Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Maybe I was wrong about Pocket Pistols

When I’m out and about I usually have Pancho, my Rock Island 1911 .38 Super close by.

That's my style of Pocket Gun.

The smallest gun I carry is something I would be willing to get into a fight with.

A friend of mine was a Milwaukee Cop.He carried a Baby Browning 25ACP in ankle holster off duty.He was sitting in a bar when he was off duty and 3 guys came in to rob the place carrying 38 specials.He drew his gun and shot them all.They killed him and walked away .They were never caught and his name is on the Memorial Wall now as killed on duty.If he had a 380 or nine ,things could have been different.

Or maybe if he had just stayed in his seat and remembered that at .25 ACP is not for gunfights but for last ditch arm's length transactions.

Pistols are not for pockets nor any concealed carry on account of they don't work when the slide can't do its thing. If you're a cop and get to point guns at people before they do anything you can disregard, but the rest of us have to actually be in danger to draw. Unfortunately most don't have a back yard range where they get to practice actually using guns other than simple plinking because it's not safe to do so on public ranges.

.32 shrouded hammer J-frame is your basic carry gun; pocket or otherwise. Hard to get so you'll have to settle for a .38 with -1 capacity unless you have big pockets and can stand a LCR or Colt with add-on shroud.

Tip: having such a revolver means you can have the gun in your hand inside a pocket without violating brandishing laws. When in a bad area in low light where you can't watch all angles of approach this is a huge tactical advantage. The shrouded .32 will fire all six out of that pocket whereas a pistol might fire one.

Anything that I ever needed to know about a .25 ACP was shown to me when a buddy showed up with a Baby Browning to shoot a porcupine. What a dismal display of lethality! He subsequently ended up climbing into the tree to get up close enough to the porky to need to stick the thing almost in it’s ear to get it to fall out of the tree.

My only input to this comes from an experience over a decade ago with a fellow deer hunter and a 32 ACP.

SuperCore was out for his first deer hunt. He was hunting with a Garand. He mentioned to me that he was carrying a 32 ACP for a "finisher." I explained to him that, should he need a second shot, it would be better to stand back a bit and put another round of 30-06 into the chest and not dick around with a pistol. Sadly, SuperCore did not listen to the advice. I was over on the next ridge on the Opener, and I heard "Blam!" then "Blam!" and then a series of "Pop! Pop! Pop!. . ."

I won't go into details, but when I arrived, SuperCore was quite shaken. It seems he had popped a nice doe at 15 yards, and then spied a small button buck following her. He shot him too. The doe was not completely dead, so he pulled out his 32 ACP and started putting rounds into her head. He emptied the mag to no appreciable effect and then left the scene to meet me back up at the house. We later found the doe a good ways away. She managed to crawl off and die in some bushes over 50 yards away. SuperCore found out the hard way that 32 ACP just doesn't cut it on a deer-- not even shot at 3 feet with a whole mag emptied into the skull.

My reason for relating the incident is to explain my reticence to carry a small sub-compact piece.

BTW, my EDC is either a 5-shot Ruger LCR in 357 Mag in summer or a Ruger P95 9mm in Winter. Around the farm, I now carry a P38 variant in a chest holster.