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Handgun Philosophy: Use a big bullet and hit 'em hard!

Although I can’t help grin when some ridiculously rowdy monster cartridge knocks me silly, I have never found the need to carry one of the “magnum” or big bore rifles when hunting North American game.  Frankly, I see no reason for a hunter to endure the punishment of heavier recoil unnecessarily.  In fact, my favorite big game rifle is chambered in the now aging, quite mediocre 270 Winchester.   Now, I’m not trying to sell anyone on the .270.  There are many great rifle cartridges.  My point is that I would never encourage any hunter to choose a more powerful cartridge that produces more recoil than is comfortable for extensive practice.  When it comes to rifles, this philosophy hasn’t changed.  However, my philosophy has changed quite a bit when it comes to handgun hunting.  When it comes to handgun hunting, bigger is usually better.  Further, I don’t believe there is any handgun that is too powerful even for the smallest of deer.

I began thinking I was ready for the challenge of handgun hunting a number of years ago.  As is typical for me getting into something new, I read all I could find and I talked to the few hunters that I knew who had actually hunted big game with a handgun.  I had a very accurate S&W 686 .357 Magnum that I naturally wanted to use.  My reading had told me that experienced hunters felt the .357 Magnum was considered to be the minimum cartridge suitable for taking deer sized game.   My buddy Ron clearly advised against it. Surely they were wrong.  Sticking to my minimalist, dance with the one you brung philosophy, I convinced myself my .357 Magnum would work just fine. 

The first decision that I had to make was selecting a pistol bullet to use for big game hunting.  Many of the writings recommended a relatively heavy hard cast bullet, but cast lead bullets seemed far too old fashioned.  I wanted a modern bullet.  My experience loading rifle cartridges had biased me towards lighter bullets to maximize velocities, flatten trajectories, increase kinetic energy.  I decided to go with some Hornady 125g XTP bullets in lieu of the 158g or 180g offerings.   The loads shot quite accurately.  So after a fair amount of practice, I headed into the woods with my .357 Magnum revolver hoping to get a shot on a nice Whitetail Deer. 

Sure enough, after putting a few days in the woods, a nice Doe came casually walking past my ambush site.  As she stepped into an opening about 50 yards away, I did my best to put the bullet behind the shoulder.  At the shot, the deer jumped and took off on a run, but slowed fairly quickly possibly going down just out of sight.  After a short wait which was surely adequate for a hard hit deer, I began tracking the deer.  Without too much effort, I found some sign of a hit and I began tracking the deer. 

To make a long story short, I jumped the deer fairly quickly and again some time later.  At first there was a good blood trail that was easy to follow, but after nearly a mile of tracking I still had not recovered my deer.  As I slowly tracked the deer, it began snowing heavier and heavier until I found myself in a complete white out.  Needless to say, I never recovered that deer. Embarrassed and feeling like a total idiot, I stuck my tail between my legs and I I reported my failure back to my buddy Ron.  I did learn my lesson and I never again hunted deer with the .357 Magnum.  In my hard earned opinion, the .357 Magnum is NOT ADEQUATE for reliably taking deer. 

It is probably worth highlighting some of my many mistakes.  I made a lot of them.   First, I made a poor choice in my bullet selection.  In order to maximize the potential of the .357 Magnum or any handgun cartridge that is marginal for the game being hunted, the goal should be to maximize “penetration.”  In the .357 Magnum, I should have used a hard-cast semi-wadcutter bullet of at least 158g. 

Secondly, my expectation of the stopping power of this relatively small handgun was also a bit naïve.  I must have expected a “magnum” handgun to kill like a rifle.  Re-examining this assumption, I learned that my .357 Mag only produces 500ftlbs of kinetic energy at the muzzle.  Rifles are designed to kill by imparting “hydrostatic shock” when the kinetic energy of the speeding bullet is suddenly and violently absorbed by the soft tissues of the animal.  While there is no hard-fast threshold, it has been suggested that at least 900 ftlbs of energy is required for hydrostatic shock to cleanly kill a deer sized animal.  So a handgun like the .357 that only has 500ftlbs at the muzzle must utilize shock and a bit of bleeding to make the kill.  While handguns do sometimes kill like lightning, I have learned to think of the killing power of a .357 Magnum more like I approach a deer shot with a traditional muzzleloader or even like an arrow.  When using these weapons, I tend to wait as long as possible before beginning the tracking.  If I had given her an hour or two before tracking, the Doe might very likely have been recovered only a hundred yards from where she was first hit. 

My biggest mistake was not listening to Ron or those that wrote about the inadequacies of the .357 Magnum for hunting deer.  By dismissing their experience, I forced myself to learn the hard way.  Especially with the internet, we can draw upon the successes and more importantly the failures of others to define reasonable expectations and limits for ourselves. 

Not long after returning from this hunt, I got a call from Ron.  Ron had found a used Contender for sale and bought it hoping that I would be interested in giving it a try.  I was immediately and hopelessly infected with a chronic case of  Contenderitis.  Contenders are wonderful.  They are accurate, relatively easy to shoot, and you can interchange barrels chambered in cartridges ranging from the .17HMR to the 45-70.   The readily available and wide selection of barrels has allowed me to do a lot of experimenting with various chamberings in search for optimal performance. 

This time I listened to the many experienced hunters that went before me.  Almost immediately, I bought a 10” 7x30 Waters barrel off of Ebay which by the way is an excellent place to find just about any barrel that trips your fancy.  Some would say that the 7x30 Waters is one of the finest big game cartridges available for the Contender.  I agree.  Although the 7x30 doesn’t see its full potential in a 10” barrel, it is capable of obtaining 2300 ft/s with a 120g bullet.  This translates into a little over 1400ftlbs of kinetic energy.   Carrying nearly 3x the energy of the .357 Magnum, the 7x30 Waters has performed almost flawless for me on many Deer and Antelope hunts. 

However, even with 1400ftlbs, I have never seen deer sized game anchored by my 7x30.  Even with well placed shots, I find that Deer and Antelope  run for a few seconds before expiring.  So a 30 minute wait followed by a short tracking exercise is fairly common.   To insure anchoring deer sized game, I believe a larger caliber or a longer barrel producing higher velocities would be required.

I first saw the limitations of my 10” 7x30 Waters barrel when Antelope hunting in Southeastern Wyoming.  I had found a nice buck tending his Does on the backside of a small hill.  My rangefinder told me the buck was a distant 225 yards away.  At the range, I had practiced with great success out to 300 yards so I was quite certain that I could make the shot off of my butt pack.  At the crack of the shot the buck hunched up and walked stiff legged.  I could see he was hit solid in the chest, but he wasn’t going right down.  I loaded another round and hit him one more time in the chest.  After a few slow steps he bedded down and slowly lowered his head for good.  While the 7x30 certainly did its job, it was running a little low on energy by the time it made it to the Antelope. 

A well tuned Contender is an amazingly accurate and nearly perfect hunting tool, but there is something about a revolver that says “handgun.”  I was visiting a newly opened Sportsman’s Warehouse when a beautiful S&W 629 with a 6.5” barrel caught my eye.   Knowing my .357 Magnum was inadequate for deer hunting, I guess I had a weak moment.  I purchased that .44 Magnum on the spot and began practicing for the upcoming hunting season.   I soon felt confident at 50 yards offhand and a bit further given a solid rest.   The .44 Magnum isn’t a 300 yard laser beam, but then again my longest shot on a Northern Whitetail still stands at a relatively short 110 yards.  With the opening of the Wisconsin gun season, I headed into the woods in search of some venison.  My chance came when a mature Doe walked up behind me.  How she got there?  I will never know, but she was headed right past me only 20 yards away.  I slowly turned, quickly placed the crosshairs on her shoulder and let fly.  She dropped instantly to the ground.  Let me stress INSTANTLY.  She dropped like she had been hit by a sledgehammer.   Simply put, the performance of the .44 caliber bullet at short range was spectacular.

On several occasions, I have duplicated those spectacular results with the .44 Magnum.  However, the .44 Magnum is not really a more powerful cartridge.  At 1400ft/s my 240g bullet produces a little over 1000ftlbs of kinetic energy.  This is 40% less energy than the 7x30 Waters.  It appears that the old adage for horsepower is true for handguns as well.  There is no replacement for displacement.  The larger diameter of the 44 caliber bullet with twice the mass sure appears to have more stopping power.  Regardless, I am sold on the .44 Magnum.  It hits hard, but the recoil remains quite tolerable. 

Eventually my love affair with my .44 Magnum began to subside and the range limitations of this potent combination became unacceptable for some of the game and terrain that I adventured.  No matter how hard I practiced, I could not duplicate the accuracy or the ease of shooting that I routinely and effortlessly saw with my Contenders.  Further, the .44 Magnum is a fairly close range cartridge with ballistics best suited to shots under 100 yards.  I wanted a bit more accuracy with solid stopping power at extended ranges out to at least 200 yards.  Undoubtedly my Contender provided the accuracy and the ease of shooting that I was looking for so all I really needed to do was to choose a chambering that was a bit more powerful than the 7x30 Waters.    

Although there are many big game cartridges suitable for the Contender, I decided to give the .357 Herrett a try.  Although a bit out of fashion, the .357 Herrett is capable of firing a 200g bullet at 2000ft/sec.  This equates to a very respectable 1800ftlbs of kinetic energy.   The .357 Herrett has it all.  A large diameter bullet and great kinetic energy (nearly 4x that of the .357Mag).  Unfortunately full power loads produce an uncomfortable amount of recoil in my 12” lightweight barrel.  It kicks so sharply that my hands develop a bit of palsy after only a few rounds.  Frankly speaking, the .357 Herrett produces too much recoil for me to enjoy shooting it.  For this reason, my .357 Herrett barrel spends most of its time sitting in the drawer. 

Too much recoil is an individual threshold, but it is always a bad thing.  Too much recoil causes us to develop bad shooting habits such as an uncontrollable flinch.  The good news is that there are things that can be done to reduce felt recoil.  Adding weight to the handgun in the form of a scope or a heavier Pachmayr forend and grip (Contenders) definitely takes some of the sting out.  Heavier barrels help as well.  Shooting gloves disperse the recoil and protect the hands.  Probably the biggest reduction comes with the addition of a muzzle break or porting the barrel.  I’ve read that muzzle-brakes can reduce felt recoil by as much as 30%.   In my experience, muzzlebrakes do a wonderful job of reducing recoil.  In short barrels, reducing recoil also reduces muzzle flip which seems to improve accuracy.  The two negative aspects of muzzlebrakes are significantly increased sound blast and a bit of length.  Porting the barrel doesn’t increase length, but velocities may be slightly reduced.  Regardless, muzzlebrakes work well to reduce recoil and allow shooters to tolerate more powerful cartridges. 

In my case, too much recoil led me to make a poor decision.  Rather than deal with the recoil of my .357 Herrett, I decided to take my beloved 7x30 Waters barrel on an Alaskan Black Bear hunt.  I would have taken my .44 Magnum, but I didn’t want to accept the limitation of getting within 75 yards to be sure of my shot.  That turned out to be a good decision.  Spring had come early that year and we had a very difficult time finding bears hidden in the budding Alders let alone getting within 75 yards.  My only shot came on the last night of the hunt at 225 yards.  With a rock steady rest, I placed the shot exactly where I wanted it.  The shot looked perfect, but after many hours of tracking, I did not revover that bear.  Simply put, the 7x30 Waters did not have enough energy to kill a bear cleanly at extended range. 

Loosing that bear with the 7-30 Waters was unfortunate and avoidable, but it cemented my belief that larger calibers and more powerful cartridges are required to reliably take game larger than deer.  Extending the effective range requires even more power.  Although I still believe that no hunter should force themselves to endure recoil unnecessarily.  Heavy recoil is a necessary by-product of producing the performance levels required in a long range big game handgun.  Faced with this realization, my current approach is to seek as much power as I can comfortably handle in a handgun when hunting really big game.

The question is "How much power can I handle?"  A couple of weeks ago, a new-to-me barrel chambered in the massive .375 JDJ arrived at my door.   Although recoil is considerable, I find it tolerable. This barrel has been ported.   With the porting I would describe the recoil to be slightly less than my lightweight .357 Herrett barrel.  The .375 JDJ launches a .300g bullet over 2000 ft/s.  That produces over 2750 ftlbs of energy which by the way is about the same as my favored .270 Winchester big game rifle.  Since expert handgun hunters have successfully taken Elephants using the .375 JDJ, performance on North American big game should be excellent.  As long as I stay within the range limitations of this cartridge, I will never again loose a big game animal because I didn’t have enough gun.

It took me a little longer with a couple of mistakes along the way, but I guess my philosophy for big game handgun hunting has solidified into a pretty simple one.  I hunt with as much power as I can handle and I recommend that others do the same.  The only warning is that one must know themselves and never exceed the recoil that they can handle.  Regardless of the power generated, a well-placed shot remains the most important aspect of cleanly taking game.  When you hunt with a handgun, use a big bullet and hit them as hard as you can!