One of the all time great revolver cartridges, the .38 Smith & Wesson Special was introduced in 1902. For many years, a revolver in .38 Special represented the classic sidearm for lawmen, but it is now rapidly losing ground to various high capacity autoloaders chambered in 9mm Parabellum. Even so, a man who can actually place six shots from his .38 will always be more effective then another who sprays 15 9mm bullets all over the landscape. In its favor, some experts believe the relatively new +P loadings of the .38 Special make it a much better cartridge for self defense use than the 9mm Parabellum can ever be, especially when its loaded with bullets weighing 150 grains and more. In addition to being one of our most useful revolver cartridges for self defense applications, the .38 Special is also one of the most accurate handgun cartridges ever designed. When loaded with top quality cast or swaged bullets at 700 to 800 fps and fired in a heavy barrel revolver, the old .38 is capable of punching tiny groups in paper targets with the best of them.Recent accuracy tests with 3.0 grains of HP38 behind the Speer, Bull-X, and Hornady 148 grain Hollow base wadcutter bullets produced 12 shot groups of less than 2 inches at 50 yards from a custom Jarett PPC revolver fired in a ransome rest. 

This text is based on information from “Cartridges of the World”, Hodgdon reloading manual, the cartridge designer and/or own resources.

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