I have seen the 148-grain .38 Special wadcutter recommended as a top standard pressure load for the .38 snub. Do you agree?
I absolutely do not. Most of the commercially loaded rounds I’ve chronographed have been well under 600 ft/sec when fired from a snub! As I understand it, the recommendation comes because most of the .38 +P loads fired from a snub do not reliably expand in gelatin after passing through intermediate barriers such as denim. So, why put up with the extra recoil and wear on the gun? As others have said, there is no free lunch with handgun calibers. What if the target is not wearing denim? The expanding bullet will probably be more effective than the slow wadcutter, assuming equal hits. Even when the often-used LSWCHP +P doesnt expand, it frequently flattens or deforms to mimic the wadcutter and smacks at 800 ft/sec or so. As I’ve mentioned in the past, I spoke with a man who had been shot through the heart with a .38 wadcutter. He was sitting on a curb and didn’t feel very good to be sure, but he could talk and could’ve used a gun. That he died 4 minutes later is not the point; the load wa
