spitballing but I really think most women who decide to carry a pistol are far more motivated by preventing being physically assaulted, maimed, raped or abducted than being robbed of their wallet/handbag. Their motivation is the up close fight. Strong hunch. Can't prove it.

I agree with you here.

I get this from two different angles - 1) the gun-centric person - the kind of woman who either would already be involved a bit in the shooting world with the various female groups like Shoot Like A Girl , and who probably never did much physical sports activity or 2) the non gun involved female who joins a BJJ or Krav gym. Having a foot in each of those worlds means I see a lot of different women looking to protect themselves, and I would take an educated guess that I see more than someone with both feet in a single lane. Very few women I have seen give a crap about saving their purse. They all are worried to some level about personal harm.

One other aspect to this type of discussion when it pertains to women and loading them up with revolvers that has gotten lost is how much it sucks to shoot normal to +p 38sp loads in air weight snubs. I don’t care how good a shooter you are or how tough, or whether we are talking female OR male, running those loads through an air weight for a 50-100 round practice session is the opposite of enjoyable. And if you dread shooting a practice session like that, you are far more likely to not do it, and that dread will even carry over to just shooting a cylinder full in an actual defensive situation. So it’s no wonder that - paraphrasing the earlier comments about women not preferring snubs - a not super experienced shooter will prefer something more enjoyable, and hence the appeal of a 365 or G43.

Perhaps if instead of shooting 135 gr +p HPs in a 642 and getting scarred for life, that woman would shoot an LCR in 22lr. Maybe they would enjoy it so much (because it is not destroying their hands) that they would want to shoot and practice nore, which would make them more effective, and having no mental barrier to shooting means that not only do they not dread the wheel gun but like it, and they can focus 100% on solving the defensive problem.

Just a thought.

[Navin Johnson]

Watching this thread loosely. Adding to the above excellent post

When women hate to shoot a jay frame what are they shooting through it?

Sorry but the 22 is a 22 good luck ….. talk about a race to the bottom ……It is notably better than harsh language and I have a cousin who carries one.

And people wanting high velocity wadcutters defeats the purpose of a wad cutter.

At 642 with good stocks on it and gold medal match is quite shootable for almost anyone.

Perhaps a steel gun to practice with

The trigger on the 22 J frames I believe is quite a bit heavier.

Women also don’t have the 70 round shoot out fantasy that they believe they need a G34 and four magazines to deal with

A J frame may be a professional’s gun but a subcompact semi automatic is certainly not a beginners gun

YMMV

[BillSWPA]

AsI posted above, the single biggest mistake I ever made in teaching my wife to shoot was letting her try a lightweight J frame. This was not with +P ammo, but with standard pressure practice ammo. It took me years to correct the resulting flinch.

If something cannot be made to work on a range under zero pressure, then there is no self defense situation in which it can be made to work.

I completely understand the advantages of a revolver up close, such as in a car. However, in such a situation, other skills will be far more critical than the type of gun. Again, if it doesn’t work for that shooter on a range, it will not work when pressure is added.

There are some women who prefer a J frame. However, this is not a choice that should be made without trying such a gun first, and should certainly not be the default recommendation.


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[JHC]

I agree with you here.

I get this from two different angles - 1) the gun-centric person - the kind of woman who either would already be involved a bit in the shooting world with the various female groups like Shoot Like A Girl , and who probably never did much physical sports activity or 2) the non gun involved female who joins a BJJ or Krav gym. Having a foot in each of those worlds means I see a lot of different women looking to protect themselves, and I would take an educated guess that I see more than someone with both feet in a single lane. Very few women I have seen give a crap about saving their purse. They all are worried to some level about personal harm.

One other aspect to this type of discussion when it pertains to women and loading them up with revolvers that has gotten lost is how much it sucks to shoot normal to +p 38sp loads in air weight snubs. I don’t care how good a shooter you are or how tough, or whether we are talking female OR male, running those loads through an air weight for a 50-100 round practice session is the opposite of enjoyable. And if you dread shooting a practice session like that, you are far more likely to not do it, and that dread will even carry over to just shooting a cylinder full in an actual defensive situation. So it’s no wonder that - paraphrasing the earlier comments about women not preferring snubs - a not super experienced shooter will prefer something more enjoyable, and hence the appeal of a 365 or G43.

Perhaps if instead of shooting 135 gr +p HPs in a 642 and getting scarred for life, that woman would shoot an LCR in 22lr. Maybe they would enjoy it so much (because it is not destroying their hands) that they would want to shoot and practice nore, which would make them more effective, and having no mental barrier to shooting means that not only do they not dread the wheel gun but like it, and they can focus 100% on solving the defensive problem.

Just a thought.

+1 A-Z

I think I will take a shot at a sacred cow here. Although this is a site dedicated to training the pistol like it was our job . . .

For the 0-5 yard personal fight, one doesn't need very much live fire to make hits. Jeff Cooper observed this in the context of the Model 60 for this use case. His words to the effect "it's not much about marksmanship but availability and willingness. I think "availability" is not just about having it on one's person in a condition to be accessed but all the factors to involved in bringing it to bear in the entangled fight.

I've only seen a few non-enthusiast females pursue a defensive pistol. They did try out steel and alum frame J frames with standard pressure .38 ammo. None of them liked it. None of them feared it afterwards. But one aforementioned went to a keltec .32. IMO it was a pure talisman move based on the expressed mind set and the Keltec price.

The other 3 all prefer the J frame to all the other stuff they've sampled - G42, G43, G19, G17, 1911s in .45 and 9mm. They see their close range hits with small amounts of live fire conducted infrequently, compare the manual of arms for carrying in a ready to go condition and they just intuit a similar conclusion as has been explained by Demonstrated Concepts, DB, Claude Werner and other folks with similar experience.

D-con vid for general reference.

[JHC]

I'm familiar with the cost difference between LR and Mag. It's one one reason my cheap ass frugal self has a passel of LR pistols and revolvers and zero .22 Mags. To me that sounds like a good reason to have a LR for training and a Mag to carry.

Not sure I can pocket an LCR unless the .22s are smaller than the .38s...

FWIW and your mileage may vary - but I've been shooting rimfire j-frames (not exclusively, just 50-100 rds) every week for some months now and here's what I've seen from my 317 (3" barrel) and 43C in .22LR and my 351C .22 mag. Out to 7 yards or so the hits and speeds are pretty close. From 10 to 25 yards the .22 LR guns stretch out a fair lead over the 351C - surely because the Long Rifle gun triggers are not that much heavier than my centerfire J frames whereas the 351C trigger is substantially heavier (I still love it). Because I'm obsessive about stupid low probability capability that makes me like the Long Rifles a bit more. All the more silly because these are rarely my primary when away from home (G43, 26, 19).

My use case for them is as an always on me gun while I WFH, out in the yard, during some types of exercise in certain venues, etc.

[Mister X]

Mas Ayoob penned an article years ago titled “The real ladies handgun”, which really reflects the viewpoint of the vast majority of women in my life.

They’ll get their permit, but that’s about it. Revolvers are preferred. Especially enclosed hammer snubs. About the only practice they will do is at most running a couple of cylinders through the gun once in a blue moon. I can get my wife to engage in some additional dry-fire at home and some bare minimum H2H skills, but that’s about it. Wife, mother, sisters have absolutely no interest in becoming proficient with autoloaders. An NRA instructor tried pushing my elderly mother toward a Glock 26, which made little sense to her or me considering she could rack it, nor even remember or care to learn how to operate it safely.

Talk of taking down active-shooters and across the street shoot-goes in one ear and out the other(it pretty much does with me as well), as they are pretty much only worried about relatively common extreme close-quarter threats and I don’t think they are wrong. At home, hiding in locked walk-in closets, behind locked bedroom doors is the plan, especially if I’m not home. Maximum shot range is about 3-5 feet max, so I don’t really see where any additional shoot-ability factors in much. Plus I like the inherent ECQ advantages a snub revolvers offers should someone actually get through the layers of security before help arrives.

A few years back some guy started banging on the side of our house. I grabbed a Glock 19 and handed my wife a model 3” model 60, which she was pretty familiar with and reasonable proficient at using, but she was really spooked and kept wanting to preemptively cock it, despite having previous discussions on why that’s really a bad idea. I traded it in the next day for a 640.

Not necessarily ideal for all possible scenarios, but to me, a hammerless snub makes a lot of sense, for a lot of people, in a lot of different situations.