Sooner or later, I'm gonna get around to buying a lightweight .38 Special snubby, but every time I've made a move toward one since I started thinking about .38 snubbies back the spring of 2008, something sexier has popped up.First snubby that caught my eye was a Smith & Wesson 396 SC .44 Special called the Mountain Lite. Then I shot it and learned you can't repeal Newtonian physics that says for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
If a handgun is light as a feather, unless it's shooting a projectile that's both underpowered and also very light, it's gonna kick like a Missouri mule, like the "Mountain Bite" .44 Smith snubby. And underpowered light projectiles sucketh when it comes to actually doing what bullets are supposed to do, deter bad actions.
Then I bought a pair of stainless-steel Charter snubbies, .327 Magnum and .44 Special. While neither has what anybody would call low recoil, they're both manageable enough to enjoy shooting and to control for accuracy. And both are more than adequate in the deterrence department, ballistically speaking.Then I fell in love with another stainless sorta snubby, a S&W 65-3 .357 Magnum with 3" barrel, which is also pleasant to shoot unless you load it up with CorBon 180-grain loads, which I found out the hard way are just too hot for a K-Frame, even an all-steel one.
In between the two Charter snubbies, I almost bought my first Colt, a .38 Special Cobra, the alloy-frame version of the famous all-steel Detective Special. With the factory grips, it beat the hell outa my ring finger, so I bought some gap-filling grips that made it more comfortable to shoot.
But when I had the Cobra almost paid off at the gun store where I work, in came my second Charter snubby, the Bulldog .44 Special. It has a better trigger than the Colt, plus it's a .44, not a .38. So the Colt went back in the counter and the Bulldog came home.
But I have shot one lightweight .38 that both has a good trigger and won't beat you up too bad with +P loads, the new Ruger LCR polymer-frame .38 snubby.
A customer bought one that didn't have the Crimson Trace Lasergrips properly zeroed at the factory so I volunteered for the job of fixing that.
It took me a whole box of Hornady Critical Defense .38 Special +P jacketed hollow points to get those laser grips properly zeroed. It was a dirty job, but somebody had to do it.
And now Smith is finally stepping up with its first polymer frame .38 snubby, the new Bodyguard model soon to be delivered.
I'll pass on the new Bodyguard .380, 9mm is as small as I go with pistols, but the .38 Bodyguard got my attention with an ambi cylinder release as well as ambi controls for the integrated laser. That's a real feature for lefty shooters like me.
Maybe I'll get a chance to shoot one of the new Bodyguards before I finally buy my first .38 snubby. But until then, I'll just get by with my .44, .327 Magnum and .357 Magnum snubbies.
Here's a S&W video commercial on the two new Bodyguard models.
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