I will start off saying I am not good with pistols. I don't have strong enough wrists for serious recoil, and the flinch I get makes my aim terrible. This is unfortunate, but I make up for it by being really good with carbines and other long-guns. I prefer flight to fight.
There is a popular myth in the media, usually fed by ignorance and a creepy sort of gun-fetish, over the .454 Casull. This is a round based on the .45 Long Colt, loaded like a Magnum in a strengthened firearm. Unfortunately, the round is... finicky. I have seen them fired at ranges. You can't avoid the noise. They are much louder than a full power .44 Magnum, itself horribly loud. They also have a lot of muzzle flash, which makes then nearly useless for self defense. If the muzzle flash is bright, at night this will blind you meaning you only get one shot against an attacker. Unlike the video, created by Japanese gun fetishists because Japanese people aren't allowed to have guns, at all, the Casull case will not work in an automatic handgun. Strictly revolvers. Revolvers are generally a bad idea for night time self defense anyway, since they flash in the gap between the cylinder, which holds the cartridges, and the barrel. This is usually measured in thousandths, however the pressure of the load of hot gasses is often 25,000 pounds per square inch, and oddly enough, this corrodes steel as it goes screaming past with a brilliant flare of burning powder, like a flashbulb. Revolvers have many flaws. When you know the facts, you find people using them to either be true experts willing to live with the costs, or massively ignorant of them. In the real world, a pistol has interchangeable parts you can swap yourself. In the real world, a revolver must be given to a gunsmith, to manually and carefully correct defects which is genuinely expensive, time consuming, and never ending. If you use it, it will be damaged. Thousands of dollars of effort and labor costs, for each revolver. And you can just swap those parts in an automatic pistol. Automatics are, oddly enough, cheaper and more reliable.
What makes the Casull finicky? Well, the powder load has to be VERY precise. Too much, it explodes the gun like a grenade, blowing apart your hand and possibly killing the person next to you. That would make you murderer, btw. Firearms rules are: you are legally responsible for the bullet. No kidding. Same with kabooms, what they call a firearms malfunction that explodes it. Such events are rare, but not impossible. Anybody who says nice things about Soviet weapons should be aware that their ammunition is of the lowest quality, with powder variations averaging one grain, which is a lot. This contributes to their inaccuracy. Liking Soviet guns marks you as IGNORANT.
Too little powder in the case, the bullet doesn't move and the case overpressures, once again exploding. The margin of error? 0.33 grain. That's it. This is a very small amount. In most calibers, you can vary a load plus or minus 5 grains, which slows it down or speeds it up until overpressure blows out the primer and stretches the case, obvious danger signs to an expert loader like me. I spent hundreds of hours perfecting my craft. I liked making ammo more than shooting it. I eventually figured out that I just like precision assembly work. This helped me stay in a job 3 years longer than I should have, but we all make mistakes. If only I'd become an auto mechanic. Sigh.
The gist of this is, the .454 Casull is a finicky prima donna round. The others like it, such as the .44 Magnum can be loaded nearly as hot, without exploding, or down drastically until it reaches .44 Special, which only has 1/3 the energy, around that of a .45 Long Colt black powder. Knowing you can fine tune the velocity, and thus recoil, of a .44 magnum makes it a far better round for an inexperienced handgun shooter. And even that is debatable considering that a .357 is even more tunable, as you can put standard .38 special through a .357 without a problem, or .38 +P (high pressure), or .357 magnum, or .357 +P (higher pressure magnum) in the same revolver. The recoil of .38 special is not bad. It won't give you a flinch so you can aim it pretty well. This is a modern version of the .35 (same diameter) used by most gunfighters in the Old West. Yahoos used a .45 Colt peacemaker (.45 Long Colt). Few got good with them because the recoil was bad. The heavy weight over the barrel in a .45 ACP pistol helps tame the recoil of the 230 grain "ball" round in the famous 1911 Automatic designed by Mormon John Moses Browning. Browning eventually corrected the flaws of this pistol in his later Hi-Power 9mm, including magazine capacity, range, and removing the linkage pin that kept breaking and remains a problem today. The Hi-Power is the most popular handgun on Earth, btw. It and its copies are insufficient for killing bears, but perfectly adequate for Cougars, wolves, wild/feral dogs, rabid raccoons, 2-legged predators, and will do so out to about 70 yards. At 50 yards, you need to aim about 13 feet over the head of a target using a 1911, since EVERY bullet drops under the effect of gravity after leaving the barrel. This is another truth the ignorant ignore.
Ignorant people also like AR-15s. They are the US army's rifle. They aren't very nice. No military weapon is very nice. All of them are cheap, low bidder, crap. I have handled many and been seriously unimpressed. Always choose a bolt action hunting rifle over a military gun if you want to hit stuff with one or two shots. The military one just throws more rounds downrange and tries to hit by chance. This is unacceptable for private citizens when every bullet is your personal legal responsibility. Especially the ones you miss with. They keep going. Even the ones you hit with keep going. Many people don't understand that. A clear shot is awfully hard to insure. And a safe backstop is rare. Hollywood is doing nobody favors. And video games should insist on friendly fire being the default. It is less fun, but would certainly teach better control and proper respect for firearms. It might make people a lot more responsible.
Hollywood, for another example, loves the Desert Eagle handgun, built by some insane mechanical engineer in Israel. It weighs 4 pounds. It has the gas system from an M-16, shrunk down, fitted to a cartridge with a rebated rim, a known flaw in firearms that most mechanical engineers avoid, with a highly overpowered charge which still has less energy than a standard M-16 does, at the muzzle and at 100 yards. On paper its a ridiculous failure. The Israelis don't issue it, but individuals can carry their personal firearms in training so anything goes. Golda Mayer (former PM of Israel in 1948) carried a short barreled English Enfield tanker carbine rifle instead of a silly pistol. Used it to great effect too. In movies, we've been seeing the Desert Eagle since the original Robocop. And it appears in Snatch. But in the real world, the .50 Action Express is not a self defense round. It is a loud noise and probably a 2nd degree murder charge or civil suit for personal property damage because the one you missed.. it hit somewhere else.
Hollywood loves the Toyota Prius, which is capable of 50 mpg if driven carefully. Hollywood is steep, with hills and canyons. Hollywood people are not careful. Most of them with a Prius gets around 40 mpg, which most cheap compact cars can do, thanks to modern fuel efficiency and the lack of hauling around the 1100 pounds of lithium batteries the Prius has. The Prius is technically a very dirty car, ecologically. The strip mines where they get the lithium poison the environment, and then the lithium itself travels a total of 26,000 miles for processing before it gets into the batteries and put into the car. 26,000 miles before the car moves a single foot under its own power. How lame is that? I know people who drive them economically, and actually have the care and caution required, and good for them. But they aren't Hollywood people. They live around here. Completely different species of human, really. Hollywood is for grasping egomaniacs, people who need to look good on camera, all the time, to protect their Brand so they can be hired again.
The moral of the story is, if Hollywood likes something, it is probably junk. Hollywood is all flashy ignorance. It is about marketing for quick cash. It is part of what is sad about Southern California, more boom-town inevitability. This is particularly sad because there is so much oil under LA that fracking will destroy the ground water, cause fires and cancer there first. It will empty because of this. And then, the hurricanes will come up from Baja and dump a lot of rain and cause a lot of flash floods and landslides and fill in the few reservoirs leaving them with less to drink, ironically. LA's future is rather sad. I hope that most of them go back to Florida and New York and the really interesting ones go to Detroit and St. Louis and get murdered by the local drug dealers while pretending to be making gritty realistic movies with .454 Casull handguns. Sigh. Idiots.
Of course, everybody in Detroit carries a gun for self defense because they have the highest rate of carjacking in the world, even higher than Cape Town, South Africa. And Hollywood is SO fussy about not being seen to allow self defense. Victims make better stories. Stories they can turn into movies, with marketing deals they can sell to pay for their next mansion, their next supercar, their next fantastic deal. Hollywood is all about increasing the misery for their own profit.
See why I think California needs a divorce from LA?
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