Probably because it was in all the cop movies when I was a kid, right? I didn’t know they were called J-frames, I didn’t know anything about S&W revolvers, but Chief’s Specials just always seemed so very cool.
So I’m somewhere in my mid-twenties, a virgin in a little town in the Texas panhandle, eking out a bare living at this dying Cadillac dealership – and in the glass counter of the town’s only real gun store where I unabashedly hung out in my spare time there was this shiny little used Chief’s Special. It was infatuation at first sight. I put it on layaway immediately and subsisted on generic mac&cheese for weeks to raise the money to get it out of hock. I bought a fancy shoulder holster and wore that stupid thing everywhere for an embarrassingly long time, cosplaying Steve McQueen in my own mind. People kept asking why I was wearing a jacket when the temperature was up over 100o.
The problem was that this was also during my IPSC period – I was frantically enthusiastic about combat shooting and everybody knew there was no real pistol but a 1911. And for all the hundreds of rounds I loaded and fired through this little revolver I could not get it to group anything remotely as well as my worst franken-1911 cobbled together from parts some of which probably dated back to Korea. I couldn’t shoot it well, I had been conditioned to believe that .38 Special was as useless as spitwads, but I so badly wanted to believe that I looked cool with this dopey inaccurate revolver upside-down under my armpit.
I still like J-frames. Landlady has one I love to play with but I’m reconciled that other people may shoot them well but I just don’t. Guess it’s part of growing up.
My initial opinion on the .38 snub nose revolvers came long before ever firing one. Back in the sixties, when I was a kid, I read a Donald Hamilton novel called Death of a Citizen where the main character, Matt Helm, talks about being ordered to carry a .38 snub nose revolver. He rambled on about the noise and lack of accuracy versus his preferred carry, a .22 colt woodsman.
A few years later when I got to try out an SW Chief’s Special snub nose that I found out how right he was, accuracy wise. I picked one up for PPC and couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn door no matter what loads I tried. Later, I was able to sell it and pick up a 4-inch model 19 in .357 which worked great no matter what I fed it.
Neat little guns, and Ian does really great videos! 🙂
Kentucky
Dad had one. It was nickel plated and had a 3″ barrel. I don’t know if you got a bad one, he got a good one, or both. I do know that Dad got 2-3″ groups with it at 15 yards, and 4-5″ at 25 yards, using a cup and saucer grip. Mom made Dad sell the pistol, she said it looked like a toy and was afraid of us kids playing with it. Sigh.
I own more than one J-frame and, for what they were designed for, they are a great gun. I carried one for years. In fact, the only time I used a gun to get out of trouble, it was a lowly Model 36 (AKA Chief’s Special). Lost me my girlfriend at the time — turned out she was hoplophobic — but we both got home uninjured.
The one time I needed a pistol in a dire fashion, the distance was so close that it was basically impossible NOT to hit the bad guy. The 36, and really most snubbies, aren’t really meant for more than across-the-room distances…in which case they work just fine.
“ that it was basically impossible NOT to hit the bad guy.”. Thus the very useful term “Belly Gun”.
S&W j-frame takes a different approach. Pulling the trigger using the pad of the first digit doesn’t work well. The long hard pull stacks, takes some effort right before it breaks, which results in the sight/barrell twitching way off intended point of aim.
I started using finger crease to pull, results in much better control. Seems almost instinctive, shots go where intended.