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Category: All About Guns
Above: The S&W Military & Police .32-20 is elegant, offers modest recoil and dependable accuracy. What’s not to like about this classic gun/cartridge combo? Far left: The .32-20 works well with both cast and jacketed bullets.
The .32-20 started life in the Winchester Model 1873 and then shortly after was chambered in the newer Model 1892 rifle. The two other members of the Winchester bottle-necked levergun trio, the .44-40 and .38-40 were more serious cartridges for hunting and self-defense, while the .32-20 was obviously designed for small game and varmints.
By the time it arrived the West was much tamer than it had been in the 1870’s–1880’s and rifles were needed by farmers and ranchers mainly to keep the varmint population down.
Colt, just as they had with the .44-40 and .38-40, chambered their Colt Single Action and their Bisley Model for the .32 WCF (.32-20) and it became the fourth best-selling chambering behind the .45 Colt, .44-40 and .38-40 respectively. They would also offer it in their Model 1878 Double Action as well as the Army Special. Over at Smith & Wesson the number one vehicle for the .32-20 was the Military & Police.
Custom 81/2″ Colt Single Action by Hamilton Bowen. Even in factory guns, the .32-20 can offer guilt-edges accuracy.
Choices
Today the .32-20 can be found in replica single actions from Uberti and in the recent past has been offered in the 3rd Generation Colt Single Action, the Ruger Buckeye Commemorative, the Dan Wesson Heavy Barrel Double Action and the USFA Single Action.
When it was obvious I was not going to find the .32-20 I had long been looking for since my high school days, I had Hamilton Bowen build me the perfect sixgun. Starting with a Colt Single Action Army, Hamilton made a new cylinder, fitted an 81/2″ barrel along with an S&W adjustable rear sight and a post front sight.
It shoots just as accurately as expected, too. The Dan Wesson .32-20 is also exceptionally accurate, as is the Freedom Arms Model 97 .32 Magnum when fitted with an auxiliary .32-20 cylinder.
Just as with the .44-40 and .38-40 I load my .32-20 cartridges on the RCBS Model 2000 Progressive Press using separate dies for seating and crimping. The bottle-necked .32-20 cases are spray lubed with Hornady wax-based lubricant putting about 100 at a time in a cardboard tray. They slide in and out of the sizing die even easier than if it was carbide.
For some reason there’s a lot of variation in the overall length of .32-20 cartridge cases from various manufacturers. This means they must be separated as to headstamp or the bullets will not seat and crimp properly.
I only purchase new brass from Starline and keep my dies at the length of this cartridge case while separating the other manufacturers’ brass to use for loads safe in such older .32-20 sixguns as the Colt Army Special and the S&W Military & Police. For these two older sixguns my most-used load is the Oregon Trail 100-gr. SWC over 4.0 grains of Unique for right at 800 fps and groups well under 1″ for five shots at 20 yards.
Getting Serious
Heavier loads are saved for the Colt Single Action, the Dan Wesson and the Freedom Arms Model 97. Way back before I ever had a .32-20 I had the load I was going to use, which was 10.0 grains of #2400 and it hasn’t changed. I use cast bullets sized to 0.312″-0.313″ with excellent accuracy.
In my long-barreled Colt Single Action this load under the Oregon Trail 115-gr. SWC does over 1,450 fps and groups into a very tiny 3/4″. The same bullet using 5.0 grains of Unique results in 1,180 fps and a group of 7/8″. Jacketed bullets also perform very well with the #2400 load with Speer’s 100 JHP doing 1,313 fps and a 7/8″ group; while the Hornady 100 XTP gives 1,374 fps and a 3/4″ group.
The Dan Wesson 8″ Stainless Steel Heavy Barrel is absolutely monotonous in its accuracy. Loads well under 1″ are the norm. Lyman’s #31116HP over 10.0 grains of #2400 gives 1,300 fps in the Freedom Arms Model 97 with 3/4″ groups.
For a while Thompson/Center offered a 10″ Contender barrel in .32-20 using a 0.308″ barrel. Using the Speer 110 grain Varminter JHP over 13.0 grains of #2400 (only for use in the Contender!) muzzle velocity is close to 2,000 fps with groups of 0.5″!
With the arrival of the .327 Federal Magnum, the .32-20 is not quite as necessary as it once was for those who want to shoot varmints and small game with a revolver. It is, however still an excellent cartridge which connects us to the past.
I daresay most of us carry a gun regularly. It behooves us to approach that soberly.
The details really don’t matter much, but the 9mm defensive gun discharged in the man’s lap. The bullet was a top-end, state-of-the-art expanding hollowpoint — the best money could buy. That’s when things got interesting.
The man reflexively dropped his pants. The entrance wound was in the left groin, angled outward. The gun went off at contact range. There was no exit wound. Without conscious thought, the man shoved his right thumb deep into the hole. He could feel the powerful pulsing of his femoral artery. When queried, he admitted, yeah, that hurt a lot.
One bystander was in health care. By mutual agreement, it was decided that this man should assume responsibility for the wound. They lowered the victim to the floor and prepared to swap. When he removed his thumb, blood shot forcefully across the room and tracked up the wall. The guy rightfully torqued down on the wound and got the bleeding slowed but not stopped.
This is the high-performance bullet that the surgeons pulled out of this guy’s leg. It performed exactly, precisely as intended.
Details
Just like real estate, gunshot wounds are all about location. This one was bad. The injury was too far north to accommodate a tourniquet. The second man threw his weight behind the situation to get the hemorrhage under control. This was predictably excruciating.
There was no reasonable way to assess the details on site. Somebody dialed 911 and got an ambulance energized. Then reality settled in.
Retrieving his cell phone, the man punched up his wife and had The Talk. He told her what had happened and that he might not survive. He asked her to tell the kids he loved them.
The ride to the hospital was expeditious. A great deal of chaos followed. However, he had been lucky — incredibly, breathtakingly, lyrically fortunate. Though grievously injured, his femoral artery was not transected. Had that been the case, he likely would not have survived the ambulance ride.
Geometry
When you look at a naked person from the front, the pubis forms a Y independent of gender. When first learning human anatomy, medical students remember the word NAVY. Whether working from left or right, the major structures are oriented nerve, artery, and vein leading into the Y.
Arteries are high-pressure vessels that transport blood from the heart to the rest of the body. Veins are low-pressure plumbing that return blood back to the heart. Nerves are obviously the information-carrying structures that facilitate both sensation and movement. You don’t want to shoot any of that. However, if the objective is not to die, the artery is the most acutely critical of the three.
Performance Anxiety
The bullet behaved exactly, precisely as intended. Those horrifying razor-sharp petals deployed on impact and decelerated the projectile until it came to rest just underneath the skin on the far side of his thigh. Curiously, in my experience, that happens a lot. Skin is really tough stuff.
Human flesh is a heterogeneous amalgam comprised of tissues of wildly varying densities. Blood, vessels, muscle, tendons, and bone all conspire to turn a bullet’s transit into a study in rabid chaos. While this same bullet fired into ballistic gelatin would have produced a uniform, almost artistic result, this man’s leg upset the symmetry of the thing to a degree. Regardless, it still made a great big bloody mess.
The Butcher’s Bill
It is seldom like the movies. You typically leave a bullet in place unless it is threatening something significant. In this case, however, the diabolical thing was like having abandoned a box cutter underneath the skin. A surgeon later numbed the site and removed the razor-sharp projectile from the opposite side of his leg.
Miraculously, the guy eventually recovered. The plumbing remained intact. The wildly-gyrating buzzsaw cut through a fair amount of quadriceps muscle, but that did ultimately heal fairly well. The man still has a significant denervated patch on the anterior aspect of his thigh wherein he has no sensation, but he kept his leg and didn’t bleed out. On balance, he took the win.
Philosophy
There is an internet-based church that orbits around packing with a hot chamber. Acolytes of this holy dogma espouse their theology with insensible verve. The Hot Gun sect alleges that Empty Chamberers are apostate and destined for ballistic hell. The Empty Chamberers invariably quote the holy writ of Israeli close combat training to support their particular spiritual doctrine.
All I can say is that I have never known anybody personally who died because they got ambushed and did not have time to charge their handgun.
By contrast, this gentleman is the sixth person I have personally met who got shot unintentionally because of a misadventure with a hot weapon. Personally, I intentionally dabble in both.
There are times I pack hot and others when I do not, particularly when I am working around children. Some will take umbrage with that, but powerful scientific machines cannot accurately measure how little I care.
There are a great many life lessons to be found here. The first is that luck trumps everything else. This guy was not particularly irresponsible. Guns are freaking dangerous, and this was a terrible, tragic accident.
Chaos typically comes at you from unexpected quarters and out of the clear blue sky. To prevail, we must remain ever vigilant. That, and it helps to be really lucky as well.
This is what my Google search found, so take it for what it’s worth! Grumpy
- Cost & Availability: Ammunition is more expensive and less common than standard 9mm.
- Muzzle Blast: Produces a loud report and significant flash due to high operating pressures.
- Bullet Setback: The short neck on the bottlenecked case can risk bullet movement if the same round is chambered repeatedly
- and this also.
- Despite its favorable ballistics and performance, the .357 SIG has not achieved the widespread adoption seen with similar cartridges.
- One factor preventing the round from achieving greater popularity could be the cost of the ammunition, which frequently reaches double the expense of 9 mm, .40 S&W or .45 ACP ammunition.
- Because of this, as well as availability issues, some law enforcement agencies that previously adopted the cartridge have reportedly began to move away from the .357 SIG in favor of more common rounds with comparable performance
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