I wrote a long series about certain positives that can surround carrying a revolver for self-preservation. One area where it is impossible to argue that it is a positive, is when it comes to capacity. The wheelgun will have anywhere from 5 – 8 rounds on board, and regardless of methodology or skill, it will take longer to reload than almost any semi-auto. 

This is the single biggest aspect of wheelguns that the anti-revolver folks will pounce on and shout “Aha!” Here is where they can spout off endlessly about firepower and how the semi-auto has the ability to continually put more rounds on the bad guy. And it is fairly difficult to argue with them if we stay in the theoretical realm. But when we step firmly onto the real world with actual empirical data, does the theory hold up? 

Before we go any further, and just so we do not obfuscate the discussion with points that are irrelevant, let me be clear about this, since the last time I touched on this was in the very first article in the series, the prologue. My focus has been, and will continue to be on what is most logical for the private citizen. For the professional gunbearer like military or law enforcement, there is no doubt that the primary handgun should be a modern semi-auto. These two groups stand a good probability that they may face dedicated multiple attackers who are determined to press the fight even after rounds start getting fired. With that risk, then it stands to reason that a higher capacity on the gun, plus a faster reload capability is a definite plus. 

However, I contend that this does not matter for the private citizen. Well, not that it does not matter, but that is very much an extremely low likelihood where dedicated multiple attackers continue to press the attack after the good guy fights back. Here is a perfect example of a recent situation : 

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DFk8T2pxy5R

Bad guy car rolls up on good guy who is armed with a revolver. One bad guy gets out with a gun deployed but good guy fights back and shoots bad guy. How many other bad guys are in the car? We don’t know because they got the hell out of there as soon as the good guy started firing. The car could have been full of bad guys but it is a moot point because most bad guys are not interested in well trained fire and maneuver elements as they close on their target. They want to get some form of payment and get away, and they have little interest in getting into some form of John Wick style Gladiatorial Combat. 

This scenario plays out time and time again. If bad guys can retreat in the face of good guy fighting back by firing a revolver at them, they will not willingly sacrifice themselves so their partners can succeed. They want to live, and have no problem with running away. A number of firearm Subject Matter Experts over the decades have asked for a real world instance where a good guy private citizen making good hits lost the fight because he ran out of bullets. There are almost no provable data that shows that to be the case. 

Am I saying that capacity is meaningless? Not at all. As I wrote in the original prologue (months ago now!), it is not my job to tell you as an individual what you should do. If you make the decision that you want to be covered for the worst case Black Swan scenario, and prefer to not only carry a duty size semi-auto with 15+ rounds onboard, but even have multiple spare magazines available, then that’s awesome! I am merely pointing out that for those who choose to run a revolver as a primary, they are not necessarily doing a dumb thing. 

Revolver Epilogue Part 1 – The Entangled Fight 

After wrapping up my Revolver Positives series, there are a few other things I wanted to address about the wonderful world of wheelguns, but were not appropriate for the series. There are some items that I would not categorize as “positives”, but are still relevant to the overall discussion. 

These items are a) revolvers in an entangled fight, b) capacity concerns, and c) who can actually teach this material correctly and from experience? So let’s start the wrap up!

Today, I want to discuss in brief the idea of using revolvers – especially small short barreled snubs – in an entangled fight. 

Many people advocate for just such a role for snubs. They talk about things like the small size of the gun making it easier to access and deploy in a grappling encounter, the shortness of it making it harder for the bad guy to grab onto and take away, and the surety of firing when in contact with a bad guy. All of those sound like positives, so why did I not include this in my overall series? 

Because I am staunchly opposed to a hardware solution over a software one. All of the above “positives” can be a positive if the user has the skill set to enable the positives to matter. In other words, he has enough grappling skill to pull it off. If the software – the skill – does not exist, then it is a literal crapshoot if the above positives will even matter. 

I have seen it countless times in training scenarios, and it is easy to find real world examples as well, where the person is carrying a snub, and it has no bearing on the fight because he was not able to access and deploy the gun. He did not have the skill to do so, and the bad guy kept him from being able to do what the good guy wished to do. The hardware will not solve the problem on its own, more times than not. Anything can happen in combat, and miracles do happen, but do you want to rely on the one in a million shot? Not really the best plan. 

Years ago, on the old (and greatly cherished) Total Protection Interactive discussion forum, there was a student who had gone through ECQC with Craig Douglas and did not do well. He asked on TPI for ideas of how to do better the next time. He was inundated with posts about developing some grappling skill, training some striking systems, building his cardio, building strength and some muscle mass, etc. All ideas focused around the core concept of improving the software. After all of that, his solution was to ignore the advice and instead he would just carry a snub revolver AIWB. Flash forward a year and he took ECQC again (which was a tremendous thing, and he was commended for trying  again) and does anyone want to guess the results? He got taken to the woodshed in the FoF evolutions again. And once again, he asked for advice, and of course got the same advice as the year before. And, just as the year before, he ignored and decided his new plan was to carry TWO snubs forward of the hips, one of each side of his belly button………..

So do I think the short barreled small revolver has some really good positives in an entangled fight? Absolutely, but only if it is supported by building the functional ability to utilize the positives to the fullest. 

The chaos of a life or death struggle, especially at hand-to-hand combat range, can be mentally overwhelming. In a grappling encounter , this chaos level goes up exponentially. The better the skill set, the less this occurs, but what about for that person who is still learning to fight under in-extremis duress? 

Keep this checklist in mind, and follow it when you don’t know what the next step is. 

Breathe – this sounds like a “duh”, but under stress , most especially in grappling, this is about the first thing that falls apart. Either we stop breathing entirely, or we hyperventilate. Both ways mean we can get the right amount of oxygen into our body the needed way. Focus on forced exhalation. The following inhale tends to follow correctly after a good and powerful exhale. 

2) Move Your Hips – You May rightly ask “how”, and the answer is that it does not matter. Moving the core and the main driver of leverage (which are what the hips are) leads to some movement which makes correct movement easier are more likely. 

3) Underhook, underhook, underhook – The underhook is everything in grappling, whether standing, on the ground underneath an attacker, or on the ground on top of an attacker, the underhook takes care of so much. Get the underhook and keep the underhook, and a path to winning becomes visible regardless of position. 

So far, in the previous seven parts of this series, I kept the talk about revolver positives to a fairly general point. I did not bring up different specific revolvers to talk about differences in them, since up to now, the focus was a generalized approach that would encompass all revolvers. 

However, For this installment, I am going to take a look at a subset of wheelguns, the smaller ones. OR, in other words, snubs. A very popular choice for self-defense, and probably the one area of fighting revolvers that still were popular the last couple of decades when Striker Fired Wonder Nines ruled the roost. 

There are two areas where even when gun companies were churning out semi-autos like the S&W Shield, G43, P365, etc. , these weapons were at times taking a backseat to the classic snubs like the 642 or the LCR. First, the favorable geometry of the revolver is magnified when you are trying to maximize concealment without sacrificing too much performance. As mentioned in the last part of this series, the curve of the snub makes for an even easier match with the curve of the human body. 

The second area will be the main thrust of this article. 

Ask any long time and experienced shooter or firearms instructor and they will tell you that while the duty size semi-autos are some of the most rugged and reliable mechanical tools around, something happens when they start to shrink. The alchemy that interacts to make something like a Glock 19 be awesomely dependable, starts to fade a bit as you shrink the machine down. It does not take a ton of time involved to see lots of little things interfere or even choke the operation of a micro nine, ranging from pocket lint, to body parts or clothing getting in the way of the slide, or even the accidental pressing of the mag release. 

For whatever reason, those things rarely impact the small snub nose revolver. The shrinking of the mechanism does not seem to change the overall function. The most logical guess is that since a revolver is operated entirely by the pull of the trigger, there is less to go wrong. 

It is very difficult to find a real world instance of a snub not working when it was needed to work to save a life. They just work, and along with the ease of concealment, caused the snub wheelgun to still be used by knowledgeable gunfighters even if their main gun was a Wonder Nine. 

In sum, small revolvers work exceptionally well, and are a smart choice as a backup gun, or for the non-permissive environment.

Whenever we talk about concealment of a firearm, It almost always involves straight numbers. For example, Gun X is so many inches tall, so many inches thick, the barrel is so many inches long. And we tend to compare guns by stacking them on top of each other while saying “look! they’re the same” or “look how much one is less than the other”.

This makes sense on a very surface level. It’s easy to wrap our head around simple mathematical numbers.We look at an overall footprint and break it down by height, width, length.This is easy to understand and it’s an easy way to compare different things. And it certainly is much easier to write about! Concrete numbers Are always simpler and easier to grasp.

The problem with concealment is that there are other factors than the straight numbers that we must take into account. We start to move away from math and into the much more difficult and complex (and hated!) world of geometry.

This is why comparing semi auto pistols and revolvers with straight math Is very disingenuous.Their construction and shapes are different from the other, And these different shapes interact with the human body differently. 

Here is the simplest way to understand this. All semi-autos are built around hard right angles (slide to frame). Try to think of any semi-auto pistol that has even been built that could conceivably be concealed on an everyday basis that does not fit into this paradigm. It is not possible. For the action to work, it has to have that hard angle. 

The problem is that outside of the shoulder joint, there are no hard right angles on the human body. Remember the old children’s toy where you put different shapes into different cutouts? That is what it is like to match a hard right angle object to the roundness of someone’s anatomy. That match, like the child’s toy, is far more likely to stick out because the two geometric patterns do not mesh. 

Contrast that with the lines of a revolver. With any wheelgun that has a three inch barrel or less, there are almost no long right angles. They are made up of nothing but general curves (with minimal straight lines or edges that have little impact on concealment). And geometry says curves match curves. 

In other words, if you take a revolver and a semi-auto that have the same overall dimensions, the revolver is going to have an edge in concealment. It is going to be easier to match the round of the wheelgun to the round of the human body, especially when the body is in movement. 

To be very clear, this may very well be in specific instances only a slight difference between a pistol and a similar size revolver, but it WILL be there. Geometry does not lie. 

By the way, this is one of the biggest misconceptions in the gun world about concealment. People love to take still photos of themselves in front of a mirror to show how well their gun is concealed. This is only a tiny part of it. It is easy to make sure the folds and lines of your clothes are in the right place when there is no motion and you can stand up tall. Moving, in any way, immediately changes everything. I once had lunch with a YouTube “influencer” and who is one of those who love to take the mirror pics. He had no idea that as he sat there eating his salad, the butt of his pistol was poking up and away from his body and his shirt protruded out almost an inch. He never even knew. I could not say anything because we were surrounded at every table by people who were too close, and he did not pick up my eye and head movement signals. He was no doubt convinced he had perfect concealment when the truth was he was close to shouting to the world he was carrying. The hard 45 degree angle of the rear butt could not match the curve of his torso. He would have been far better served by having a curved revolver stock. 

Those who have not taken the time to even try to understand the world of the wheelgun will never realize this. That is why when they speak about such matters, smart people don’t listen. 

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IAC Seminar Yadkinville, NC Jan 24-26, 2025

I will be going back to NC in January to work with the great guys at Apache Solutions Firearms Training to do my foundational coursework on Surviving an Entangled fight in a weapons based environment. The people there are terrific, the facilities are great, and the hospitality is second to none. Come join us!