Speer Gold Dot 357 Mag (short barrel) Whats the point?

[Rexster]

Some purists would rather not have to deal with the ring of crud that builds up in the chamber of a .357 revolver when firing .38 Special ammo. (Especially, in the case of Titanium cylinders, which should not be scrubbed with certain cleaning products, I would think.) If/when I start handloading, I plan to load my .38-level loads in .357 cases.

[DefensiveCarry.com]

[Landric]

IMO the 135 grain short barrel .357 Magnum is for people that want to be able to say they carry .357 Magnum ammunition in their carry gun, but don't actually want to downsides (or the performance) of actually doing so. Its really nothing more than a +P .38 Special in a magnum case. There is nothing wrong with that, in and of its self, but its really shouldn't be marketed as a magnum round because its not.

The ballistics by the inch website in interesting as far as it goes, but since they use a cut down TC contender, their barrel length measurements include the chamber, and therefore have nothing to do with real world performance of 2" revolvers. Their "2" barrel" in the testing actually only has about 1/2" of barrel, the rest is chamber.

Out of my 2 1/4" SP101 the full power 125 grain .357 Magnum Gold Dot averaged 1242 fps and the 125 grain Federal Classic SJHP averaged 1293 fps. That is a significant increase in performance over a 135 grain bullet at ~ 990 fps.

[harley2007]

I'm still waiting on them to stamp the stuff .357 -P.

Funny...true though.

[ccw9mm]

And am now asking what the point is? The 357 short barrel on Speer's website states the short barrel version only puts out 990 velocity 294 energy?!?!!?! The 38 Special +P puts out 945 and 248! Whats the point in the 357, can anyone find one? Especially since the regular 357 mag in 125gr posts 1450 velocity, and 584 energy.

In a 4" or 5" revolver, the two different rounds will have certain performance.

In a 2" snubbie revolver, the two rounds will have quite different performance.

As we all know, ammunition is generally tuned by the mfrs to a given barrel length, to best manage the pressure, and to result in the best combination of blast, flame, smoke, recoil, etc.

In a given 2" snubbie revolver, I'd be willing to bet that the on-target force (ft-lbs) would much more similar between the two different rounds than implied by the printing on the boxes of ammo. Which cartridge would be preferable in a 2" snubbie? Hard to know, until both are tested in a 2" snubbie, but it's likely the "short bbl" ammo has been tuned to maintain what energy it can while reducing flame, blast, smoke, recoil to what's reasonable on a 2" snubbie.


Question: Is the comparison between the performance figures being made in a single 4" gun, or in a single 2" snubbie gun? Or, is the comparison impossible due to simply taking the numbers off the box and attempting an apples-to-oranges comparison?