I have a confession to make. For years after I first started shooting, I was a little apprehensive about recoil. I’d grown up on a steady diet of mythology, folk wisdom and clichés. I was pretty sure that a .45 ACP, as fired from an M1911, was a lot of recoil. After all, Ian Hogg described it as being some sort of brutish hand-howitzer in all the coffee-table, military-firearms history books I’d read.
It didn’t help that I barely knew how to properly grasp a handgun at the time, holding it way too low on the grip and thereby giving old Isaac Newton’s laws plenty of fulcrum to have their way with my pipestem forearms. Therefore, for a long time, my personal recoil ceiling in pistols was somewhere in the .40 S&W or .45 ACP range.
At the first gun store where I worked, my horizons started to broaden. I picked up my first .357 Mag., in the shape of a Rossi M971, and then a 7.5-inch Ruger Blackhawk in .45 Colt. Some friends were kind enough to correct my … uh, “half-fast” grip technique on the gun, and my boss convinced me to try a couple of magazines through his Desert Eagle in .50 AE.
I won’t say I was turning into a recoil junkie, but I was progressing beyond more than just social recoil enjoyment. So much so, I purchased a compact Glock G29 in 10 mm.
There was still a frontier I was scared to cross. I’d grown up on a steady diet of the dialog in “Dirty Harry” movies, and the hype and mythology surrounding the .44 Mag. cartridge had seeped deeply into my hindbrain, somewhere down around the medulla oblongata. If it was the most powerful handgun in the world that would “blow a man’s head clean off,” what would it do to my poor hands?
Ah, but then we got a nice-looking, stainless-steel Ruger Bisley Vaquero in on trade. It was in like-new condition, all shiny and chambered in the forbidden .44 Mag. I was hypnotized by that wheelgun.
The Blackhawk already had me kinda digging single-actions, and I was in the middle of a phase of binge-watching modern Westerns like “Young Guns” and “Unforgiven” and, of course, I had watched “Tombstone” until I’d about worn the magnetic particles off the VHS tape and had the dialog all-but memorized.
I’d read a bunch of Taffin and Spangenberger. I knew that the Bisley grip shape was supposedly aces for taming recoil in old-school Single Action Army clones. My rationalization motors went into high gear and, before I knew it, I’d talked myself into buying a .44 Mag.
Unfortunately, the very day I bought that Ruger, I had a motorcycle wreck on the way home from the shop. While the gun escaped with minor scuffs, I broke my right radius and ulna (among other bones) and so I got to occupy the summer recuperating and working up an existential dread about what that recoil would be like on my freshly knit wrist.
Finally, that autumn, the fateful range trip arrived and—hey!—it wasn’t bad at all! In fact, with regular 240-grain range fodder, it was just loud and thumpy enough to be fun. I’d spent all that time and energy worrying about nothing.
Fast-forward a couple of decades and I’m living in Indiana. The Vaquero’s long gone, and the only .44 Mag I now have is a 3-inch Smith & Wesson Model 629. I’m in the process of thinning the herd of a lot of my more modern wheelguns in favor of older, more collectible pieces—but I just can’t let that Smith go.
There’s no practical reason for me to be holding onto a short-barreled .44 Mag. If a bear is sighted in the Hoosier state, it’s probably lost and will wander back into Michigan shortly.
It’s not really any good for hunting—or, rather, if I decided to take up handgun hunting for whitetail, I can think of dozens of better choices, like the .243 Win. T/C Encore I have in case that specific contingency arises. (Besides, it’s one of those 1980s pre-Endurance Package 629-1s, so using anything hotter than typical 240-grain commercially loaded range fodder risks the old gun doing the “Wheee! My cylinder’s turning backwards!” trick under recoil.)
Yet, I just can’t bring myself to part with it. For starters, it’s fun to shoot, and as I have written many times before, “it’s fun” is a legitimate reason to own a firearm.
Secondly, if I sold that 629, then I wouldn’t own a .44 Mag., and what would Inspector Harry Callahan think of me? Not much, that’s what. It’d feel—un-American, somehow. Plus, y’know, I have all that .44 Mag. ammo in storage and I need something nice to fire it through, so there’s that.
While it’s interesting to look back at how my perceptions of recoil have changed over time, it is also worth noting that everyone’s perceptions have shifted. The recoil Overton Window—the range of “normal”—has been moved, if you will.
Reading the firearm literature from the 1930s, when together Elmer Keith and Daniel B. Wesson developed the .357 Mag., it was described as being only suitable for the most hairy-chested he-men due to its mighty recoil energy.
Granted, original .357 Mag. loads were spicier than the typical generic range loads of today, launching a 158-grain Keith semi-wadcutter at something like 1,500 fps. However, that was being fired out of a classic all-steel, long-barreled, large-frame Smith & Wesson Registered Magnum.
Nowadays we’ve seen the same cartridge offered in compact five-shooters with exotic alloy frames that weigh less than a pound. Now, those have some nasty recoil to them. But .357 Mag. in a steel N-frame is seen as a pussycat. Meanwhile the big-bore world has seen a similar recalibration. When there are both .454 Casull and .500 S&W Mag. revolvers loose upon the land—to say nothing of scandium-frame, lightweight .44 Mag. revolvers—suddenly a steel .44 Mag. doesn’t seem that bad.
Oh, and that T/C Encore? It turns out they made a .405 Win. barrel for those. If I have a Model 629 for just in case a bear wanders down from Michigan, then it makes sense to have a rifle chambered in Teddy Roosevelt’s “big medicine” for just in case a lion escapes from the zoo, so I got a 209x50 Encore muzzleloading rifle (Practical! Can be used for deer hunting!) and a .405 Win. barrel for it (Silly! Just for fun at the range!).
The .405 Win. isn’t all that outrageous in the recoil department, at least in the grand scheme of rifle cartridges, but when fired out of a lightweight single-shot, it’ll get your attention. I’ve got a couple of hundred rounds of ammo, and I’m not ashamed to say that’s probably a lifetime supply.
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