Thinking about a wheelgun? ME TOO!!!

SayUncle  I’ve been thinking about a wheelgun:
 MAGAZINES ARE NOT ALWAYS 100% RELIABLE!

Actually, I went out and bought a short-barreled revolver for home defense several years ago, and I've never been attacked in my home.  This proves the defensive capabilities of a Stubby, Right?

No.  It proves nothing.  I never 'expected' to suffer a home invasion (I have nothing worth stealing .. everybody knows that) and the proposition that having a gun in the home prevents robberies is  .. not really real.

I just wanted to have a reliable firearm in my home,

And the 1911 just doesn't get it because ... magazine spring.

Magazines, and .... RESTING!



When I was competing in USPSA matches with an Open Gun, I had several magazines ... two 140MM magazines, and four 170mm magazines,  I shot at least four matches every month .. 48 matches a year (although I did miss a match or two each year).

In between matches, I would take the baseplate off of all my magazines, and allow all of the magazine springs to extend to their full lengths; I would never allow a magazine to sit 'under tension' for more than the day of the match.  This is because I was aware that a magazine spring which sits under tension for awhile loses it's 'strength' and is not 100% reliable.

And I bought new magazine springs for all of my six .38 super magazines every year.  I discarded the old magazine springs.  Not cheap!

The reason for this fanatic devotion to magazine springs was because reliability is at least as important as accuracy in a competition firearm; when you want to shoot 23 rounds in a string without reloading, it's because time spend reloading is wasted time, and I just wasn't good enough to spend 2 or 3 seconds in a stage reloading unless it was necessary to do so according to the stage instructions.

(Which is why I had 140mm magazines ... capable of holding 17 or 18 rounds of .38 super, each, depending on the follower ... instead of all 170mm magazines, capable of holding about 25 rounds; when you have to make a mandatory reload in an IPSC match, the shorter magazines are faster to reload. The difference between winning and losing an IPSC stage is how much time you spend during 'non-shooting' activities .... which 'reloading' is very much a 'non-shooting' activity.)

But that's "Competition"; mundane things like "home defense' have much more mundane priorities, and one of them is that if you have a gun sitting in a nightstand drawer 24/7 for years at a time, the one thing you do NOT want to do is rely on a magazine spring to hold its tension.

You've got your first shot, but the follow up shot is .. problematical.  I don't want my second shot to misfeed because the magazine won't feed reliably, when there is a Stranger In The Home.  So I don't rely on a magazine.  I don't expect myself to rotate magazine springs; I want a gun that is using a limited number of 'springs', and those are 'at rest' from one season to the nest.

That means that the gun in the drawer is a Revolver.

There are a limited number of springs in a revolver, and unless you keep your hammer cocked (why would anyone do that?), most of the springs in a Revolver are at a limited degree of tension.

In a word, the springs are 'resting'.  And therefore more likely to be more responsive when called upon to perform.  (Ignoring facetious sensual references ... even thought they may not entirely inappropriate.)

So I'll keep a revolver in my nightstand, thank you very much.  There's also a semi-automatic, as a back-up.

There's also a pump-action shotgun available, but again I'm not relying on springs.  But the philosophy is a bit different.

The shotgun already has a round in the chamber; no springs are involved.  There are a few rounds in the tube, and even if the feeding of rounds in the tube of a pump-action shotgun are spring-loaded, the tension is not so much when it's not fully loaded.

I figure if the first few rounds in a shotgun don't dissuade a home intruder, nor the six rounds in a revolver, there's always the 1911 which admitedly DOES rely on a magazine spring to feed the next round ... but really I'm running out of options here.

Oh .. and there's another revolver and .. but you don't REALLY need to know my home-defense game plain.